Building one successful company is hard enough. So why am I building seven?
Most VCs and startup gurus preach the gospel of focus. They tell you to pour every waking hour into one idea, one product, one monolithic vision. They’re not entirely wrong. But they are operating on an outdated playbook. In the age of AI, the biggest risk isn’t spreading yourself too thin; it’s going all-in on a single bet in a market that changes every four weeks.
I’m not a traditional founder. I’m a builder. My approach is different. I run a portfolio of AI ventures in parallel, from my AI-first marketing agency, Creative Marketing Group, to a suite of agentic AI products under the 'Autothink' banner. It’s not chaos. It's a deliberate strategy, a founder's playbook designed for the relentless pace of the AI revolution.
My journey as a multi-product founder is impossible to understand without first understanding the role of my agency. Creative Marketing Group isn't just a service business; it's the incubator for everything that follows. It's the unfair advantage.
Most SaaS founders start with a personal pain point or a perceived gap in the market. They spend months, sometimes years, and hundreds of thousands in pre-seed funding to build a product based on a hypothesis. They are building in a vacuum. Then they have to go out and find the customers to validate their guess.
I have the opposite problem. My agency's clients, from ambitious startups to established FTSE 250 companies, bring me their biggest, most expensive marketing problems every single week. We’re on the front lines, seeing exactly where traditional workflows, overpriced SaaS, and human inefficiency are costing them millions. I'm not guessing what the market needs; the market is paying me to show me.
This is the flywheel. The agency provides the problems, the data, and the initial capital. We work with clients, see the repetitive, low-value work that plagues their marketing teams, and ask a simple question: "Can an AI agent do this better?" If the answer is yes, and the problem is big enough, it becomes a candidate for a new Autothink product.
Our first agent, Autoemails, was born this way. We saw clients spending £5,000 a month on lead generation agencies that were essentially just sending templated emails. We knew we could build an AI agent to handle the entire cold outreach process—from list building and personalisation to inbox management and booking meetings—for a fraction of the cost and with better results. The agency was the first customer. We de-risked the idea using our own business before ever spinning it out.
This model flips the traditional startup risk profile on its head. The cash flow from the agency funds the R&D. The client work validates the product ideas. And the agency's own marketing machine provides the go-to-market launchpad. It’s a closed loop of innovation that allows me to build multiple products without raising a single pound of venture capital.
The conventional wisdom for running multiple ventures is to build separate, siloed teams for each. This is a capital-intensive nightmare. It creates knowledge silos, duplicates roles, and fosters a culture of 'us vs. them'. I reject it completely.
My entire portfolio, from the agency to all seven Autothink products, is run by one core, centralised team. I believe in hiring A-players and giving them ownership across the ecosystem. My Head of Engineering isn’t just thinking about one product; he’s architecting a shared infrastructure that benefits all of them. Our Head of Growth isn’t running seven different marketing playbooks; she’s building a single, powerful growth engine that can be pointed at any product in the portfolio.
First, it’s brutally efficient. We don’t need a separate CTO, CMO, and CFO for each venture. We have one leadership team, one development squad, one growth unit. This keeps our overheads ridiculously low and allows us to allocate resources dynamically to wherever the biggest opportunity lies.