AI, Dubai, and pivoting without shortcuts ⚙️ | James Augustin (Particle Execution)

Humans should be doing things that are innately human. They should be going out to sales meetings, they should be recording podcasts, they should be creating content, talking about strategy, being creative, because that stuff that at least for now, AI can't do. That is the highest leverage thing a human can be doing. You can free up more time for people to be doing things that people should be, and that is more beneficial to the business, but they actually enjoy.

This week's Millennial Master is James Augustine founder of Particle Execution. From Pokémon lucky dips in school to building AI automations for businesses across the globe, James is all in on designing a life of freedom, focus, and real impact. He left the UK, landed in Dubai with no safety net, and built a profitable agency in under 3 months. In this episode, we talk about what most founders get wrong about AI, how to sell anything without cold pitching, and the real difference between freedom and ownership. Millennial Masters is proudly sponsored by Jolt, the UK's top web hosting service. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling up a custom app, Every great project needs a reliable home. That's why Jolt has hosting plans starting at just £3.95 a month, with unbeatable deals on domain registrations too. Why Jolt? It's a no-brainer. There's no waiting around with support within 30 seconds on live chat. Your site stays live no matter what with over 99.99% network uptime. And you can also pay with Bitcoin or American Express, so you can rack up those points too. How good is that? Sign up today and enjoy your first 3 months free. Head to jolt.co.uk to get started. James, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you today? You're joining us from Dubai, right?

Yep, in Dubai Marina. I'm very, very good. Thank you, Daniel.

Well, Before you got to Dubai, your story started here in the UK, and you were 10, and you started doing Pokémon lucky dips at school. Was that the moment you realized you were wired differently?

I think with regards to my entrepreneurial story and realizing that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I wouldn't say I realized that until probably secondary school, but the Pokémon club was definitely something that I think just made sense to me at the time. Like I definitely wanted some more money for sweets after school. And I realized if I went and created a Pokémon club with the key feature being a lucky dip with a bit of shredded paper in, or quite a lot of shredded paper, but also a number of Pokémon cards, some good, some quite standard ones. Kids were happy to pay me 20p per go. And so it kind of made sense. I think, uh, yeah, didn't have the big realization then, but it kind of made sense when I reflected on it a little bit later.

So then you went into uni and you started PPE.

Yep. I did politics, philosophy, and economics. Um, I was tempted to do business, actually very, very tempted. Um, and I, I only just kind of went to university. I remember speaking to my parents and they said, well, I basically would drive to college and I would think about business ideas. This is when I was 17, 18. I would think about business ideas and look at the like biographies on Wikipedia pages of like Alan Sugar and famous entrepreneurs like that. And see that a lot of them didn't go to university, but my parents, they didn't go to university. And so they were like, I think you need to go. All of your siblings went. It was such a valuable experience. But yeah, I was planning to do business, but my mum said, well, look, you've, you're doing politics and philosophy at A-levels. So I think PPE is a good option for you and it will be very well-rounded, but I managed to take a few free choice modules at university, including business.

And that's when you also started dabbling in proper business.

Yeah, exactly. So, at this point, everybody was starting to apply for their grad schemes in the third year of university. And I remember hearing some people on the bus actually talking about it and said, oh, I've applied, applied for this grad scheme at Deloitte or at Shell or BP. And I just kind of thought that this was in like November, so early on in third year. And I thought that has no appeal to me. I kind of always knew that what I wanted to do I mean, I hadn't even defined it that clearly in my head, but I just knew that that didn't really appeal to me. And so I actually came up with a business and entered it in the University of Manchester's Venture Further competition, which is the largest startup competition at the University of Manchester.

And what was that business?

It was a business called Around You. So this business was, the idea was if you needed some kind of extra work at like a restaurant or a hotel, you'd be able to post on the app and they would then go and, um, people in your local area would be able to say, oh, hi, I can do that, like the Uber for restaurants. But what actually happened was I got into the final of the Venture Fervor competition, and then COVID happened, and this was March of 2020. And so I went straight back home. My mum actually has a chronic lung condition, and we weren't sure, like, how bad COVID was going to be, but we were taking it quite seriously. And I was in this very entrepreneurial mood. I'm the type of person who really likes to be out and about and, and doing things. And I basically just posted on loads of university and LinkedIn groups all across the world and said, hey, look, this is going to be something that's like, we don't know, it's crazy what's going on right now. But what I do know is that there's loads of students and other people that can actually help here. So we put together a team that was cross-continental and started working on a solution to help people. What we came up with was a Phone a Friend service to connect people to combat loneliness. To connect people as a tech product, right? So to connect people for the type of conversations you might get in the park or in the pub, rather than having a trained volunteer on the other side of the phone. So that did quite well. And it was, it was funny laughing about it because what I know about entrepreneurship and tech development now, I mean, it was, it was crazy. Like, I didn't even know how we got stuff done, but we managed to get the product out there and it helped a few hundred people. Then the first lockdown ended and we didn't have the foresight to realize that there was going to be more lockdowns. And so what we did was—

not many people did.

No, no. I think we all thought in that summer, the eat out to help out. I think we kind of thought that was the end of it. Right. So what we then pivoted to do was create a, what became the UK's largest student consultancy. So we took students, put them into teams of 5 with the team lead being maybe somebody who had a bit more experience than a year in industry or a PhD student. We worked with charities to understand their strategic needs. And then we, strategic needs were clear deliverables that lasted 6 to 8 weeks. And then we put the students to go and do those. And so we managed within 3 weeks, we managed to set up 20 projects, projects in that summer, which lasted 6 to 8 weeks. And then yeah, that, that just kept rolling. And that was really my first taste of like proper entrepreneurship and feeling like this is something that I can and should do. Even just stuff like speaking on BBC, building such a big team, like just bringing people into the vision. That's where I really found my skills were. And I think it's an interesting one, because I think so many people just don't dare to do it. But if you dare to take that first step and say, I'm going to do this, and then actually do it and be so bold as to speak about it publicly and say, this is what we're doing, who wants to help, you can actually get a lot of stuff done.

