I've learned that over ten years, mostly the hard way. I've been in crypto since 2016, first with my own money, then making the creative for projects I believed in, and eventually building a crypto exchange from nothing to a $23M market cap, with no funding, before I exited. In that time I've watched entire narratives arrive, peak and get buried in less time than most companies take to approve a logo.

Ten years is a long time in any industry. In Web3 it's closer to seventy, and some mornings I feel every one of them.

The clock runs differently here

On a Monday the timeline is obsessed with one thing. By Wednesday there's a new chain everyone swears is the one, a new meme, and a thread explaining why Monday's thing was always a terrible idea. By Friday somebody's made a fortune, somebody else has lost one, and they're both posting about it.

I've had a front-row seat for a lot of it. I was in the room for the AntShares to NEO era, back when projects were raising millions on a white paper and a website, and was later VeChain's first European creative partner, involved in their UFC partnership campaign. When a scruffy gang of goblins took over the internet in 2022, during the worst bear market most of us had seen, I was right in the middle of the Goblintown moment. I was also a founder of Galactic Fight League, a combat sports NFT project with UFC legend Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson as its ambassador. It was featured in Sports Illustrated and Forbes, and Vulcan Forged and SkyBridge Capital acquired it.

Every one of those eras had its own language and its own heroes, and none of them sent a calendar invite before it ended.

Why even the fast agencies couldn't keep up

Here's the uncomfortable bit, and I can say it because I've run my own creative agency since 2016. Most agency processes are built for brand time. A brief, a moodboard, a first round, a second round, a call about the second round, legal, sign-off, production, and then a bit more sign-off for luck. For a lot of brands that's exactly right. I spent three months hand-building five coin worlds for The Royal Mint and I'd make the same call tomorrow.

Web3 runs on community time, and community time is measured in hours. The best Web3 agencies I've worked alongside were properly quick, quicker than anyone in traditional advertising would believe, and they still struggled. The thinking could happen overnight, but the making took weeks. A 3D character takes days to model, rig and light, and an animated film takes longer still. By the time it rendered, the joke it was built around had been told a thousand times by people with free tools and no reputation to lose.

So most people picked a side. Some went fast, posted whatever they could make by lunchtime, and the community smelled it a mile off. The rest went for quality and arrived, beautifully dressed and perfectly on time, at a party that had finished three days earlier.

The time I got it right, and the half I got wrong

When Pineapple launched in September 2024, I was finally on the other side of the table. There was no outside client and no sign-off chain, so the creative could move at the speed of the timeline.

Then there was the name. A pineapple, it turns out, is also a symbol associated with swinging. The exchange did swaps. You can see where this is going. The sensible move was a quiet rename before launch. Instead I leaned all the way in, with lore, characters and a launch film called It's Not What You Think, It's Better. It's one of the boldest decisions I've made in business and one of the most rewarding, because a brand that knows exactly who it is can take whatever the market throws at it and turn it into the next chapter.

That film helped secure a partnership with Binance Labs. The launch campaign cost about £45,000 and took Pineapple to a $7M market cap, and a bigger campaign later took it to $23M, still with no funding. It went on to partner with UFC Fight Pass, Cage Warriors and Polaris. The way the community got behind it still means more to me than any of the numbers.

Much of that lore and advertising was made with AI, while most of the industry was still arguing about whether it counted. The speed came from the tools. The soul came from having decided early, and firmly, what the thing was.

The half I got wrong I've written about properly in I was brilliant at half my job. The short version is that the marketing moved at the speed of the timeline and the foundations didn't. Web3 opens that gap faster than anywhere else I've worked, because speed is a gift to the story and a liability for everything underneath it unless someone's minding it. I exited in 2025 with wins I'll be proud of for the rest of my life, and lessons I paid full price for.

What AI changed

For most of my career, speed and craft pulled in opposite directions. AI is the first thing I've used that lets them pull the same way, and I don't say that lightly as somebody who once spent three months on a set of coins.

It changed the making. The days spent modelling, lighting, rendering and re-rendering have shrunk to hours. For Fake Brand Friday I invent a brand that doesn't exist and make its advert, just to see what the newest models can really do. My Pi Network pitch was a film instead of a deck. Priority Seat, my short about a teenager and a war veteran at a Welsh bus stop, took 731 images and 163 video generations and won Best Super Short Film at the Cannes World Film Festival, and the bit that won it was every generation I said no to.

What it hasn't changed is the bit that decides whether anyone cares. AI doesn't know your community. It can't tell an in-joke from an insult, and it has no idea that a crowd of goblins will tear a brand apart for sport and adore a piece of fan art made with love. It'll hand you a thousand options before your coffee's cooled, and most of them will look like everyone else's.

