Like so many of my friends, I have caught the Claude bug!.

I’m a non-technical founder—no coding background. I studied computer science, but I sucked at developing. So no, I am not a developer!

Last weekend, I built three websites. I’m running a coworking space, launching a members bar, building a SaaS product, and writing a newsletter that now has 16,000 readers in 1year.

Here’s exactly what I am using.

Wispr Flow

Start here. It lets me speak, instead of type, accurately everywhere. Every prompt, every message, every doc. I use it all day, every day. If you’re still typing everything, you’re already behind before the AI even gets involved.

Atlas Browser + ChatGPT Max Top tier

Atlas is my main browser — it’s built around ChatGPT and runs underneath my entire day. It can submit my HMRC tax returns while I am working on something else. Email: I can’t figure out how to word it. Something I need to think through fast. It’s always there.

ChatGPT, powered by Deepresearch, powers the research behind my Brixton newsletter BCC — which I started a year ago with AI and now has 16,000 readers. ChatGPT surfaces what matters, what’s worth writing about, and what the community needs to know.

90% of my working context lives here. I’m not moving it. What’s crazy is I have typed 100,000+ words in ChatGPT since I started.

Brave Browser

For anything security-first, I switch to Brave. It has its own built-in AI and is my default whenever privacy matters—two browsers, two distinct jobs.

Claude Max .

Everyone is going crazy about Claude this week, especially as it’s in the news. The US government decided not to use Claude, but all my developer friends, everybody who’s building anything, is using Claude. Claude will blow your mind this weekend. Here’s what I’ve done. This is where I build things.

This weekend, I built three websites that would have cost me 30k + a few years ago. Have a look and give me feedback.

• impactbrixton.com — my Brixton coworking space

• bccmembersbar.com — private members bar, I am launching soon

• thisandthat. chat — DoBox, the SaaS I’m building

Three brands. Three sites. One weekend. No coding background.

Claude is my project studio. I come here with the intention to make something. It’s also the reason I’m awake at 2am — because when something is working, stopping feels wrong.

Grok Free

When I need the truth, I go to Grok. No filter, no hedging. It’s my verification layer. I dont do politics with AI, so I dont have to like Elon to use this :-). At least I don’t give my money to Elon :-). Yet :-)

Gemini Through Google Workspace

Already in my Impact Brixton Google Workspace subscription, so it costs me nothing extra. First stop for image generation — blog visuals, quick concepts, anything visual that needs to happen fast.

Midjourney Free for now

When the image actually matters — cinematic, atmospheric, brand-level — Midjourney is still the standard. I use it selectively. Nothing else comes close when quality is the point. But I’ve not used it for a month, so maybe it’s time to ditch Midjourney.

Read AI

Joins every meeting I’m in. Records every conversation on my phone. Sends me a summary and action list afterwards. Nothing falls through the cracks. It’s like having a chief of staff who never misses a word.

DoBox Free(for now) — I am part of the team building it

DoBox pulls commitments from across all your communications — messages, meetings, conversations — and turns them into trackable actions. I built it to solve my own problem. I use it every day inside this exact stack.

Using your own product is the fastest way to know if it’s real. thisandthat.chat

The total: ~£520/month

Three websites in a weekend. AI is helping me build and manage all my businesses.

I’m not losing sleep because I’m stressed. I’m losing sleep because I can’t stop building. There’s a difference. One is anxiety. The other is momentum.

The tools exist. The gap between people who use them and those who don’t is widening every single week. That’s not hype. That’s what I’m watching in real time.

Get in it. And maybe set an alarm for when to stop.

I know you are wondering? Did Gerald actually write this ?

— Gerald

Running Impact Brixton, building BCC, and shipping DoBox.

I’ve been fooling myself.

Not because GTD is wrong — but because the world it was built for doesn’t exist anymore.

This morning I woke up to 46 WhatsApps, 9 Telegrams, 200 Discord, 40 LinkedIn messages, 160 emails across seven accounts… and 28 Slack messages.

Why do we pretend this is normal?

Everyone’s juggling multiple projects, roles, and communities. I run a coworking space, build SaaS products, and make rum. But this isn’t really about me — it’s about how we all work now. Every single project comes with its own channel. There is no single place where everything lands. There never will be.

Most of what we call “productivity” today is just dealing with messages. Reply, skim, archive, snooze, move stuff around. The numbers go down, and it feels like progress.

It isn’t. It’s input management.

The real work is always hiding inside the messages:

“Can you send that?” “Let’s meet tomorrow.” “Can you approve this?”