So what were some of the key lessons you took from that early stage entrepreneurship? You said you obviously created two tech products, and you worked with development and with lots of people at the same time. What were the main realizations you had there? What surprised you?

Okay, so what surprised me was we made this Phone a Friend tech product, and this was like the biggest lesson, but I still— I think is the most important for all entrepreneurs, which is you need to speak to customers and you need to speak to stakeholders and you need to map out the different people who are involved in your product. So we'd created this Phone a Friend tech product, and then there was this group of moms who were running a kind of like a a support circle for elderly people, right? And I knew a couple of them from, like, they were parents of friends or associates when I was in school. And I jumped on a call with them and told them all about what we were doing. And I just thought instantly they'd be like, oh yes, this is amazing. Let's get out. Let's get out. But actually, they started asking loads and loads of questions I wasn't prepared for. They started asking about, like, safety measures to make sure that vulnerable people weren't spoken to by the wrong person. And, like, had we got this kind of approval from government and things like that. And whilst it was, I think it was a really, really good reminder of one of the most critical lessons that startup founders and famous startup founders and people who know about business will know is you need to speak to the business and you need to speak to the stakeholders involved. Because even if something is a free social impact company and you've created a product, there's still, you're still creating a load of hypothesis when you start a project or start a business. And you need to go and validate them. And so the first thing you need to do is actually speak to the customers, or at least speak to the people who are going to be giving it to the end user. So that was definitely the thing that surprised me the most. And then the other thing which was instantly recognizable to me was the importance of keeping a team lean. During the Phone a Friend product, we probably had— on the marketing side of things, I managed to get a team of like 50 students together, and the strategy was they would go and post in all of these Facebook groups groups over COVID and say, oh, hey, there's this new product people can use. On the tech development side, I had developers in India, I had developers in Argentina, I had a guy from Harvard running one of the products, or running one of the work streams, and dev firm from Poland. We just had so many people chipping in. But what I realized is it's a lot better to have a few people who are really committed with tight lines of communication than like 20 who are just chipping in there. Because it's actually counterproductive. So I think those are my biggest two takeaways that I take with me today is speak to the customer or the user or the stakeholder and keep your team lean with high performers.

So when was the moment you realized that you wanted to go bolder and bigger and decided to go to Dubai with no network and no safety net?

Yeah, so if I kind of just take it back a little bit, so I did the consultancy and the student management consultancy, it was amazing. Loved it. And I guess it's kind of ironic in hindsight, because I said that I never found the idea of those grad schemes and consultancy jobs appealing. Because I'd started this, I actually just on a whim reached out to the head of recruitment at a very fast-growing management consultancy in the UK, where people usually need to wait like 9 months to hear an offer from. And I just said, hey, I built this, and I'd be interested in consultancy because I knew it was a good job. I knew it paid well.. And I didn't know too much like about it apart from what I'd done. But it just seemed like a no-brainer that if I could get a job there and I didn't have to go through like months of waiting, then great. So, so I managed to, I got, got the job, had the first interview and had the job in 2 weeks, which was great. And then I think that I was working like 16-hour days and I found it so unfulfilling compared to what I was doing previously. Even though what I was doing previously didn't generate any money because it was a nonprofit and we didn't even have any revenue, but I think it was that understanding of this isn't for me, just sitting in an office and doing that. So I left that because it actually gave me no time to work on other projects. And then I kind of went to work in a sales role in London. And at that point, I was just kind of in London after COVID. And I thought, right, I'm kind of two steps back, one step forward from where I want to be in or where I have been in my life. And so I need to get out and meet some new people with a fresh perspective and try and understand what venture I'm going to start this time that's ultimately going to make me some money as well. And I think it was that realization of not being exactly where I want to be, paired with what I knew was my ability and the stuff that I had done in the past, made me realize that, okay, I need to get out of London. I didn't have any savings at the time. So I needed to go somewhere where I could work. Where I also thought it would be sunnier because I'm a big sun worshipper. And Dubai was a place that had a lot of entrepreneurs, even though I'd never been there and didn't know anyone there. I just thought, let's go, let's see how it gets, because I knew that the situation I was in in the UK wasn't where I was going to flourish and be able to do exactly what I wanted to do in my life.

So what happened then when you got to Dubai?

So when I got to Dubai, I managed to get a job at a corporate events company that runs tech events. It was, it was a good job and there was quite a bit of traveling and I met my partner who has also just started a business and I met her then, so lots of benefits, but I immediately started trying to, I basically put my feelers out for a lot of different opportunities that were there and after a few months I kind of zeroed in on two specific opportunities. One was the AI recruitment tech startup that I've still got, and it is recruitment startup, which I've still got. And it's, it's, it's kind of going to date. And the other was the YP Club, because I met the founder and CEO very soon afterwards and kind of said to him, look, I've got a lot of entrepreneurial experience. I think I see a load of potential in what's, what you're doing here. I'd like to help. And the YP Club, for reference, is the Middle East's largest paid community for entrepreneurs and professionals aged 20 to 40. So I basically focused in on those two businesses throughout 2023. It was a very busy time because I was working full-time whilst trying to build both those businesses. And then in 2024, the YP Club had enough revenue for me to go on full-time. And so I did.

So you helped it grow to such an extent that it would also support you as a full-time employee of the business.