How I keep the soul in it at speed

People ask how I move this fast without the work going hollow. Most of the work happens before the moment arrives.

I build the world first: the lore, the characters, the look, the tone of voice and, where it makes sense, a model trained on the brand's own references, so anything generated later already looks and sounds like it belongs. When a trend breaks, I'm reaching into a world that already exists, and that's where the real speed comes from.

Before I make anything for a community, I spend time where it lives. A Web3 community can tell within a couple of posts whether you're one of them, and knowing how it speaks does more for the work than any render setting.

The piece of work that opened the most doors for me in this industry was unpaid fan art. Giving before taking still works in Web3, as long as you're quick about it.

The decisions stay human. AI makes the options, and I choose the one that's true to the brand, cut the detail that's only there to show off, and notice when something technically finished still isn't right.

If you run an agency, read this bit

I've sat on your side of the table for a decade, so this isn't a lecture. Your people are good, and the process they work in was built for a world that moves at a different speed, while your Web3 clients need both speeds at once.

That's the gap I work in now. I can sit alongside your team and turn a narrative into a finished film, campaign or world while it's still the conversation, with the craft that gets a heritage brand's design team nodding and the fluency that gets a Web3 community on side. Your team keeps the relationship and the strategy, and gains a gear it didn't have before.

The market will probably have moved on again by the time you finish reading this. The trick is being ready when it matters, and still meaning something when you get there.

If that sounds useful, you know where to find me.

A room made for hunting

I wanted to do things a little differently this time. Instead of one character in one scene, I'd build a scene packed with Easter eggs from other projects, then let their communities go to work finding them. I already knew there were a few big wins to be had there, with Goblintown and their audience for a start.

My favourite Rugrats character was Chuckie, of course. So it would be Chuckie's bedroom, filled with Web3 goodies.

Building Chuckie

The first thing I needed to do was create Chuckie in 3D.

The final scene

The final scene features BAYC, Punks, Doodles, RTFKT, Moonbirds, Cool Cats, Chromie Squiggle, Goblintown, Azuki and Beatboyz.

What happened

The result was an insane amount of social engagement, my highest to date. It was incredible seeing members of all those different NFT communities come together, tagging the projects they'd spotted in the scene.

Recur Forever and Nickelodeon retweeted and liked it, Goblintown quote retweeted it along with plenty of other projects, and I picked up lots of new followers, likes and comments. Putting Beatboyz in the scene also won me more NFT and Web3 projects, including a number of Cardano based ones, and opened the door to future collabs with Beatboyz.

They were driving Atari X, the Web3 wing of the company, and wanted to work closely with me on a short looping video, something that said Atari was moving into the world of Web3.

Starting with Centipede

I'd be lying if I said this wasn't a dream job. I'm a keen gamer and I played on Ataris back in the day, so this was my chance to put my own spin on a classic.

I took Centipede as the base. The scene would be a computer lab desk covered in old Atari games, stationery and bits of kit, all of it in greyscale. Then a centipede would crawl in from the corner of the screen and walk across the desk, bringing everything it touched to life. A nod to Atari's rebirth in Web3.

Built for people who know

The assets were made to be ultra accurate. I knew a passionate, hardcore audience would be casting their eyes over every console and cartridge, so nothing on that desk could be roughly right.

The final scene

In the final scene I added a few things Atari fans would pick up on, the grid lines, the asteroids and the mushrooms popping up from the original Centipede game. The centipede weaves between them and brings the scene to life as it goes.

To understand why I did it, you have to remember where everyone's head was at.

The bear market and the goblins

This was the summer of 2022. The market had fallen off a cliff, the mood online was grim, and most studios in my world were quietly battening down the hatches. Then, out of the gloom, a scruffy little collection of goblins appeared and started making an absurd amount of noise.

Goblintown was unlike anything else at the time. No roadmap, no promises, no polished founder threads about the future of finance. Just chaos, in-jokes, a made-up language, and a community that turned all of it into something genuinely magnetic. I watched it climb and had a strong feeling it wasn't going to fizzle out. There was real craft under the mess, and I wanted in on it.

I saw an opening. If I could make something that landed with that crowd, I could pull a bit of their energy back towards TH3M and put my animation and storytelling in front of exactly the kind of audience I wanted. That last part mattered. I'd spent years building the studio's craft on proper brands, and this was a chance to aim it somewhere that would actually get talked about. On paper it was simple. In practice, it was the hard bit.

You cannot market at these people

The thing about a community like Goblintown is that they can smell a brand trying to sell to them from a mile off, and they will happily tear it to pieces for sport. This was a notoriously difficult audience to win over, and the usual playbook, the polished ad, the "fellow kids" tone, the forced meme, would have got me laughed out of the room and rightly so.

So I didn't market at them. I did my homework instead.

