AI can build your idea, but it can’t sell it (yet) 🎯 Simon Jenner

I've been in business 20-odd years and the speed that AI is bringing to the change is so phenomenal, particularly for our industry, that almost the plans that we made last quarter are blown out the water because, because, you know, Gemini 3 got released or whatever and it could do something that it couldn't do before. And we're like, ah, right. So we need to kind of rethink this again. So it's, it's moving so quickly. Like I've never seen it before. It's scary and exciting, probably in about equal measures at the moment.

This week's Millennial Master is Simon Jenner, co-founder of MillionLabs. Simon has spent the last 20 years building, breaking, and rebuilding startups, from his first exit in his mid-20s to launching almost 2,000 companies using no-code, AI, in what's now called Vibe Coding. That's because the tech has changed fast, but the fundamentals haven't. AI can build your idea, yet it still can't sell it. In this episode, we talk about why AI has made building cheap and selling very expensive, how Vibe Coding rewrites startups' economics overnight, and why most founders don't fail on product, they stall on distribution.

Simon, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us today from?

Hi, Daniel. I'm joining you from my farm in Shropshire, beautiful Shropshire, I should say.

Amazing, because I know you've been building companies since your 20s, and you've gone from cybersecurity to cafes, accelerators. What was the first big leap that made you realize you were wired for entrepreneurship?

Yeah, I don't know. So I, I think it's like most entrepreneurs. I was, um, working for a large corporate, um, in, uh, Reading, and I was seeing how they were doing things. I was like, this, this, there's got to be a better way to run this business. Um, so that's when I first started my cybersecurity business. I spun out with a couple of other people that were working there, um, and we, we set up our, this new consultancy, um, and managed services business, um, and ran that for 7 years through to an exit. So that was my first kind of experience, 20— in my sort of 25, uh, relatively early years, um, running, running that. Yeah, that was first itch that was scratched.

So it was, um, about 25, 26 when you sold your first company. That's obviously quite an achievement looking back. Uh, did it give you confidence, or did it just like reset your appetite to build again?

Yeah, a bit of both actually. So the weird thing is, yeah, so I sold it, had a kind of an earnout exit on it. So I was there for a few years afterwards, fairly standard with consultancy businesses. But I guess I had this hubris of like, well, I'm young, I've figured out how this works, it's easy. Like I'll just do this again. But there was quite a lot of naivety in that because lots of ways I just got lucky and, you know, but you put that down to your own skill and expertise and really it wasn't. It was just a bunch of luck. So the next one and the next one, you know, the ones after that were proving that it's actually a bit harder than it looks.

Because you basically moved through wildly different worlds afterwards, coffee shops, tech hubs, adventure driving. What's the common thread that ties them all together for you, you think?

Well, I suppose like any entrepreneur, like, you know, sparkly ideas, you know, moving between those. But really business, you know, I enjoy the whole setting up, figuring out is there a market for this, working out how we're going to do sales, etc., and how we're going to market this. What's the go-to-market strategy? I love all that early stage stuff and that's probably what I'm really good at. And so that's, you know, I get bored after a while. Like, again, lots of entrepreneurs get a bit bored, so tend to kind of jump ship. Uh, and tech has been throughout all of that. Um, so even when I had the coffee shop, so it was really the day job was still tech stuff. So I've never really left that bit because that's my background and my expertise. Um, but yeah, I guess the common theme there is just business startups.

So Simon, I know you helped shape Birmingham startup ecosystem long before it was fashionable. And I'm wondering, what did those early days teach you about what founders really need? And what they think they need? Because I think there's two big differences there.

Yeah. So I think I started in something like '99. So this was sort of at the start of relatively early into the sort of tech bubble that was about to occur. But Birmingham had pretty much nothing. It had the odd incubator like most cities had had previously, but really didn't have what I would call the Silicon Valley tech environment and accelerator programs, you know, the kind of 13 week, bit of investment, et cetera. The investors that were sat in Birmingham and largely are still today were very traditional investors that would, once you're a success, they might give you some money, um, and or debt from a bank, you know. So there was none of that what we might call the modern tech scene in Birmingham. Um, so seeing that opportunity, I actually joined, um, an European-funded scheme to start with. They'd got some European money to do something with startups. So I went and helped them set that up and run that. And then that moved into an accelerator that was commercial, spun, left the incubator and created an accelerator. I think the things that were the classic things that entrepreneurs thought they needed, they thought they needed some space because they needed an address. They needed to look like a real business. So they wanted an address, so they wanted a bit of space and they wanted investment. Those two things, they wanted money or it didn't actually, it didn't really matter if it was investment, but they wanted some free money. Some of that's not really changed. You know, everybody still wants money, but maybe the space bit has disappeared and gone away. But I guess what we really found is that they were naive, like all of us are when we start out. We don't know, we don't know what an invoice is. We don't know how to go to market. We don't know any of these things. So they needed that kind of support and advice on how, you know, what are the mechanisms that they could do to achieve, you know, that success.

Oh, Simon, I think you once joked that Silicon Canal in Birmingham could only disappoint everybody equally. What did you mean by that?