Exactly. Because when I met Cameron, he had just started running the— about 6 months prior, he'd started running the events. And I got— I then got involved, and it was a community. And we essentially launched memberships together, myself, Cameron, and the CMO called Ben. Basically, throughout 2023, we took memberships from launching in April to 0 to 400 by the end of 2023. And then by the end of 2024, we were at 800. So yeah, we grew it from zero to kind of what it is today.

But there was still a bug there.

Yeah.

You, you were part of a business, you were helping it grow and develop, but it just wasn't yours, was it?

Yeah, no, exactly. And I think it was a weird one because again, this kind of comes back to what maybe a lot of entrepreneurs don't always know that they want to be. Wanted to be an entrepreneur, but, but I did. And it was a weird one because in August of last year, we started scaling very fast. And we basically doubled the memberships throughout August and September. Now, what happened was, I was excited at first, and then I felt quite flat. And I thought, this is really weird. And I was shareholder or vesting shares in the business, like a significant portion. I said, why am I feeling flat? And so then throughout basically October, um, I did quite a bit of introspection and I realized that the whole reason I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur was to have really autonomy over my time, my finances, and my geography, which is something that I've always had really important. And I realized that whilst I was a business partner and we'd grown a little team underneath us and Cam referred to me as his business partner, we took strategic decisions together. I still realized that I did not have that autonomy piece that I was searching for. And I actually joined a course at the beginning of this year, very successful entrepreneur friend of mine has started running that. There's two guys from Canada, Corey and Kate, who are good friends of ours. And they've exited like an 8-figure business. And she has now launched this course. Her new passion is helping people find their niche. Right? So how do you find your niche? And how do you position it? How do you start out? How do you separate yourself from the market? So I joined this course. And one of the first one of the first things we did was a lot of introspection and wrote down a lot of documents about our lives and like what we didn't like, what we do like, what our vision was, what our anti-vision was for how we don't want the world to be. And I realized that there's this big theme throughout my life, which has been freedom. I've always wanted freedom. And within YP Club, although it was and is a successful business, it didn't allow me to live wherever I want. It didn't allow me to have final say over my finances. And it didn't allow me to have full autonomy over my time. And that's really why I basically took the decision to leave and spoke to my business partner about it in the middle of October.

And in a way, you took a bit of a sabbatical at that point, didn't you? You went from hot to tropical. Share a bit about that adventure and what you decided to do next.

I mean, sabbatical in the loosest term possible, but what essentially happened was I decided to leave YP Club. Again, I had Startly, which was my AI recruitment startup, which was not profitable at the time. And it was bootstrapped, so no funding. I also had this new concept for my current business, which was Particle Execution, an AI automation agency and implementer for businesses. But I didn't have a client for it. And I had no savings because I'd invested so much in the businesses. And so what I essentially did was I had 6 weeks, and when I had the conversation with Cam about me leaving, I knew I had 6 weeks, but I just kind of backed myself because I've always thought, I guess if you push yourself into a corner, and you're capable, and you're very determined with what you do, you will be able to make stuff happen. So I had 6 weeks, I managed to make Startly profitable by just a horrendous amount of outreach and sales to get a number of people using the platform. I managed to get our first client for Particle Execution, which was a big ticket enough for me to kind of pay myself at least on a small salary. And I managed to hand off, hand off the last part of YP Club. But the other thing that I knew I couldn't do was stay in Dubai, because Dubai is very expensive. And whilst I'd managed to make Startly just about profitable, and got my first client, and I couldn't afford to live here. So my girlfriend had actually just started up an Airbnb business. So what we did was we, we had a conversation with our landlord and said, let us rent this flat for you on Airbnb and we'll split the profit, but we'll also guarantee you the minimum monthly amount each month. What that did for him was it meant that there was absolutely no risk because as well, all the stuff in the apartment is ours, but it just increased his upside. So we managed to make that deal with the landlord whilst everything else was going on. And then 4 days before it was meant to renew the tenancy contract, which obviously this side agreement with the landlord was dependent on, he sold the property. I then had 4 days to organize with the next landlord to do the same deal, but we managed luckily to get it over the line. So we decided to go somewhere, we went to Vietnam for a few weeks, but we really decided Vietnam wasn't the best place to, to like base and work. So we ended up going to Bali, living in comparative to Dubai, a very cheap villa with a couple friends who are also entrepreneurs I know. And really, we just grinded out sales, both my girlfriend and I, on, on the business, on the businesses. And the whole plan was always get slightly profitable, get our first client, hand off YP Club, sublet our flat. But within 2 months, by the end of February, we'll have enough money to move back to Dubai. And so that's exactly what we did. And we managed to make it happen.

In 2 months, or how long did it take you? Amazing.

From the middle of December all the way to middle of February. That's when we came back.

So sales are obviously one of the trickiest parts in a business, but also one of the most important ones. And you shared a couple of times already how you were grinding out sales. What are your tips for sales besides doing a crazy amount of outreach? And when we say that, can you give some sort of indication of, you know, how many hundreds of people do you have to contact before you get the one or two sales that you need to keep the business afloat?