I spent a lot of time simply living in it. Lurking in their Twitter spaces, learning the rhythm of how the brand actually spoke, working out what made the community tick rather than guessing at it. At that point Goblintown were kicking off their McGoblinburger story, a side property that let holders mint their own goblin burgers, and the hype around it was real. Everyone was scrambling to secure theirs. They even had social accounts role-playing as McGoblinburger staff, fully in character. Once I understood that, I knew exactly what I was going to make.

"Goblintown NFT became a viral phenomenon largely through its bizarre Twitter strategy. The account regularly posts nonsensical goblin gibberish, bizarre tweets, and hosts massive spaces where speakers do nothing but make goblin noises."

Building Urki

I picked one of the McGoblinburger staff, a goblin called Urki, and set about bringing him into 3D. Then I dropped him behind the counter mid-shift, serving up McGoblinburgers in all his glory, and built a whole grimy little world around him. I hid a few TH3M easter eggs in the scene for anyone paying close attention, and paired the whole thing with some deeply wacky sound design.

The goal was never to make it look expensive. It was to make it feel like it belonged, like it had crawled out of the same swamp as everything else they loved, only rendered with a bit more care than they were used to seeing. Watching it come together, I had that itchy feeling you get when something might actually work, sitting right next to the quiet dread that it might not.

Then I posted it, tagged the Goblintown crew, and I sat there braced for tumbleweed.

It went off

It didn't take long. I put it out with a simple line, "Art inspires art", a nod to the fact this was homage rather than a pitch, and things lit up almost straight away.

The McGoblinburger and Urki accounts started replying in full goblin-speak. Then the main Goblintown account quote-tweeted it with "oooo dis ees so amesin We luv dis so mush WoW!!", which if you know that world is about as good as it gets. From there the whole community piled in, thousands of comments and retweets, people asking whether these were early metaverse-ready models, the inbox filling up with strangers who suddenly wanted to talk to me.

That first post did a shade over 64,000 impressions on its own. I checked my phone the morning after and had to read the number twice, because for a studio nobody in that space had heard of the day before, it made no sense at all.

But the impressions weren't really the point. What that one piece of fan art actually did was open doors I'd have struggled to knock on any other way. In a short space of time I got invited by Goblintown to create custom 3D models, I was approached by Atari, I won six new Web3 creative projects, and I picked up a steady stream of new followers and messages that carried on well after the noise died down.

And one of those messages was from Steve Aoki's team.

Act two: a goblin, a mascot, and a cake with pee cannons

After I got on a call with Steve and his management, we landed on something suitably ridiculous. I'd make a funny goblin film for his single "P*ss on the Dancefloor", handed out as an NFT to everyone who came through NFT NYC.

The brief, once I'd finished writing it, read like a fever dream. I'd build a 3D goblin version of Steve Aoki himself, alongside his Character X mascot from his Dreamcatcher collection, and then, because the Goblintown community had a well-documented obsession with p*ss that I felt honour-bound to serve, I'd give them a giant goblin cake fitted with working pee cannons.

I want to be clear that I pitched all of this out loud, with straight faces, to a Grammy-nominated artist's team. There's a very specific feeling that comes with calmly explaining how the pee cannons on a cake would actually work to a room of serious music-industry people, one half of you braced for someone to quietly call security. Instead they nodded along, got more into it than I was, and I realised I'd stumbled onto the one audience where the more unhinged the idea, the better it landed.

First came Goblin Steve, long-haired, one wandering eye, "BUY HIGH" tattooed across his chest, which is the kind of detail that only works if you've done the reading. Then Character X. Then the cake, the scene, the whole absurd set piece.

What it did

When it went out, it moved faster than the first one. Steve Aoki, sitting on 8.2 million followers, not only shared it but followed me off the back of it, which is still one of my favourite sentences to write. Goblintown reposted it to their community with "Purveyors of P*ss assemble, your king is here." One of the tweets cleared 84,000 impressions.

Underneath the noise, it brought in four more Web3 clients and my first proper music-industry client, and it quietly sparked a side project of my own that I'm not quite ready to talk about yet.

How it was made

An insight into my creative process.

What I actually took from it

It would be easy to write this off as a lucky moment in a strange corner of the internet, and part of me is tempted to. But the more I sit with it, the more I think the lesson holds up anywhere.

I didn't win that community by talking at them, or by dropping a budget on ads, or by explaining why they should care about me. I won them by caring about the thing they cared about, enough to make something for it, for free, expecting nothing back. I did the homework, I respected the craft that was already there, and I matched their weirdness instead of sanding it down.

That's the whole game, really. The audience you most want is usually the one that's hardest to fake your way into. So don't fake it. Learn what they love, and then go and make the best possible version of it. Even if that version happens to involve a cake with pee cannons.