Yeah. So the Silicon Canal bit came from Birmingham having more canals than Venice, or at least that's the rumor. So that's where that name came from. In terms of disappointing everybody equally, when you are trying to do a whole tech scene and we were trying to kind of please everybody in theory, So you're trying to do stuff for startups, you're trying to do stuff for the medium enterprises and stuff for the large enterprises, councils, universities, everybody in that kind of ecosystem wants to be involved or you want them to be involved. And really, as a small organization, you just can't facilitate that. So that's what I meant by like, we would equally disappoint everybody because everybody wanted us to do something and we couldn't do it. We could do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So it's a really hard organization to run. So I take my hat off to anybody trying to do something that's basically not-for-profit in a city around the tech ecosystem or any ecosystem is you just can't please everybody, but everybody wants you to. So you're getting criticism from everybody. Oh, you're not doing enough for us. You're not doing enough for us. It's like, oh, you can't win.

I think from my experience as well, you can never make everybody happy, but small successes do drive things forward. And I think you had some of those with Oxygen because you ran one of Europe's top accelerators before launching MillionLabs, which we're going to talk about in a bit. So I'm curious to hear from your point of view, uh, what were the biggest gaps in the accelerator model in the UK?

Yeah, so this is going back a bit. So I think at the time there was probably one or two other accelerators when we started. So there was Seedcamp and then there was one up north. Um, and Seedcamp was running a slightly different model to everybody else. Um, Whereas we adopted the San Fran or the kind of Silicon Valley model of 13 weeks, small amount of investment, diverse set of teams from anywhere in Europe, run them through the program and then try to get them the next round of investment. So that was the kind of model. The gap was, well, that certainly didn't exist in Birmingham, never had existed, and there wasn't much of that in the rest of the UK. As we saw over the next, you know, 5, 10 years, we saw a lot of them get created in similar sort of fashion and model. Uh, so that, that was the kind of gap. And we were, we ran 6 months, uh, so one cycle of, uh, startups in Birmingham. And then we moved to Google campus in London and we ran another cycle of, uh, things. So we were doing 2 cycles a year, probably something like ideally 20 startups a year through, through those 2 programs.

And working with hundreds of founders, what would you say separates the ones who actually execute from the ones who just talk about it?

Yeah, there's— I think there's a wannabe startup founder out there who wants the kind of sitting on a beanbag, the kind of, I don't know, the social network film kind of vibe view of the world. Um, and there's ones that really want to execute and really want to try and solve a problem, and those are the ones that we try to back, is the ones that are kind of passionate, have maybe got the, the problem themselves, and they're trying to solve it. Grit is definitely a thing. I mean, if I've seen anything, you know, you spoke to Nick a while ago, you know, the gritty founders that just keep going and going and going, they're the successful ones. So almost the ones that cockroach their way through to an exit or a second round of investment, et cetera. So those are the ones that you want to back. They're really hard to find and they're really hard to, if I've learned anything in talking to startups, the amount I've spoken to for the last 20 years, you'd think I'd have a better idea of which of the winners are. It's really hard. It's really hard to, you know, pick the winners. If I could do that, I'd be, you know, a multimillionaire. But you just can't. So you kind of have to work with them to see some of those trends and those kind of character traits come through.

But then something else came up, which in a way changed your trajectory, but brought together everything you've done so far. And that's the 1 Million Startup Mission. Let's talk about this. Where did the idea come from? Is it a marketing hook or is it a real North Star that you're aiming for?

Yeah. So I think the challenges that I saw over the previous accelerated incubators, et cetera, was It's really hard for a single non-technical founder to launch something with a tech. At least it was. So they would need to go and find a tech co-founder and everybody was looking for that tech co-founder. Tech co-founders could earn $150,000 a year, you know, £100,000 a year. Why the heck would they give that up to come and join a startup that has a very high chance of failure? So that was always the thing. And if you'd got a tech founder, Lots of people found one, but they would start and build something and then disappear and they'd have a half-built product. So it was a real barrier to entry. So there was the tech barrier and then there was the financial barrier. Like, how can I, you know, still pay the rent when I haven't got any income coming in from the startup because it's too early stages? So those were the two fundamental barriers. So come along MillionLabs, we actually were trying to build a bank. So my business partner at the time, we were trying to build a bank. He was in the finance industry. I come from the tech. I said, well, I'll come join you and we'll try and do something with the tech. And we built this infrastructure using no-code, and that was relatively new at the time, going back 7 or 8 years. And the banking whole thing didn't work. We burnt it out probably within the first 12, 18 months of figuring out that actually we built all the tech infrastructure, that was fine. But the market wasn't quite ready for what we were trying to do. Anyway, at least that's our excuse. But we had noted that this whole, we'd been able to build a banking infrastructure in like 3 months. And some of that's because of the moves in APIs and availability of stuff from others. But some of it was because of the no-code platform that we used. So the revelation was, hang on a minute, if you no longer need a tech co-founder because this barrier to entry has dropped, I'm not a coder. My business partner wasn't a coder and we, yet we built this infrastructure. If that barrier then disappears or at least significantly drops, then we're gonna get lots and lots more startups. The world of VC, the world of investment's gonna have to change because the reason they needed such big check sizes was because they needed to go hire their tech team.

Well, one of the major reasons, obviously go to market as well, but that, that, you know, and then take that time, possibly a year if not longer to work with those tech teams to deliver the MVP or the alpha or the beta product that would hit consumers?