Those aren’t messages. They’re commitments.

A friend asked me to meet on WhatsApp three weeks ago. I said yes. Forgot to calendar it. Missed it.

Maybe I’m careless — but a meeting agreed in chat shouldn’t rely on memory to become a calendar entry. The system is broken.

Commitments are buried everywhere. Slack. Email. LinkedIn DMs. Telegram. One “quick message” that quietly becomes a real obligation.

So GTD’s first step — capture — becomes a full-time job. You end up retyping your life from one app into another: copying Slack into a task app, forwarding emails to yourself, screenshotting threads, leaving messages unread as fake reminders.

Modern productivity isn’t doing work. It’s moving work around.

Here’s what’s actually broken, simply:

Most tools show you what’s new. What you actually need is what you need to do.

The real question isn’t “what’s unread.” It’s: what do I owe the world right now — and who’s waiting on me?

That’s why inbox zero is a fantasy. Even if you clear one inbox, the commitments are still hiding in five others.

We need a new layer. Not another inbox. Not another task app. An action layer — one that sits above all your channels and surfaces the commitments buried inside them.

That’s exactly what I’m working on with DoBox at this+that.

One place. Every channel. Just a clear view: here’s what you need to do.

Agents will eventually do more of this automatically. But I don’t live in the future. I live in this morning, and this morning, I need important things to stop getting dropped just because they showed up in the wrong app.

Where do your commitments get stuck most — and have you found anything that actually helps?

Gerald

That was always wrong. But now? In the age of AI? It might be startup-failing advice.

I see it constantly. Brilliant founders, heads down, shipping features into the void. Iterating on UI no one has seen. Debating architecture for a product with two users. Building, building, building — convinced that the right product, polished enough, will eventually find its people.

It won’t.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about startups: building a good product is hard. Finding people who love it is harder. And yet, founders split their time as if the first problem is the only one worth solving.

It isn’t.

My framework is simple, and I’ll defend it anywhere: put 80% of your energy into finding the people who will love what you’re building. Put 20% into the build.

Not forever. Just at the start — when nothing is proven and every week of silence is a week of drift.

Why? Because the moment you find even 100 people who genuinely love what you’re building, the product roadmap writes itself. Your customers tell you what to build. Your energy goes where it should. Everything sharpens. Before that moment? You’re guessing in the dark and calling it conviction.

Now add AI to this.

We are entering an era in which building is becoming cheaper. You can spin up a website in an hour. Full applications in a day. In a few years — maybe sooner — the most technically complex software in the world will be within reach of a single focused person with the right tools.

If that’s true, then the build is no longer the moat.

The code is not the asset. The customer relationship is. The trust is. The resonance is.

The smartest start-ups I’ve watched recently aren’t marketing their product — they’re marketing the problem. They’re building an audience of people who feel the pain deeply before a single line of code is shown to them. They’re releasing to tiny cohorts. They’re creating believers, not just users. And they’re doing it with a team that’s heavy on storytellers, brand thinkers, and community builders — not just engineers.

That is the shift.

The new moat isn’t your product. It’s that people trust you to solve the problem.

And trust isn’t built by shipping more features. It’s built by showing up, naming the problem clearly, and making people feel like you know how to solve it before asking them to buy anything.

So if you’re a founder right now — especially one riding the wave of AI-powered building — stop and ask yourself honestly:

How much of my week was spent building? And how much was spent finding people who would actually care?

Build it, and they will come is long dead. Make them come. Then build it.

Adoption hasn’t stopped — it’s compounding

Crypto.com estimates global crypto ownership rose to about 741 million people in 2025, up from 659 million the year before. Bitcoin ownership alone sits at roughly 365 million: the user base keeps expanding. On-chain, Bitcoin addresses with nonzero balances are in the tens of millions. That’s not what a “dead” system looks like.

Stablecoins are having the WhatsApp moment for money

Chris Dixon recently described stablecoins as the “WhatsApp moment” for money — it used to cost my mum hundreds of pounds to talk to her mum in Ghana, and it currently takes a long time and costs a lot of money to move money around the world: stablecoins moved over $12 trillion last year. Moving money across borders is still expensive and slow, with multiple middlemen(Banks, Visa, Mastercard…) taking a cut. Stablecoins are proving there’s a cheaper, faster and fairer way — and adoption tends to follow cost and convenience.

Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero when people won’t stop buying it

The “it could go to zero” argument treats Bitcoin like a stock that can simply be abandoned. But Bitcoin isn’t just a ticker symbol. It’s a tool — a permissionless, globally transferable value you can custody yourself.

And then there’s something even simpler: belief with a bid.

I would keep buying Bitcoin if it fell to $1. Not because I’m blind to risk, but because I value what it represents. And I’m far from alone. When millions treat something as long-term savings technology, you don’t get zero. You get volatility. You get cycles. You get headlines declaring death every few years.

And underneath all of it, you get growth.

So yes — I’m buying.

Not because it’s guaranteed. Not because it can’t fall further. But because adoption continues to rise, infrastructure keeps improving, and the long-term thesis hasn’t changed.

This isn’t investment advice. It’s simply how I’m positioning myself.

Crypto isn’t dead. It’s maturing.

Through these experiences, I've observed how entrepreneurs often struggle with premature attachment to their initial idea, leading to difficulties in objectively validating if anyone wants it, acquiring those crucial first 10–20 customers, or pivoting quickly when necessary.

I'm excited to share that I've been helping an AI startup called this+that. I initially helped them build an MVP and secure initial funding, and now we have a MVP to show.

In my role at this+that, I'm focused on validating key assumptions around a productivity challenge we believe affects virtually every organisation: unplanned work.

Imagine an AI that ensures you never miss a task! It scans project conversations across email, Slack, meetings, and other platforms to come, identifying both issues and unplanned tasks, and connects them to your project management tool. From Trello, Jira, monday.com, Asana and many more.

Sign up while it’s free to trial it here.

The Hidden Challenge of Unplanned Work

Most organisations have become proficient at managing and optimising planned work in business productivity. Tools like ClickUp, Monday.com, Asana, Trello, and Jira excel in helping teams break down structured projects into clear tasks, timelines, and accountability checkpoints. Yet, despite these tools' sophistication, is there a critical productivity leak affecting nearly every organisation? —unplanned work?

We categorised unplanned work into two distinct types. The first type includes tasks that haven't been captured and integrated into project management tools. These are tasks that teams are aware of but fail to document properly—perhaps forgotten, not updated, or buried in emails and communications that don't translate into clear, actionable items. This type of unplanned work is estimated to represent 30-40% of overall unplanned tasks.

The second type, estimated at roughly 50% ? is the more disruptive "silent disruptor." Bottlenecks in the company. These are critical, unforeseen issues that emerge spontaneously through communication channels such as Slack, meetings, and emails. This category encompasses urgent regulatory changes, unexpected customer requirements, emergent market conditions, or internal conflicts—complex problems that don't neatly fit into predefined task lists and typically remain hidden until they cause significant disruptions or project failures.

How Businesses Currently Address (or Don't Address) Unplanned Work

Most productivity platforms are designed for planned work, assuming clear task identification from the outset. Hoop recently raised an astonishing $5 million to address part of this by scanning for tasks that inadvertently get missed in standard project management software. Yet, Hoop's approach is primarily transactional, identifying isolated tasks rather than contextual, communication-driven issues.

On the other hand, enterprise search platforms like Glean offer powerful solutions to retrieve organisational information when a user actively queries it. However, their reactive, search-based approach assumes awareness of an issue's existence—something unplanned work frequently lacks.

Hot Topics: Where Communication Meets Action

A deeper, more disruptive aspect of unplanned work exists: critical issues and decisions hidden within everyday communication. These issues we are calling "hot topics" are not merely overlooked tasks—they represent vital insights, challenges, or opportunities that require collective attention and swift resolution. This is where this+ that AI is validating. Our platform uses AI-driven technology to proactively surface these "hot topics" by continuously scanning your organisation's communications, helping you identify and prioritise critical issues before they escalate or derail your projects. Rather than passively awaiting queries, this proactively alerts managers and leaders about these significant hidden matters, empowering teams to tackle challenges head-on and enhance organisational agility.

Looking for Early Adopters and Researchers

We believe deeply in collaboration and co-creation. We understand that the best solutions are built when real-world users provide active feedback, shaping the tool based on genuine organisational needs. We're seeking early adopters, beta testers, and researchers passionate about productivity, organisational efficiency, and communication effectiveness.

We are inviting leaders, project managers, product leaders, and sales executives who face daily inundation from communications and wish to unlock insights buried in their emails and messaging platforms. We want to learn about your current challenges, existing solutions, and ideal outcomes when addressing unplanned work.

If this problem resonates with you, feel free to email me, chat or explore it further here.

Gerald

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