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a few lenses to look at this at, right? So I mean, realistically, if you've got a good enough product and a good enough offer before it starts with sales, you need to do that Alex Hormozi thing, you need to work out what is the marketing to get there? And what is your offer? Right? So I think the first thing to understand is, is what is your offer? Is it an offer that's appealing to people? So you need to understand, well, I guess, at the same time as that, who are you actually selling to? Right? So you need to understand who is your target market? Are you selling to accountants? Are you selling to marketing agencies? Are you selling to big banks? But often, obviously, it's easier to sell to smaller companies just because they have less bureaucracy and smaller sales cycles. But if you really understand who your customer is, then the next step is to make an offer, then you can go and speak to these people and say, does this like sound appealing to you? Does it sound like something you'd want to do? So in terms of your first sales for a business, In my opinion, unless it is some massive enterprise company, you're going to have to try and crack into in a different way. If you're selling to SMEs or consumers, it should be people in your network, you need to go out to them and say, hey, look, I'm thinking of doing this thing, you are the type of person that I would like to sell it to. This is an offer that I have drafted. I would just like to get your feedback on this opinion on this, on this offer. And so that maybe If you were interested in it, then it's great. But otherwise, then it helps me refine it for other people who are similar to you. Right. So in terms of sales, like, I think the first few clients that you get should always— ideally, it depends on your network, but ideally, they should come from your network. Because they're warm outreaches. They're simple conversations. They're not difficult for anybody. Like, anybody can message somebody in their phone book who they've got a relationship with and say, hey, can you give me feedback on this? So in that sense of getting your first few clients, I would actually not focus focus on doing as much sales outreach, but focus on speaking carefully to the people that you know, in your network for the particular persona that you're trying to sell to, and then asking them for their feedback on the offer. Right. And I think it's especially, it's especially easy if it's a service-based business where you're selling your expertise. Right. With Particle Execution, we specialize in AI and automation and designing operations, right. Which is a skill set that a lot of businesses don't have. So that is basically how I'd say to kind of get your first clients. But in terms of general sales, I feel like there's a lot of strategies that I've been using this year that have actually been quite effective and starting to get quite a bit of traction.

So share some wisdom.

Yeah, I will do. So there's one thing in particular that I've joined this year. Alex Hormozi talks a lot about lead magnets and giving people value upfront and sharing the knowledge and then selling the implementation. The idea is with lead magnets, you can turn cold leads, people who have never heard of from you before, into people that you are now credible to, and that they trust you. And basically, the whole point of a lead magnet is to give out a free resource that is so valuable that somebody would actually pay for it, and that solves a small pain point for them, so that then they would trust you to go and solve a bigger pain point. So I read this last year when I read Alex Hormozi's books, and I kind of knew exactly like how it worked and what it was about, the concept of it. But I've actually kind got a mentor and joined this community this year called Growth Garden. And this guy who runs it called Harald is an extremely intelligent guy based out of Norway. He's come up with this whole methodology and process for B2B sales and marketing, which has genuinely transformed the way that I do it. So last year, I used to be the type of person with my tech startup where I'd say, I'd find a list of people on LinkedIn, I'd use Sales Navigator, find a list of 1,000 founders or whatever it was,. And I would set up an automation or manually do it myself to say, hey, I've just launched this, I think it's relevant to you. Are you guys hiring? Would you be interested in using it? And the vast majority of the time people would say, not interested, sorry, no, not for me, not for me, or just a thumbs up and no reply. Now, what Harold has created is this whole methodology for lead magnets that allows you to really optimize them. It's like he's taken the philosophy that Alex Hormozi has and put it into a coordinated strategy. So firstly, you have to create the lead magnet. So one that I posted last week was a guide on how semi-founders can use AI and automation. It basically breaks down in the written format with a video attached as well, step-by-step actionable advice people can follow to start using AI and automation. So for example, and I just did a YouTube video on it yesterday, in fact, it starts with like, an intro, it says the importance of it, how much return on investment you can get. And then it goes straight into what should you be automating? How should you be automating it, the actual setup of itself, the tracking to understand what the return on investment is, and then the scaling of a successful automation to other parts of the business for maximum impact. Now, that in and of itself is valuable to people. And of course, AI and automation is so trendy at the moment. So what I did was created that, put it into a format with a document with a video, as I said, and then you create a post on LinkedIn that says something along the lines of I've solved simple AI automation for businesses, easy, understandable, practical, that you can use right now. And it says like, list the pain points. If you're struggling to use AI automation, have loads of repetitive tasks, have team members that are spending time on things they shouldn't be doing, but you just don't know where to start with AI, I've written this guide for you. And it gives out XYZ, it's got a free tool that you can use inside it, it's got a video, it's got step-by-step application, all you need to do is comment AI in the comments. And I posted that 2 weeks ago, I've had 500 comments of people requesting it for it from all across the world. And why it's brilliant is because it takes people who would never have normally looked at your LinkedIn, and it validates that they are interested in your products and services. And then you can go a step further, which is what we've done. And when people comment AI on your post, you automatically send them a comment, you set up an automation that comments on the post for you, and either says connect with me if they're not connected, and I'll send it across. Or if they are connected, it says sent, and it sends them the resource that you've made. So at that point, what you've done is you've taken all these thousands of people that have seen it, because for example, my post got 30,000 impressions, and you found the 500 or so people that are interested in it, and you've made them an inbound lead. And so it's very much transformed my focus around giving away value first, because then the conversation becomes so much easier. So I message them a week later, how have you found that? Were there any key takeaways? Oh yeah, it was actually really, really good. You know, we're exploring AI, but not quite sure how to do it. Oh, well, look, if you want, I could jump on a call with you and just discuss about it. It makes the whole sales process for finding your ICP so much simpler. And conversation so much warmer when you have it. The time-intensive thing is, I guess there's a hard part, which is changing your mindset and approach to this is how you should be marketing and selling. Because it's easy to set up an automation that says, do you want to try my— do you want to try my services? I'm sure you've got them on LinkedIn before. Hey, I've got resources out in the Philippines or India, or we do web development or something like that. And you just ignore it. Right? But if you can change the whole narrative of how people are actually perceiving your brand to attract them closer to you, then it makes everything from there so easy. Yeah, I would say a big, big, big appreciation to Harold for that, because he's really transformed exactly the way that we are doing our marketing lead generation and sales. And then apart from that, the final thing I would say on sales is make it so easy to define ROI in the eyes of your customer. And what I mean by that is, is we've actually just gone through this process over the last 2 months. Obviously, the business is quite new, still 3 months old. And we got to 10, just under $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue in 2 and a half months to less than 2 months. But I kind of thought for the amount of people that I know, remember talking about warm leads before, I said it should be doing higher. Because if the offer was that good, because it all starts with the offer, why have we not got more leads? I know hundreds of business owners, right? And so then what I did was realize, originally, originally we were pitching on sales calls, but we were going to come in and transform people's whole businesses. Right. But what's interesting is that for the human mind, it's quite hard to quantify what transforming a whole business actually means for you in terms of return on investment. So now we've totally— what I did was I sat down on all of my sales calls, because I record them all on Fireflies.ai. And I put it into ChatGPT. And I said, what's going on here? Like, what are the key trends and themes? And one was cost, Another was value, and that's classic. You're always going to get that. But the biggest, one of the biggest themes was around disruption. People were seeing it as something that was quite disruptive to the business and also something that maybe was just wasn't a focus right now because they had other things on and bigger things on. But if you flip the script and say, okay, I'm not going to transform your whole business, but what's one process that is really annoying you right now, or, or that, that you can't be up to the, the, the, that should be optimized and you see a big, big opportunity in, we can then dial in on that. So for example, for a lot of people it's sales and marketing. And so we have now been creating AI automations in sales and marketing. And it's so much easier to say if I can get you 30% more leads or save your salespeople 20% more time or make the likelihood of closing 30% higher. Now that is so much more quantifiable to a founder or a team lead or a leader in general, than just saying, we're going to come in and transform everything. And so that's something that I kind of knew from my past experience in sales. And I've read about because I read a lot of books. But it's just one of those things. Again, when you start a new business, sometimes you forget some of the basics. And so taking it back, relooking at all of the calls I'd had and saying, let's change the positioning of this so that it just clicks with people has been amazing. And we signed 4 clients in the last 3 weeks, or maybe 5.

