Founder Insights

Why Ben Fridja Won on Dragons’ Den and Walked Away

Founder Insights, Podcasts & Interviews

Ben Fridja won a 70,000 pound Dragons’ Den deal in 2015, then walked away from it. Fifteen years on he still owns Fridja. What that decision teaches founders. […]

Why I Turned My Back Catalogue Into a Knowledge Base

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

I had twenty years of my content turned into one structured knowledge base, and now we use it to repurpose my existing content into new articles. Here is why, and how it works. […]

Scaling an Outdoor Brand From £500K to £4M

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

Scaling an outdoor leisure brand from £500K to £4M takes more than great products and marketing. It takes a tech foundation that does not crack under growth. Here is what it took with AE Leisure, and why the boring infrastructure work mattered as much as anything. […]

How Gravel Shed Became a Client Without a Pitch

Founder Insights

You may remember the post about me driving to Wales to explore working together and meet the team at Gravel Shed. No contracts, no pressure, just a real conversation. Fast forward a week, and they are now part of our MageCloud client list. Did I push for it? No. […]

What a No-Contract Visit to Wales Looks Like

Founder Insights

Last week, together with Zach Wilson, I drove to Wales to visit a business. No contracts, no hard sales, just a real conversation about growth, strategy, and the future. It may not be the trendy way to onboard clients, but I keep doing it because it works. […]

Why I Travel to See My Clients in Person

Founder Insights

I recently visited Tom and James McIlvenny at Avenue 85 to review project progress, and I came away with the same thing I always do from these trips: an enormous boost of energy. Until you have been backstage at a client’s business, you have not really seen the company you […]

What Overnight Success Actually Looks Like

Founder Insights

People love an overnight success story. Here is what one actually looks like when you write down the hours: roughly 215 of them, spread across twelve months, in steady increments nobody would call dramatic. You do not need a lot of money for this. You need patience and consistency, which […]

What One Month Back Managing Shopify Taught Me

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

It has been one month since I went back to managing Shopify projects myself, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. Daily calls with my team, meetings with clients, real problems getting solved. Here is what that month actually produced, because the work is more revealing than any […]

Why Vague Project Requirements Lead to Bad Quotes

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We are often asked to quote on projects full of unknowns. Integrate with an API, but no details about the API. Add a service, but no integration guides. As a database engineer, I find that lack of clarity hard to ignore. Yet other agencies quote on the same vague briefs […]

What Checking Clients After a Google Update Revealed

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

I spent the last few days going through our clients after the latest Google update. We are a development company, not an SEO agency, but our job is to help clients make more money, so I treat this as part of the work. On one project, I found something I […]

Why B2B Brands Can Absolutely Win on YouTube

Founder Insights

I hear the same objection constantly: our product is not for YouTube. We are B2B, we have a different audience, we are not sexy enough. Then I visited Shadow Foam, an industrial product with a 135,000-subscriber channel, and it put every one of those excuses to rest. […]

How a 16-Hour Pilot Won a Times Square Brand

Founder Insights

A 16-hour pilot turned into an entire project and a client running a commercial on Times Square. Paul Ryazanov on why starting small is how you earn the big work. […]

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