Why I'm here, and what I'll be talking about

4am. Sleep-deprived. Pouring rain. Desperately tired. And yet I can't shake the feeling that I just have to do this. So, without further ado, let's get into it.

What is "this"? A valid question, and one I haven't quite answered yet. I have a feeling that by the time I've filled this blank page I'll have got there, so bear with me. If you stick with me — and you're a human with a job in or around tech, and getting that tech into the hands of other people — then there might be something here you can take away too.

To say the working world has changed over the past year would be an understatement. I haven't come here to hype or scaremonger; I'd much rather stick to the practical and the pragmatic. But it's not hyperbole to say that, as I write, the ground is quite literally moving beneath our feet. In the fifteen years or so I've been at it, I've never experienced anything like it. The LinkedIn Lunatics will tell you the playbook has changed, in a few short. snappy. sentences (that were definitely not written by AI) about how to keep up. Maybe that's where I should be too. But I don't fancy subjecting myself to the whims of the algorithm, and we all know it feels a bit disingenuous and self-indulgent over there anyway. Here, in my own space, you can take these thoughts as honestly as they're meant: no agenda, just what I actually think.

Why does it matter what I think? Another valid question — probably the most valuable of all. The short answer is that it doesn't. But I've been in the game a while, and I've been fortunate enough to have had a front seat for a lot of it. There aren't many founders of Too Good To Go walking around, and there can't be many growth stories like that early one — I built it from absolutely nothing, and have plenty of lessons from the climb to teams of hundreds. Then came Futureplay: a completely different journey, in a different country, with a different culture. I was the first marketing hire, and though stepping away from your own startup is hard (one of those things LinkedIn doesn't tell you about — more on that another time), I like to think I had a small part in the company's acquisition by Plarium. After four years, the right moment came to join Metaplay: another startup of ten people at the time, building backend tech for the games industry. It's where I've felt most at home since the Too Good To Go days. Selling to game studios turns out not to be that different from selling to food retailers and restaurants, and I get to lean on everything I picked up at both. Along the way I've built teams, hired people, fired people, managed up, managed down, launched products and run campaigns — just about anything anyone in marketing or business development would expect to.

A lot of that has meant working closely with engineers. And for almost all of my career, for a non-technical person like me, development was the bottleneck. We ran the Metaplay website with a web agency for three years, and though they were good people I'll always have time for, I look back and wonder how the hell we wasted so much time and money for so long. That's the part that's changed. Where a non-technical person used to depend on technical people to build and ship, you can increasingly do it yourself. And those of us who've spent our whole careers close to the customer are in a good position to do it in ways the people who've only ever lived in the code might never think of.

Which brings me back to what's actually changing. I've just realised this is the first time I've typed these two letters in the whole piece: AI. (Was it the elephant in the room?) The world is awash with it, and if you don't know where to start it probably feels impossible to catch up — heck, even the people working in AI feel like they're falling behind. But there are so many gains to be had. As a long-time WordPress tinkerer, I threw myself into Lovable when it launched in late 2024, got helplessly addicted, built an endless stream of projects, and have since graduated from Lovable through Cursor to Claude Code. That hardcore vibe-coding ramp means that, without being a coder, I've picked up the thinking and the mental models you need to build the systems that let marketing and commercial run themselves — without pulling engineers off the bigger, more meaningful problems they'd much rather be solving.

So what does that look like in practice? Since the start of 2026 alone I've been able to do a lot, and honestly it feels a bit like cheating. That's why I want to get some of it out in the open: I know other leaders and operators are running into the same challenges, and I'd like to use the journey to help. Over the coming weeks and months I'll go through it properly, so that if you're just getting started you'll have something useful to follow. Here's roughly what's coming:

• Moving to an AI-systems-first way of working, with people kept in the loop only for the things people are for: judgement, decisions, and signing off anything customer-facing. Everything else — the boring, manual, tedious background work — automated.
• Running almost everything through Claude Code, GitHub and Linear. It's like work, but on acid. There are plenty of gotchas, and one wrong decision early can cost you weeks, so I'll share those sooner rather than later. (If GitHub is just a word you half-recognise, don't worry — that was me eighteen months ago.)
• Moving our website off HubSpot to a self-hosted Next.js project. We used to pay thousands and wait weeks to change a few modules; now I can ship them in a minute.
• Migrating our CRM from HubSpot to Twenty, an open-source CRM that costs about ten bucks per person per month — an order of magnitude cheaper, and for the way we work, an order of magnitude better. (Much of our HubSpot life was spent trimming the contact database to stay under a marketing-contacts tier. IYKYK.)
• Building a team of agents on top of all that to do the proactive work — finding the right prospects, tailoring the message, teeing up the outreach for a human to send. There's no off-the-shelf tool that does it the way you want, so you build it, and learn the hard way what works.

None of this replaces the actual job. We're a people-first B2B sales and marketing org, and selling to people in the games industry is genuinely hard. The real levers are offline — events, conferences, mixers, meetings — and everything else exists to support them and stay out of the way. That's the whole point of the stuff above: ultimately I'd rather not think about anything other than the selling and the marketing.

Anyway. That's enough for a first post. If you're still here, you've got a rough idea of what's coming — the practical things, and the softer ones too.