Just to dial it back a little bit, how did you land on this AI automation idea?

Yeah, so I've always been a huge advocate of AI. I think ChatGPT came out in November, December 2022, or at least the version that everyone became famous for. The first time I used it, I was just mind blown. I thought this technology is absolutely insane. And it's surely the biggest thing since sliced bread. It's the biggest thing ever in terms of technological revolution. So I knew I had to do something with it. Now, what I initially tried to do was the AI recruitment startup, because I thought, right, if we can do that, recruitment is a really big pain point for a lot of people. And it was a very obvious use case for AI. You can screen CVs, you can use it to analyze voice recordings, or as we do on Starly, voice notes. From candidates to understand who's good and who's bad. But what I kind of realized with the tech startup is it— there's a lot of it, you're setting yourself a lot of challenges with a tech startup, not to say that you should never do them. And we did grind through it. And we've managed to get it to like 1 to 2k a month MRR. But I'm really just having it there at the moment and not focusing on the marketing and sales for it. Because I've realized that this opportunity with the AI automation agency is, I think, genuinely the biggest and most obvious I've ever seen, right? Like AI automation and AI is the fastest growing market in the history of markets. And the AI automation agency model rests on a very sound thesis, which is essentially that over the next 5 years or so, tens of millions of companies worldwide will be scrambling to understand how to use AI in their businesses. The ones who are early will be ahead of the competition. But the rest will 100% follow, because they will need to, to stay competitive. So the opportunity for me was so vast thinking, well, look, we have these process and operation expertise within the business. We have these developers who are experts in AI and integration and automation. If we marry those two together, we have the opportunity to become the Middle East's best and potentially the world's best AI automation agency. And the return on investment when you're talking to people on sales calls is such a no-brainer. It's like I said to you, if we can set up for 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, whatever it is for a small business and AI automation that saves you having to hire another marketer or saves you having to hire another salesperson or means that your salespeople can spend 40% more time actually selling rather than just doing admin, a no-brainer. So I think it was To answer your question succinctly, my passion for AI, the opportunities that the team had, the opportunities in the capabilities that we had within the team, and also the ability to make an offer that is so clear and understandable to people. That is kind of what drove me to the business.

Many businesses would hear AI automation and assume it's either too complicated or too expensive. From your outreach so far, what's the biggest myth about AI in business? And just to add to that, I'm assuming there's a bit of a difference between the age of the business owners.

Yeah, so I mean, it depends because my network at the moment is mainly people in Dubai in between the ages of 20 and 40, because that was the focus of YP Club. And so I haven't had as many conversations yet with people who are a bit older, but in a sense, I think that people who are a bit above that age are actually even more surprised by what AI can do. Like, it's easier to— to— it could take me like an hour to make a chatbot that can handle customer queries, and someone could be absolutely amazed by that, whereas someone who's a bit younger and well-versed in AI, it might take a little bit more to kind of impress them, right? Um, and so, so That's the question on, I guess, the age of the founders, right? But when it comes to the biggest myth, I think, yeah, I mean, it is, it is exactly as you said it, people are thinking, but it's maybe too complex or too costly. But it's actually quite simple and quick to implement, especially when comparing to a software product that you have to build absolutely from scratch. I think what people need to realize about AI automation is this, I guess, number one, every company will be doing it. So if they're not doing it now, every company will be doing it because it has such good ROI, right? So if you're not doing it now, why are you not? Because you're spending time, effort, and money doing things that you won't have to do in the future, and you don't need to be doing it now. You're just choosing not to implement AI automations. And the number 2 is that any process that has a very clear set of steps with little variance, you can use AI automation for. And if it's a time-consuming process that you do frequently, you should be using AI automation for it. Right? So the very first step is to actually understand what in my business am I spending a lot of time on, but I'm doing frequently that from doing it one stage to the next, there is almost no variance, right? When you understand that, you then need to go and map out your processes and say, okay, how is this actually working? Like visually, like, okay, lead comes in, We send an email, they don't reply, follow up, we try and find a time on an email chain, we send it, we jump on a call, we send a proposal. You need to map that out all extremely visually. And then you can, you can do AI automations for the vast majority of it. Because what it's actually doing is taking all the softwares and the systems and the platforms that you are using, and just doing, connecting those things to do what a human would do. So basically, anything that is online, within reason, and maybe even without reason, as time goes on, you can set up an AI automation for. So for example, in that workflow that I just briefly touched on, you could have it so when a lead comes in from the website, AI reads that, and then it drafts a personalized email based on the information and sends them out an email with maybe a link to a Calendly so that somebody can easily book it to save the time over email. Somebody maybe doesn't follow up after 2 days. Well, automate another follow-up that's personalized. Another 2 days, automate a follow-up that's personalized. And then, okay, they respond, they book a call. And a lot of salespeople's roles, for example, are spent on making proposals. Well, we set up an automation that reads the transcript, pings it into a proposal template and puts it ready in your Gmail for you to just press send on and review. And it's like that whole process is taking up hours and hours and hours of every single like people's days. The fact that you can automate that with AI is, I think, why the thesis for the business is so big. So I think it's that people just not realizing exactly what is possible, and also just assuming it's a lot more complex, time-consuming, and costly than it is. But every company should be doing it because they will be saved.