Totally. Really quick would be 6 months. Most teams were 12 to 18 months in the kind of tech coded world. So yeah, you needed a check size, fairly large check size just to get you through that stage, not only hire the people, but get you through that stage. So that barrier we could see was dropping away. And no-code was potentially going to be the answer to some of those problems that startups were having. So our hypothesis was, well, okay, we're now going to create not just a handful of startups a year, there's going to be millions of these things, literally millions and millions of these things. So how do we help those new people, new founders coming into the market going, well, actually I can get something built now. And that's where MillionLabs was kind of pivoted into from this banking play into what it is today. Um, so million startups, no, actually it's probably realistic. I mean, it's still a, as you say, North Star, big hairy audacious goal, but it's, it's probably realistic.

And because now of these AI no-code tools, and feel free to name drop as many as you wish and you can recommend, um, I'm wondering what's the most underestimated skill now if you don't need a technical co-founder? To have when you start a no-code business or idea?

Yeah. So the new tools that have come around, actually they've been around for a long time. If you're old enough, you remember Visual Basic, Access databases, things like that. So they have been around, but they weren't really usable. They weren't certainly usable in as web, in the cloud as it was.

They were a screen of code for anybody non-technical.

Yeah, they were, but they were, they were very visual. You could drag and drop and do stuff with. And that's really what the new tools have brought. They brought a visual layer to it. If you could do PowerPoint and you could do Excel, then you could use a visual no-coding tool. So that's, that's where we've got to. And then probably more recently, literally in the last year, we've got to the point of what we're now calling Vibe Coding, which allows you to use an AI prompt to do it. So prompting is gonna become the skill and being able to, you know, prompt your way to build an app. You know, that's what we're seeing now. It still helps to have some at least logical understanding of like, well, if I do this, then this is likely to happen so that you can talk to it and inform it and help it get there quicker. But to be honest, you know, anybody could now prompt their way to an app, which is which is a massive step change again. You know, we've gone from, let's say the average tech product costs at least £100,000 to deliver. With no-code, it dropped to £10,000 to £15,000, and now we're gonna see it drop to £3,000 to £4,000. Okay. So you can build Airbnb for under £10,000 now.

And there's still a stigma around no-code. Some people say they're fine for prototypes, but not really like real products. Do you think this is right or wrong? Sometimes people talk about security issues in the way the, even the login can work into a product. What has been your experience around this?

Yeah, I mean, So the early stages of no-code going back 5 years ago, yeah, I'd agree with you. Like you wouldn't release a product on it, you'd build a prototype on it. But that, that statement made by others, it is a legacy statement from 5 or 6 years ago. And it's the same with Vibe Coding. I've met people who go, oh, I tried Vibe Coding last year, it doesn't work. Yeah, that's from last year. Literally, it's moving that fast. If you tried it in the last 2 months, you'd realize it did work. So I think things are changing really fast. Sure, there are challenges with anything, but it's no different to code. You can build insecure, unscalable crap code, and you can build the same in Vibe Code as well. It's equally possible, but you can also build secure, scalable. We've built, I think we're sort of 10, 12 projects in with startups now in Vibe Coding, purified coding. And they're scalable. We've got hundreds of users and it'll easily scale to hundreds of thousands of users, no problem. And it's secure, et cetera. So I don't think it's a drama.

Just to make a distinction here. So we are calling Vibe Coding the AI-assisted promptable coding, which I believe, uh, you previously said that it eats no-code's lunch. What did you mean by that?

Well, the challenge with, uh, most of the no-code platforms like Bubble, WeWeb, et cetera. So there's, there's. Like literally 300, 400 of them out there. But Bubble arguably is the sort of leading one there, bubble.io. The challenge with that is that you have this layer of no-code and then underneath is still code. So it's translating into it. And that gives you challenges around performance and scalability. They're not massive. And for most MVPs and most startups, it's not a drama. It works just fine. You'll scale Fine. But if you could go straight to code, then why go through the no-code layer? And this is what Vibe gives us. We're creating just raw code at the end of the day. But we're just prompting to generate that. So it gives you the advantages of code, which is it's scalable, it's well-trodden path. Even if you don't want a Vibe coder to do it, you could pass it to a coder because it's in code and they could read it and understand it and do things with it. So It's compatibility. You can lift it, you could shift it. Whereas in most of the no-code platforms, you're kind of stuck in their ecosystem. You can't pick up the code and move it because it needs their layer on top to be able to use it. So I think that's why it's eating their lunch in that why would you go through the no-code if you can go straight to code?

So anybody who has a business idea, you would recommend that they would start with, so to speak, Vibe Coding or AI coding versus no-code, which keeps you locked because this way you still get the code and later on with a more advanced model, say in a year's time, you could fix any of the issues that were created by the weaker model in previous months or years.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we, we've seen that literally on a kind of month by month version. You, you, you'll have seen it yourself as Gemini's out, new version of Gemini's out, new version of ChatGPT's out, and it's like a constant battle of upwards trajectory. And we see that in the Vibe end of it. So it all filters through. As soon as they got a new model, it comes with a bit better at coding. And so it's better at finding its own bugs. It's better at fixing its own bugs. It's better at secure and performant code. So like, I think, you know, we're there, it's just gonna get better and better and therefore quicker as well.

