61 · Eating McKinsey

Growth agencies are specialised marketing firms focused on measurable, compounding revenue growth across the entire customer funnel, from acquisition to retention. Consulting rates run £100 to £500 an hour for experienced professionals — mostly project fees or monthly retainers, which is wilder. It makes no sense to me that consultants earn so much for giving advice with no skin in the game. We want skin in the game and actual responsibility. The goal is a specialised SaaS accessible to both SMBs and large enterprises — there's no reason big firms should pay absurd sums to someone who has neither built a business nor carried the consequences of decisions. The progression: freelancer building websites; then SMMA plus growth agency doing marketing across all platforms; then consulting; eventually AI SaaS for consulting — not a tool for consultants but a replacement for consultants, crashing BCG, McKinsey, KPMG, Bain, Deloitte. When you get an internship inside one, you'll see quickly — it's cool and all, but what is this? Long-term: London office, Dubai, New York, Seoul — locations all over the world.

It all plays together. SaaS subscriptions, one-time purchases, digital courses folded into consulting. I've never seen digital courses offered to businesses: a six-week bootcamp for owners — course materials, videos, tutorials, practicals, reading assignments — upscaling them alongside the business, with gamified learning, 24/7 data inputs, variables to measure and improve, a callable chatbot for guidance. P.S. Just like Howard — kill the ego. There is no hierarchy in building something of scale; don't be scared to go back to door-to-door sales in rich districts for UHNW customer acquisition.

My main line in business: I provide infinite value first and take crumbs from it — my main goal is that you thrive and grow. I know you have fear about missing out on AI; you're seeing normal people making $10k a month with it. I have mastered nearly every AI model out there, and I'm almost certain I can grow your revenue and online presence by 500% in six months. Resist the urge to talk numbers early — deliver value first.

Strategy note: one of the approaches is data input, integration, output. Identify the public information the biggest consulting firms release, the corporate news, everything in finance — we're still in the brute-force phase of "train with as much data as possible," but I want to add a contractionary layer: training intensely on data that matters, allowing both interpolation and extrapolation predicated on data that matters. The counterargument: the data that matters is usually outliers, and outliers have diminishing returns plus the risk of polluting the means of the rest. And the rebuttal goes deeper into what LLMs actually are. Right now, before APIs, LLMs are pattern recognition via input — and being selective about the data sources you feed your stack is key.

Zach Yadegari's raw guide — the 19-year-old whose calorie app did $5.7M in a month. The basics: a business is simply a product and a way to sell it. Profitability: success is determined by the LTV to CAC ratio — lifetime value must exceed acquisition cost plus cost of goods. Fancy way of saying make more than you spend; LTV is revenue-correlated, CAC is marketing. Delegation: the CEO's role shifts from doing tasks to interviewing people and maintaining culture — make the business work for you, not the other way around; for me, that means finding the AI agents to automate and deploying them strategically. Scaling: focus on what matters — traffic, conversion rate, retention and LTV. Once a channel works, double down rather than experimenting with secondary initiatives; in early phases, spray and pray works. Speed: the number one core value — never delay decisions; keep a monarchy style of decision-making to avoid bureaucratic lag, which is trivially achieved running a billion-dollar online SaaS solo. There's something about momentum that is vital. Testing: A/B test decisions rather than trusting intuition or bias — MVP one versus MVP two; what works in the market works, reverse from that; don't run the Monte Carlos in your head when you can put both versions out and watch. Idea generation: ideas are in the air; the real skill is recognising a good one and validating it — you don't need a deep emotional connection to the product, just an understanding of the market gap. Resilience: business is inherently uncertain — lawsuits, platform bans, copycats — welcome the punches. Don't overcomplicate: building a business is simple in theory; the day-to-day unpredictability is the real work. Take every "general rule" with a grain of salt — every company's path differs. Start. Fail fast and cheap. Maximise the number of feedback loops you live through.

If this is all that an 18-year-old running a $40M business has to say, then theory is not the moat — reps are. It's about radically shortening the gap between idea and execution, asking that question as often as possible, engrossing the negative feedback, iterating. Do what works. Win by domination, not competition — competition is for losers.