Would you say another factor is if a business doesn't have, not necessarily well-defined, but not well-documented processes, implementing AI is not a not that easy and you need to have the processes in place before you can implement AI. Otherwise, you need to do it as part of your plan of implementing AI.

Yep, 100%. And the funny thing is that businesses big and giant often don't have their processes mapped out exactly as well as they think. And you need to get extremely clear on your processes first, because if you're trying to do AI automations for something that is unclear or is messy, then AI is just going to automate the chaos. So what you first need to do is understand exactly what you're doing. And if when you get the team in a room and you have a conversation about what's going on, you realize that the process that the team is actually following was not what you thought it was, like written down, then you need to go back and literally, just like I said, map out what is going in on a whiteboard or an online whiteboard tool or a piece of paper. Okay, what is actually happening within the business? This. And then you might realize that you haven't got the process right, which is fine. So then you need to say, how do we want this process to run? Why is Katie getting involved in sales when like she's from marketing, whatever it is, define the correct process. And this is the first thing that we're doing with every single company is mapping out those processes. If it's right, great, let's start on AI automation. Let's see what we can do, or start at least telling people what we can do for that. But if it's not, then we have to focus in on creating the ideal process. So then you map that out with extremely clear steps of what's going on when, where there are decision points, where people are spending like time or whatever it is, you map out super, super clearly, including like what tools do you use? Who do you inform once it's complete? Very granular things, and you put them into standard operating procedures with people's names attached. Then you actually go and look at AI automations, because you need to be crystal clear on what is going on in the business, how and who is involved. And then you can start to use AI automations.

So from your perspective, and at least what you're doing with Particle, is you're not replacing humans, you're augmenting humans and allowing them to be more productive and do more of what they're good at.

Exactly. And I use that line all the time. I think the first thing is humans should be doing things that are innately human. Right? And so they should be going out to sales meetings, they should be recording podcasts, they should be creating content, talking about strategy, being creative, right? Because that's stuff that at least for now, AI can't do. And so that is the highest leverage thing a human can be doing. And what these processes are doing is exactly as you said, but it's further than that. And the line I use is on calls. If you implement AI automation, you can make sure that the people you hire who are usually specialists in one particular area, or at least have one particular role to do, they can spend more of their time doing that, which they enjoy, they're good at, and they're actually paid for. Salespeople are not paid really to go and update their CRM after every single call to make sure that you've said that Jerry from—

that's not fun anyway. Yeah.

And they don't enjoy it. They just want to be on the phones. But there's a good statistic that I read recently, which is only about 40% of a salesperson's time is actually selling. And I think that's why what the sales process has been, at least for the clients that we signed over the last 3 weeks, an obvious starting point for us with a process. So yeah, that's it. You can free up more time for people to be doing things that people should be, and that is more beneficial to the business, but they actually enjoy.

And how do you see this? Do people or potential customers enjoy interacting with AI, or basically, you're trying to enable the humans to speak to humans and AI augmenting their tasks in the background? How does this work? Because as things are moving, there's going to be a lot of interaction with AI chatbots or AI salesbots. But do people really like interacting with these bots?