And even the visual interfaces from my tinkering and experiments with tools such as Lovable and Replit, it, It now creates fully realistic and usable interfaces with all the right buttons in all the right places, and which would just take, I don't know, weeks and months with a traditional design process or an agency. You have that pretty much built in a day, depending how long you want to spend in front of a screen.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you can have it design itself. So you can just tell the Vibe, like, go build something for me. This is, you know, the type of branding I want to use, or this is an example site I want to use. Or you can still do the traditional thing, which is let's have a designer lay this out in Figma for us, or design package. And then we can just translate that straight into code. So we can go from the Figma into the Vibe pretty quickly now as well. So either of those routes absolutely fine, but saving you, like you said, like days, weeks, um, of that activity. So I think that's been the change. We've gone from probably average MVP in no-code is 8 weeks, and we're now probably heading towards 5 or 6. So we've certainly reduced it. I think the bit that's left is the testing. So, and that's really important. So Obviously Vibe still makes mistakes and still will not fully maybe complete a feature. So you still gotta do quite a lot of testing to prove that it has done it or it hasn't done it, et cetera. And that's the slow bit because that's back to humans. However, we are already starting to see some improvements going on in there and kind of AI testing and ability for it to almost like, oh, I'll log in, I'll click that button, I'll click that button, et cetera, and learn its way through the app. Um, so once that is completed, I think we'll be down to, you know, a few weeks to build a minimum viable product, which is like a game changer from what we were talking at the start of this, 18 months maybe, and we're down to 2 or 3 weeks.

So you said no-code, uh, dropped build costs by 10x, then the AI dropped it another 10x. What happens next to the startup economy if we could have, you know, 10 times more startups than we have now?

Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting, it's an interesting, uh, sort of thought process to go through. What happens if we've now got that barrier's gone, the tech barrier's gone, um, and anybody with a credit card, a few thousand, um, pounds can get through that. Then clearly the next barrier, which was always there and was probably arguably the hardest, but less most startups got that far is the sales and marketing, the go-to-market piece. That's where everybody's gonna get stuck. So we've now got a million startups all heading into this kind of same market or overlapping markets, et cetera, trying to do sales and marketing to people. So us as consumers are just gonna be bombarded with stuff. And, and the signal-to-noise ratio is gonna just be phenomenal. So the real skill is gonna become around the marketing and sales.

And yeah, basically distribution and getting your product out there. And when it comes to that, then there are only what, let's, let's call them 5 viable channels, which are controlled by pretty much 2 or 3 main companies. So now we have millions of startups who have only 2 or 3 giants to, to deal with to reach the customers. And here I'm talking about Meta, or Google or say Microsoft or Amazon, because we're talking about tech products. So we're not going to be delivering a physical product in this case.

Yes and no. I mean, I totally agree with you for some startups, they've got no choice but to go through those. But I think what we're going to see is because you can generate something, you end up with niches becoming viable that weren't viable before. So I don't know, Airbnb, but for people with dogs of a certain breed or something random like that. So if you've got a German Shepherd, here's all the places you can stay and they love German Shepherds, right? So that wouldn't have been viable before because there's not enough customers there. But if you're only spending a few thousand dollars on the tech or pounds, then it suddenly becomes viable. So I think we're going to see a lot more niches and they will be going, yes, they might still be using Meta or whatever, but they'll also be going direct or be finding other ways to be the German Shepherd Society that you're targeting and you're marketing through them, not through Meta and Facebook. So, so I think that will be the one of the major changes is all of this kind of niching of all these startups.

And from the, uh, startups that you developed with MillionLabs and work with them, what was their go-to-market strategy? What worked for them? If we would be able to share some of these tips to any other founders.

Yep. So niche for sure. Even if you've got a global or international market, you start small, really small. So the way we do, we have this kind of methodology, start, launch, and grow. Start is about that validation of the idea. The launch is about minimum viable product to test it live with customers and then iterating. And then grow is about, right, how do we get from 1 customer to 10 to 100 to 1,000? And we really see it like that. Like the startup founder should be able to find the first customer, right? The number 1. And in fact, they should be able to get to 10 and that's network, that's LinkedIn, using all of their means, emailing friends, family, pools, all of their network. They should be able to get to 10 paying customers like that. From 10 to 100 actually does require something else. It's people you'd have never met before. It's the new stuff. And that requires some kind of campaign. So we tend to use the Bullseye approach, which is like, right, we're gonna try Meta, we're gonna try TikTok, we're gonna try whatever, we're gonna advertise on newsletters and we'll just see which one works and which one gets us the best results. And then we'll lean in on that one and then we'll go looking for another one. And so there's 50 methods outlined in the Bullseye method. And so we'll just work our way around the dartboard effectively looking for those ones that work. And we should be able to therefore be able to find the route to get them to the 100. And then same probably will get us to 1,000. And then you start into, once you've got 1,000 customers, you are really into different metrics. You're starting to look at churn rates. How can we retain these clients? And how do we get one client to bring us another client? We're kind of looking for those viral coefficients. So that's our kind of methodology. The things that work, well, it's obviously different for every startup, as you'd expect. But niching in because it's much easier if you're looking for doctors and you're looking for doctors in the UK that are in general practice. Well, it's much easier to go buy a marketing list when you're really that specific. If you're just looking for some people in the medical industry, well, that's a big list to go after. So we try to really niche it down and really don't worry about the thousandth customer. Let's worry about one, the 10, and the 100. Yeah, let's really focus in on that narrow that narrow field there.