Yeah, I think it depends, right? Because there's different use cases. If you think about what I've been explaining about the sales process, this is going from a disorganized, low-productivity sales process within a business to a super high-efficiency one. And what we're actually doing most of the time when we create AI automations is not changing things materially. There's not new systems and new processes and new tools for people to use, but we're actually just eradicating steps from their workflow. So as a salesperson, it's not the case that suddenly you have to learn this new thing. No, it's actually your time was saved when you have to understand if the lead was a spam bot or like an actual lead that you want to reply to, save the time drafting up the message, save the time following up, save the time booking in the meeting, save the time writing the proposal. All that happens is you just get the output wherever you want. If it's Gmail, if it's to your CRM put there for you, if it's to your WhatsApp, wherever. But from the salesperson's perspective, just the annoying boring bits have been removed. In that example, you're not even interacting with AI. It is just doing stuff in the background that only benefits you. Right. And then on your question on chatbots, I mean, I think what you gotta approach it about is it's everything is about user experience, right? Like why did Uber, what was the best, this is a Rory Sutherland story or quote, but the best thing that the London Underground tube did to improve customer satisfaction was saying when the next tube was coming. Right? Because people appreciate understanding and not having to wait. People just like user experience. And the key takeaway from that is, as with all tech development, and all businesses, the user experience and the user journey is above everything. And especially in this day and age, people have come to expect a seamless user journey, right? So for one of the companies that we're working with, we're working to make them a chatbot that their own employees can use. That, for example, is either on WhatsApp or Telegram, because again, usability, they're used to those, or Slack, they're used to those platforms. So it's not getting changed. It's just getting them to have a new chat in there. And they can literally say, hey, can you pull out the information from the CRM about XYZ and tell me the conversation that I had with Stacy from Millennial Masters last week, or whatever it is. And the chatbot, it's just a web of interconnected systems. So it can go into the CRM, pull out that information and display it for you without you ever having to have clicked off that tab, right? Or it could be something along the lines of, can you let me know about the latest UAE real estate regulation or UK real estate regulation? And again, you can just have this one kind of chatbot in a sense that is there for your employees to use, for them to understand what's going on in the business, update the systems, just have access to all of the systems and take action in the systems without them actually doing stuff. But again, that's probably slightly more advanced for a lot of companies, whereas the easiest things are just like the first way I said, what are you doing in the business, but slow, unproductive, time-consuming, and you do often, or maybe loads of errors occur. Now let's put in an AI automation that will do it for people, do it more productively and with less errors and cheaper. So that is usually where we start with most businesses.

Speaking about cost, you mentioned earlier how life in Dubai is expensive. But as any big city in the world, life would be expensive. You've lived in London as well. So you know that very well. But how else is life different in Dubai versus the UK? There's always, especially in the last couple of years, there's been all this talk about entrepreneurs fleeing to Dubai, about more opportunities being there, about being more business-friendly. Friendly? Is it radically that different? How have you found it now that you've been there almost 3 years?

I mean, I would say it's very different. For one, it's always sunny, and that's a huge benefit and something that can't be overlooked. And in terms of being business friendly, I mean, of course, Dubai is a lot more business friendly than the UK. In what way?

In what way?

Well, I think taxes in an obvious way. They're getting a lot of talent because of low taxes, and businesses have lower taxes here. And So that is definitely one thing. But for me, I think—

But you also don't have state help, do you? You don't have unemployment benefits if you find yourself out of your role or if your business fails.

Yeah. So one thing that you need is, and I mean, that's in a sense is quite, what's quite good about Dubai is that you actually need to have a visa to be here, right? So if you look at Dubai, they've got about over 90% of the population is not is an expat, right? They're not indigenous. And what this creates is an environment where essentially everybody is working because you're not allowed to be in the country if you're not. So of course there's no state help, but I guess the kind of mantra that they had is only people who are actively contributing to the economy will be able to stay here. And that's because, and I've seen a lot of people talk about this, Dubai is very much run like a business. And so they've come up with this policy, this strategy 30 years ago. They've stuck with it as the kind of North Star and they run it like a business. Everything is geared towards the Dubai economy and getting more businesses here, getting better talent here to work in those businesses, and being at the forefront of a lot of innovation that's going on within the world. For me personally, I think that the biggest benefit that I've had as an entrepreneur coming to Dubai is, is the people you meet. Now, I kind of break this down into two parts. I think Number one, the mindset and skill set that is normalized to create successful businesses is just so helpful. It's, it's everyone you meet, if you search for the right people in Dubai, because of course that you can find people who aren't interested in that and just want to go out drinking all the time. But if you put yourself in the right circles, like, can you do that? Yeah, I mean, that's, that's what half the people do.

Come on, bust some myths. Come on.

I would always say, no, I mean, there's a huge drinking culture in Dubai. Like the beach clubs are what most people come to holiday for here, right? And that's why I'd say the beach clubs and like, I would say roughly speaking, there's kind of two halves to Dubai. There are a lot of people who come here super ambitious and are looking to get further in their careers or looking to get further in their jobs and start businesses. There's a lot of people who come here purely just for the, like, lifestyle and the drinking every weekend and going out and having fun in the sun and whatever it is. But there is also a big mix of people who are probably kind of in the middle, like some people who are serious about it, but want to get the lifestyle benefits as well. But yeah, I think the biggest benefit for me is that mindset. Like, it's super easy to find the right people who, like Pete, who was on your podcast, for example, previously, who has multiple successful businesses and, and kind of has a life that he's orchestrated. You just find that so common. And it really makes it understand to you something which wasn't in the UK education system, or like my parents would never understand as accountants, which is but if you put in the hard work and have a plan, and obviously things in life can set you back, like you could get pregnant with a child or get really ill, or your parents could get ill. But if you're kind of fit and healthy on the most part, and you put in the work and you're ready to learn and surround yourself with the right people, you can do whatever really you want to do in life. It's just about realizing that it's possible, and it takes a plan and hard work to do to get But I think the final thing about the, just on the kind of differences in business is, in a lot of sense, I would describe the UK as quite cynical, a lot of the people, and I love the UK, I love my family there, I love my friends there. But I think as a mean average, people are a lot more cynical. And so what that means for an entrepreneur is if you go to people with an idea about something that's maybe a bit out there, or a bit ambitious, or something that hasn't been done before for whatever reason, and you start telling them about it, about it, they'll be like, oh no, mate, that sounds crap. Won't happen. Why are you even wasting your time there? But when you go to Dubai, I would very much— I mean, I wasn't there at the time, but I would very much liken it to how people describe kind of Ellis Island at the beginning of the 1900s. You kind of arrive here, and if you've got the right mindset, You can really make something. You can go after your dreams and be supported by people who are there to do the same thing, which is nice. And it feels like there's a huge amount of opportunity.

As a side note for that one and the reference to Ellis Island, I've watched recently the Brutalist film that might change your perspective on that and how that era was romanticized, but it's definitely an interesting, uh, reference.

Yeah.

Now, usually, as we taper off towards the end of our discussion, James, one of the things that you told me you were always looking for was freedom and designing your own life in such a way that you would be able to do what you like, but also have the freedom to do other things. And it sounds with Particle, besides the air automation and the type of business that you're running, you're on that path. Path. But my question is, what are the sacrifices you've had to make, or you have to make in order to have this type of life?

Well, I think the first thing to say is I'm not there yet. The business is just shy of $15K USD in its third month. And next month, we should do more than $20K. It should just keep growing, right? So by no means am I financially free yet. But I'm happy with that performance of the business within 3 months. And I want to keep pushing. And as soon as we've got testimonials and case studies, it will in terms of what I'm sacrificing, to me, nothing. Because I spoke to— I speak about this with people all the time. And I did a LinkedIn post on it the other day. I think the first thing anyone needs to do in life is get extremely clear on what their priorities are. For me, there's 3 things that I really care about at the moment. Okay, and I'm going to put kind of like seeing my close friends and my parents, my family to the side, because obviously I'm in Dubai, So I'm talking from this state of my life in Dubai where I spend most of my time or when I was in Bali spending most of my time. There's 3 things that I kind of care about, which is number 1, spending time with my partner, number 2, working, and number 3, exercising. And so once you understand what your priorities are in life aligned to your goals and what you want to achieve, you just structure your time for that. If people want to go for like a random pint for me to, with me to have a drink I'm just quite boring when I'm saying no, but that's because it's not in my kind of plan at the moment. And actually what I'm really interested in and excited by is exercising, getting fit and healthy, spending time with my girlfriend to have a long and long-lasting relationship, and working on businesses. And that means that as long as I'm tactical about how I arrange those three things, then I'm not really giving up anything. So for example, I work a lot. I probably average about 80 hours a week. But my kind of format is I work basically 6 AM till almost midnight on Mondays and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, maybe a little bit less, but still a lot. Thursdays and Fridays, I'll try and take off the evenings and spend them with my girlfriend. But Saturday morning, I will work and then spend the rest of the afternoon and evening off, usually with my girlfriend. And Sundays, I work, and right in the evening, we have some time together. And so actually, what this means is that I've got I've got 4 days where I spend quality time with, with just her. Or again, like, we go out with friends, but it's still with her. So it's never like— I know I very rarely go out just myself and like boys, which I'm fine with. Um, I had enough of doing that in my early 20s. So, um, and then the other thing is, of course, exercise was important to me. And so you find a way to marry those together. Myself and Romy, we both really like exercise, and so we get time to kind of work to work together because we're both entrepreneurs, but kind of working wherever we want. So we can work together during the day, we can go for a run together. And so I think it's just that if I'm able to balance the 3 things that I find, or not even balance, if I'm able to structure my life and my priorities around the 3 things that I actually care about, then I'm not really sacrificing anything. Because if you were going to say that working 80 hours a week or work— yes, some people are more successful who work less hours, But for me, that's kind of what it's taking at the moment. And so it's not a sacrifice, it just wasn't necessary to achieve my goals because I don't believe in shortcuts. I don't believe in raising stupid amounts of money for when you don't have product-market fit. I believe in putting in the work to actually make something happen, putting in so much work that it's essentially inevitable.

And just to wrap up, James, that those were some interesting insights in that you said you, you do a lot of reading. And you enjoy it.

Yeah.

What are the particular books that shaped how you think about businesses, about mindset, and about success that you would recommend to others?

Yeah, so I would say for any business owner, the first two books you should read, and they're short, are Alex Hormozi's $100 Million Offers and $100 Million Leads. I just think the way that he breaks down business and makes it super simple in terms of an actionable plan of what you need to start doing i.e., refine your offer for a clear customer, and then go and talk to them, those people. It just creates quite a nice roadmap to get your first few customers. For startups, i.e., tech startups, this is, and innovation-driven companies, I would say the one book that I think is very, very good, and this comes from me having read it, and then not listening to it, and then having to rebuild Startly so that it was actually in line with it, is Disciplined Entrepreneurship: The 24 Steps to a Successful Business, a successful startup. The reason I think that book is so good is because with an innovation-driven business, like a tech startup or a new— yeah, a tech startup or scale-up, something that is genuinely new, you are starting with purely hypothesis when you set out. You are starting with a load of different hypotheses on how you believe the world is and how you believe people are and how you believe they will be using your product. So, for example, with Startly, I thought that everyone in, in the UAE wants a tech role. And so if I make a platform that connects them to tech roles by showing candidates only preferences that are relevant to them, then the companies will get an extremely high output in terms of the candidates who are applying. But what actually happened was that because it was a job board, I got all the people who are the most desperate for jobs. Putting their preferences as absolutely anything so that they could apply to everything. And then the, the, the output was really, really bad. It was even worse than everything else. And then also people obviously weren't willing to pay for that. So I had to restructure the whole product. But this book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup, I think if you actually read them and follow those steps line by line, you will end up with saving yourself a world of time, headache, and heartache in building a successful tech startup. Because you'll take things in steps, you'll be extremely disciplined, and you'll be validating your hypothesis as you go along, rather than spending about a year like I did building a tech product that you realize isn't even fit for the market.

Cool. Well, I'll make sure that I include these books into the show notes for everybody to check out. Actually, Alex Hormozi has been brought up in conversation in the last 3 interviews I've done. So I'm going to have to check them out. Obviously I've seen his face around on YouTube and so social media. It's hard to escape him sometimes, but I'll definitely check them out. Thank you so much, James, for coming on Millennial Master and sharing your journey so far, and I can't wait to see what you do next with Particle Execution.

Thank you so much, Daniel. It was a real, real pleasure.

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