And when, and when a startup starts scaling from the small team or the single founder, what sort of barriers have you seen that are hard to overcome? When, when you just spend, like you said, a few thousands to, to get a product, uh, out there, and maybe it's just one person sometimes 2. Um, when does it become a bottleneck and they need more funds in order to grow the business?

I think the biggest naivety of most startup founders is they see the tech as the barrier. And then as soon as they kind of working with us or they figure it out, they realize it's not, and it's going to be the sales and marketing, but they, they have no understanding of really what that's going to cost. And it always costs so much more than they think. You know, if you spent £10,000 on your MVP, you are spending at least £10,000, if not £20,000 on the marketing sales to get that to market. So if you haven't got £30,000, you probably shouldn't start. But everyone assumes, well, I, I've got a social media following, I'll use that, you know, and they've got a few thousand Twitter followers or whatever it is. And you realize you get zero from that. You need 100,000 Twitter followers or a million Twitter followers to kind of get anything, I should call it X, but you know, to get anything from like the scale needs to be so high if you're going to do things about social media. So there's a lot of naivety we see in that.

And that's organic social media as well, because there's, that's where the paid element comes in. People think, oh, I will post something to my followers and everybody will see it and X% will go for it. But from my experience and a lot of the things that I've seen, that's hardly ever the case, or at least since 2020 onwards when the social networks changed significantly.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah. I mean, literally, unless you've got hundreds of thousands of followers, you're not going to generate probably any business from that. You certainly will probably from your network because people want to, but whether they become sticky and whether they buy is a different matter, but you'll certainly generate some signups. But I think that's the biggest— that's now the biggest barrier, and that's the biggest naivety, because people just really don't know what it costs. If you've never done Meta ads, you don't realize it costs $50 to acquire a customer, or $500 to acquire a customer, until you do it.

So, or at least £1.50 or a click, so to speak. Yeah, £1.50 doesn't guarantee anything.

Exactly. Yeah. So that, that's the other sort of naivety. You have to layer it up for them, and you have to say, well, look, if it's £1.50 a click, that means somebody came through to your landing page, whatever it is, How many people are actually gonna sign up and then how many are actually gonna pay? And so that might be, well, 100 people are gonna click and one person's gonna sign up and no people are gonna pay. So I need 1,000 to get 100 to get one pound, you know, so the ratio's there. So we help them explore that and try and understand that because that's really critical for being able to scale. People will talk about content, but content marketing plays generally don't bring you customers in the short term. They're a long-term play, you know, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, they will pay off and you should do them. But they do not bring you customers in the first 6 months. So how are you going to pay the bills? You need to probably use ads to do that. And therefore, that's going to cost you money. You know, that's the bottom line.

And would you say that then, You do need less money to get a product out there, but you still need that money to market that product. So it doesn't mean that overall the startup cost has reduced.

Correct. Yeah. And if anything, it might increase that, that marketing sales cost might go up the more demand coming in from more startups. So it might, it might well increase. Yeah, and that's, that's going to be a real challenge. And the real hustly startups that go looking for those little niches, go looking for those kind of little ways of getting things, posting on Reddit, whatever it is, finds those little gaps where they can find 5 customers there, 5 customers there, they're going to be the winners. But I, I think I see in the data that we get back from our startups, there is a startup founder that's obviously got enough money to get the, get over the tech hurdle. But as soon as they realize how hard it is, they just give up in the sales function. So we lose most of our startups in that sales and marketing piece, probably. Well, our average startup lasts 7 months before they're dead. So they're a few months in the build and then, I don't know, 4, let's say 4 months doing, trying to do go-to-market and then they give up and die.

And that— it's interesting you say that, Simon, because this was one of my questions coming up, so I'll bring it up now. When do you tell a founder to quit, or do you ever?

I, I never do. Um, I might say all the data suggests that this is not working, but you know, they're only a pivot away from fixing that, so you never know. Um, most startups figure it out on their own because they can't pay the bills and they have no choice but to go and get a job. Now that doesn't necessarily mean the death of the startup. It means it becomes a side hustle. So it shifts. And actually, 9 times out of 10, that side hustle will end up working if they can deal with the job and the side hustle. And I think most of our successful startups actually start off as side hustles and they become a full-time startup as a result. So if I was to look across our spectrum of the types of startups we deal with, we have the ones that quit their job. I'm all in, I'm going for it. We have the people that are experts in their field. Let's say they're a professional, they're a lawyer, but they're building something on the side. And we have the ones that are kind of funded. They managed to get funded via a PowerPoint or they built some MVP themselves and they get funded. I think the side hustlers are probably the most successful.

But then is a side hustle in a way a real or successful business if say they can't pay the single founder's bills? Is that, is that a realistic aim or more a hobby that pays for itself?

Yeah. I mean, so it needs to transition at some point, but you're, what you're doing is you're giving it the breathing space so that if you haven't got investment or £50,000, £60,000 worth of capital to see you through, then actually it gives you that breathing space to be able to grow it, grow it, grow it to the point it can support you, and then you can quit your job and move into it. So that's what we see, and that breathing space is what most startups need because you really don't have all the answers. You think you do, you think you've done all the research, and then the classic story, then you get hit in the face by the first customer and the plan goes out the window. So that happens all the time and you want that breathing space to be able to figure out what is the right thing, how do we pivot, how do we change, et cetera. And having a job with an income, it has some downsides because you can't commit the time and effort, but it also has some upsides is you don't have quite the same pressure to deliver speed.

And I'm curious, Simon, if we're talking about AI, How you actually use AI for MillionLabs? Is there like a task that you've built that you're never going to go back doing manually? Do you, how do you use it for your personal life combined with MillionLabs? How did that change the game for you?

Yeah, so in order for us to do startups at scale, The only way we've been able to do that is automation. So we already had a lot of automation, but not necessarily using AI. And obviously as AI got introduced, we started to look at, well, how do we automate our automation? You know, how do we make that more intelligent and push it into other places where we had humans? I mean, if you've, if you manage a project of any sort, particularly a technical delivery project, you've got a designer involved, you've probably got a technical architect owner, you've got a developer, you've got some kind of project manager, et cetera. So you've got 5, maybe 6 people involved, plus the customer or the founder involved in that. Like, things drop between those if you're not careful really quickly. So we've always tried to automate as much of that process. One, because we want to be cost-effective, because we know startups are price sensitive. And two, we want to do it at speed and automation brings us speed. So we're already doing that. We've just injected AI into that model now so that we've got a lot more stuff going on, you know, emails going back and forth to founders, etc., that are actually just AI generated and talking to them still with a layer of personalization because the founder is buying into kind of you're helping me get to the next level in this startup. So you can't lose that and nor would we want to. But the day-to-day stuff we can, we can automate. So that's one thing. And then on the tech delivery side, obviously we moved from no coding to Vibe and that's just all completely AI. So we're getting to the stage where we can do obviously the AI development, build and deliver the code. That's not a problem. We can do the testing is starting to be done, but like the scoping is all AI driven. The design in some cases is completely AI-driven. So we've got this kind of, um, very automated AI-driven process now. Uh, and that'll, that'll only increase. I think once we can get the testing sorted, then, then that'd be perfect.

So with all these tools, I think Simon, you've launched or helped launch more startups than most people meet in a lifetime. What's the one pattern that never changes for successful ones?

Yeah, it's a really good question. It is founder, obviously. I mean, that goes without saying, a good quality founder. They're really hard to find. There's not many of them. Lots of people come into the startup world, entrepreneur world, but not many people are successful. That's why we see this, the really high failure rate. So it is that grit, that ability to just keep driving forward despite all the knockbacks. And we're not really good at that as humans. In the dating world or whatever, nobody likes to be told no. And that's what you're getting told every day. You're getting hit in the saval multiple times a day. Yeah, multiple times a day.

That's if you hear back. That's if you hear back.

Yeah, you're being punched in the face constantly. So that takes a certain type of person, tenacious grit, whatever you want to call it, just to keep driving through and keep pushing. So that's the number one. And then that ability to think about the world slightly differently, go, well, yeah, that's the way it's done today, but how could we do this differently? So that sort of innate kind of, it's broken, I want to fix it, and I think I can do this. So there's a kind of inner confidence as well that's there. So those are the two characteristics, that kind of grit and that ability to look at the world in a slightly different angle. You've got to be slightly weird, I think,, um, to, to be a founder. That's why I love being around them, because they're weird. They think differently. They're, um, yeah, they're great people.

But then, as it turns out, uh, sales and marketing are also the next important skills in the startup journey. Once you had the idea, say you're able to execute it now much easier and much quicker with the, uh, AI coding tools, and that's where you sh— they should really then start focusing their next set of skills.

Yeah, exactly. So if, if you, if you are not a marketeer and you're not a salesperson, you, you need to be, you know, I think you always did whether you like it or not, you know, where the founders, you know, tech founders were great because they could get over the tech hurdle, but they were rubbish because they couldn't sell anything. So, you know, have an amazing product that they couldn't sell. Um, and so, you know, they were almost would get a bit further but never really make it. So yeah, I think if, you know, if you could say to anybody what skills you need, you need to be able to understand marketing, uh, lead generation, particularly if you were to look at a specific thing, because that's what you're going to need. You're going to need cold leads turned into warm leads turned into sales. So that flow there is going to be absolutely critical. And who's better to sell it than the founder anyway, because it's your baby. You understand what you, you know, what problem you're trying to solve, you're gonna be the best person to sell it. And I was reading something the other day, said like $100,000 to $1 million to $10 million, probably the founder's still heavily involved in that sales process. Maybe beyond $10 million, they start to step back, et cetera. So you're in this for the long term. It could take you certainly years to get to $10 million. So you are gonna be in that sales point whether you like it or not. Because you're the best person. And lots of, depending on who you're selling for, they want to speak to the founder. Like there's nothing better.

So Simon, if in a world where execution isn't a bottleneck anymore, let's say it's imagination and finding the right idea or fixing the right problem, ideally some, a problem that the founder experienced themselves. So they, they know the pain of the user and how to solve it. And you've seen thousands of pitches throughout your career. What makes your eyes light up these days? What sort of ideas besides you said niche and we talked about, you know, dogs, cars, et cetera.

Yeah.

What else is viable?

But everything's viable now. That's the beauty of it. I think there are very few things. Where we would shy away from. We don't, for example, we don't do games. It's a very specific market. So that type of thing, we tend not to do gambling apps, but not really because they're not technically viable, but they are. I think the things that really attract us, we've done a relatively recent investment. So we do a bit of investment investing as well alongside, kind of alongside paid work in MillionLabs, is a patient simulator for doctors. So doctors that are in training, they have to do a lot of scenario-based learning. So patient comes in, says they've got a scratch, you know, or got a cough, a persistent cough, et cetera. So we help this startup, UK-based startup, build a patient simulator using AI. So we AI generate all the patient case studies. We then have an interactive avatar that you can talk to, and it's like being in front of a patient. And that's fairly revolutionary. Particularly in the medical industry, 'cause things are relatively slow moving. It's a doctor who's just come through training. He's now graduated, who came up with it. So he's an industry expert. He could see the problem. So he sat in the problem himself because he'd just been through it. And he raised a little bit of investment, not just from us, but from some others. So those type of people, he's got the expertise in the niche. That's great. Tick. He, so he understands the market, et cetera. He understands who he's selling to 'cause it was him. Just a few years ago. He's already raised a bit of investment, so he's shown that he's got a bit of tenacity to get out there and present it, etc., and pitch it. And he's built a bit of a product, you know, first version of the product he'd already built. So, you know, that's perfect for us because we can actually take him to the next stage. And he's exactly the type of person that we're looking for with that kind of expertise and tenacity, etc.

Now, Simon, I know you run adventure off-road trips in your spare time. Is that right?

Yep.

Um, what's the connection, say, between leading a 4x4 convoy through the mud and, you know, leading founders through the chaos that can come when, uh, when they launch their business?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're making me think, what is the connection there? I suppose for me, it's a little bit of danger, risk. As entrepreneurs, we have different risk thresholds to most normal people, and that's what allows us to do what we do. And I think it's the same in my sort of hobbies, et cetera. Like, I enjoy the going out in the mud. We may come back, we may not come back, or at least the vehicles may not come back because we'll get stuck and we have to fix them. That kind of spontaneity of sort of an emergency, um, I really enjoy. It's the fight or flight. It's, it's kind of a, a good feeling. And I, you know, and I like sharing that with other people and taking them on that journey and showing them like some of the hints and tips of how How, how can you get the vehicle from one side of the, the bog to the other side of the bog or the desert, wherever we happen to be?

And in your personal life and the way you manage the business, what do you protect in your week that people might think is maybe weird or unnecessary, especially younger tech founders who can pour all their hours and their attention into a business?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I was that younger for a while back now, granted, but, and I was just 80 hours, 90 hours a week. It was just crazy. And you give up friends, you give up relationships, everything. And I think as you mature, you realize that that's not life. It has to exist outside of that, particularly because that could disappear at any moment. And if your whole identity is wrapped up in that startup and that thing, it really, it's like a grieving process. If it goes under, it's like, well, what the hell do I do next? Well, that was my identity. I was a startup founder and now it's gone. So you, I think you have to be slightly careful and keep yourself, and that comes with age, I guess, in hindsight. But the things that I protect is my dog walk in the morning. So I'll do an hour dog walk and that's my podcast time. That's my get out in the fresh air, et cetera, and reflect on, right, what's coming up, what's next. It's kind of that strategic thinking piece. Definitely, um, protect that. Obviously protecting family time as well. Um, so weekends, I still do work at the weekends but around stuff. Um, um, and then friends, I make sure that I get out and do Land Rovering stuff or whatever it is, adventure trips, etc. I'm doing 2, 3, 4 weeks a year of sort of adventuring activity. And that again, it's just brain space away from the business, which And getting you out of the house is what I was thinking when you said that.

Something that gets you out of the house, disconnected from your computer. You'll have your phone with you naturally nowadays, but—

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I have a great business partner and actually the business runs itself. So I'm lucky in that position where I don't have to work day to day in the business. But yeah, you're right. It gets you out, but it's that, I think it's that time to reflect back on the business. It's really hard when your hair's on fire and you're in it doing operational stuff and sending an email, doing whatever. It's really hard to see what's coming. That brick wall that you might be running into is too late lots of times. So that ability to step back and strategic view. Business partner and I, I said I was in Germany last week and we were having our quarterly catch-up. So we spend 3, 4 days together and we just look at what's coming the next quarter, what's coming beyond that. And that's again, important time to step back and just consider, particularly when things are moving. I mean, I've been in business 20-odd years and the speed that AI is bringing to the change is so phenomenal, particularly for our industry, that almost the plans that we made last quarter have blown out the water because, you know, Gemini 3 got released or whatever and it could do something that it couldn't do before. And we're like, ah, right. So we need to kind of rethink this again. So it's moving so quickly. Um, like I've never seen it before. It's scary and exciting, probably in about equal measures at the moment.

Well, I'm not gonna get you to look into a crystal ball into the future right now, cuz I know that will be hard, especially as we said with how quick the developments move. But as we prepare to close and reflect on On everything so far, what's a truth about building that, say, took you 10, 20 years to learn through your business experiences?

What's the truth about building? Um, I think entrepreneurs, most of them still hold this, hold this feeling that they don't want to be disappointed. They don't wanna be told no because we're humans. We still don't want that even though we have a higher propensity for being told no, we still have it. And so, so many of them don't launch or like, I've just gotta add this, I've just gotta do this. The marketing's not quite ready. That's not quite ready. I just need another, I just need another week. And that's really detrimental because the thing I've learned is that the quicker that you get into the market, the quicker you get that feedback, those punches, you start to roll with them, you start to dodge and weave, and you can move forward. But so many people delay that and delay that and just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. And actually, as they say, you want to be embarrassed by it. You want to be like, oh, I know it's not good enough. But that feedback that you'll get from somebody, well, it's not good enough because that's crap, that's rubbish, that doesn't work. That's what you need because you might never have spotted it, but you've waited another 3, 4, 5 weeks. To find that out. So I think that's the key lesson is get out there, get it into the market, and then just get that customer feedback, like have those really difficult, uncomfortable conversations.

So kind of like try and skip over launch anxiety.

Yeah, skip over launch anxiety, jump off the deep end, however you want to define it. But just if you, if you're constantly saying, I just need this, that's when you need to check yourself and go, do I? Do I really? I mean, even internally we have conversations around, oh, well, why don't we try this service? Oh, we've got to build this, build that. And we go, hang on a minute. No, we don't. We just need to put up a landing page that says we do it and let's see how many people click on it. So we still try to act like our startups, even though we're established business with kind of 60 people, et cetera. We still try to do that because actually it's the right thing to do. Like, why build all the stuff behind it if it never sells a thing? Why don't we sell it? And then apologize because he's not ready, because that's easier.

And finally, Simon, what's the piece of advice you'd give your 25-year-old self before that first exit?

Uh, I, do you know what? The thing that niggles me all the time is, am I taking enough risk? And as you get older, I think it gets harder because you've got a mortgage, you've got family, and those risks don't just affect you. When you're in your 20s, 30s, whatever, and you're on your own, then I think it's easier to take those risks. And I see some entrepreneurs that have taken really big risks and you're like, oh God, that's really ballsy. I wish I could take those level of risks because the successes, I mean, the failures are pretty horrific, but the successes are also higher. So, but it's that risk tolerance. And I like, I always wish I had a bit more risk tolerance. But who knows?

So you wish you would've taken more risks and bigger risks?

Yeah. Yeah, definitely when I was younger because that was the right time to do it. So maybe I sold too early. Maybe I exited before I could have grown that into a larger business, et cetera. And I think back then I was more focused on, well, can I raise investment for it? Can I grow it, et cetera? And I'm still there, probably not raising investment, but it's still in terms of I want to grow this. But there's some great statistics. It's like the people that make money are the ones that see the business through for 10 years plus, you know, that's, that's if you've got the grit to get it through the 10 to 15, 20 years over that lifetime, you will make much more money than most of the exits, you know, because you'll be pulling half a million, you know, maybe a million profit out of it a year. Do that over 10 years and you've suddenly got 10 million. Well, that's, you know, the average exit certainly in the UK is way below that. So maybe you just have to rethink about the way you do that.

Especially when the cap table changes with more investment, actually you could be left with way less at the end of it.

Way less. I mean, let's be honest, most investments never exit. So that's number one. And even when they do, as you say, you're so diluted. Even if you started off with 50% as a co-founder or whatever, you, you might be down at 10, 20, but maybe even single digits by the time you get to an exit. I think if you've got a good established solid business, you could actually be taking out more over the long run than, than somebody that has a good exit or what looks like a good exit.

And Simon, I know you've also been a mentor for years for many people. To leave something inspirational at the end of this episode, what's something founders should stop romanticizing about entrepreneurship?

I think, I think there's two, two things, probably one's a positive and one's a negative is one, the positive is the freedom. Like it's, it's your world. You can do as if you want to go for a dog walk in the morning and only work till, you know, 3 in the morning, that's fine. Like it brings you massive chance of freedom. And I think that's worth a lot of money to most of us because we can go on holiday, we can do whatever. The flip side of that is obviously there's a lot of work to be done, but you can do it in your timescales when you want to, when it suits you, not when somebody's telling you to. So I think, I think that's the positive. I think the negative is what everyone should realize is you're in this for a long journey. This is— I don't think it was described a marathon, not a sprint. I don't think it's even a marathon. And in the marathon, it's 26 miles and you're done. With a startup, you have no clue how far this distance is you're running. You're running and you're running and you're running. And so that's what every startup founder should understand. But the journey is, they should live the journey and love the journey because that's what startup entrepreneur is about. And most, I think most successful entrepreneurs will look back on those days and go, they were the good times. Now I've got bureaucracy, expense policies, dealing with HR. As it scales, you've got all these other things. That are probably a lot less interesting than the early days that you had in your startup.

So don't lose track of your aims, but also don't forget to live through the journey because that's going to be the most enjoyable part. I think that's a great parting thought from you, Simon. Thank you so much for joining Millennial Masters and sharing your story. Your learnings. And also, I'm looking forward to see all the cool stuff that's going to be coming out of MillionLabs.

Awesome. Brilliant. Great to be with you, Daniel.

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