A few years ago I sat at a screen at two in the morning, moving a single blade of grass a fraction of a millimetre to the left. Not a field of grass. One blade. On a coin most people would glance at for half a second before it slid back into their pocket.

That was one of a handful of projects I did for The Royal Mint, and it's the one that keeps coming back to me.

They'd come to me with their 2019 coin set, Monumental Stories in Miniature, and the brief was the sort that sounds like a gift right up until you sit down to actually do it. Bring the coins to life. Five of them, Sherlock Holmes, Samuel Pepys, Wedgwood, D-Day and Queen Victoria, and my job was to take each flat little disc and turn it into a world with depth and weather and drama in it.

So that's what I did, in 3D, one obsessive detail at a time. From the rivets on a D-Day landing craft, to plague rats no bigger than a pinhead pouring over the edge of Samuel Pepys' coin, to the cogs and gears that powered Queen Victoria's age all turning and connected, to the bloody trail a fleeing murderer left curling across the Sherlock Holmes coin as if the crime had only just happened.

And it had to be right. Not roughly right. Right. For the D-Day coin I worked alongside the Imperial War Museum, who checked my work against the real thing. For Wedgwood, Wedgwood themselves signed off the detail. Every vehicle, every texture, picked over by people who would spot a mistake in a heartbeat. There's a specific kind of pressure that comes with that, knowing the experts are leaning over your shoulder, and it's exactly the pressure that has you nudging a blade of grass at two in the morning.

Where the obsession comes from

People ask me sometimes where that fussiness comes from. I think it's the trade. I left school at seventeen to lay bricks with my dad, and one of the first things a building site teaches you is that the details you assume nobody notices are usually the ones holding the whole thing up. A wall is only as good as the parts you can't see once it's finished. I never really shook that. It just moved from bricks to pixels.

The bit everyone's arguing about

All of this is on my mind lately because of where we've ended up with AI.

Scroll your feed and a good chunk of what you're looking at was made in seconds. A lot of it looks the part, and I want to be clear, I'm not one of the people shaking a fist at it. I use AI every single day. It's brilliant for getting from a blank page to a hundred rough ideas in no time, so you can bin ninety-nine and chase the one that's actually worth it. It's made me faster and it's taken a load of the donkey work off the table. I'm glad it's here.

The real skill with AI was never in using it. Pretty much everyone can do that now. The skill is knowing exactly where it earns its place in a piece of work and where to keep it out of the room entirely. I reach for it most days and I'd not want to give it back. But there's a whole part of my process it never gets near.

The decisions that actually matter stay with me. The ones about what a world should feel like, which detail earns its place and which is just showing off, whether a thing has truly landed or whether it's technically finished and still somehow missing something you can't name. Those aren't tasks you hand off to anything. They carry something I've never once watched come out of a machine, and believe me, I've looked. Call it taste, call it instinct, call it soul. Whatever the word is, there's no substitute for it, and there's no prompt for it either.

Here's the clearest example I've got. AI doesn't sweat the blade of grass. It can't. It predicts and it recombines and it hands you something that looks right, instantly. What it won't do is sit with a brief for weeks quietly obsessing over how a fleeing murderer's footprints should fall across a surface the size of a thumbnail, knowing full well nobody will ever consciously clock it, and doing it anyway because it makes the whole world feel real. That isn't a prompt. That's a person caring about something they were never asked to care about. And you can feel the difference, even when you can't put your finger on why.

Alan Watts had a line I've always loved. The menu is not the meal. Right now, AI is extraordinary at producing the menu. Beautiful, fast, convincing menus. But the meal, the thing with warmth and intent and a human fingerprint pressed into it, still has to be made by someone who gives a damn.

What the obsessiveness actually achieved

Now, you could read all that and decide it's a nice story about a Welsh lad fussing over grass. So let me tell you what the fussing actually did.

Those five little worlds became the centre of a full national campaign, online and off. The mailer alone went out to more than 48,000 households and came back with a return of 1,100%. There were full-page spreads in Britain at War and Military Monthly. The work went on show at the World Money Fair, the biggest coin fair in Europe, in front of more than two million people and over 330 mints from around the world. More than half a million impressions online. And David Park, the Royal Mint's own Head of Design, said I'd built worlds with more action and drama than they had ever imagined.

All of it off the back of caring too much about details nobody asked for. That's not a footnote to the result. That was the result.

AI is going to keep getting better, and I'm going to keep using it, hard. But I don't believe it will ever lie awake over a single blade of grass. That part is still ours, the people who actually make the things. And as the feeds keep filling with work that's technically flawless and somehow instantly forgettable, I've started to think that's the thing worth protecting. Not perfection. Care.

If you want to see the coins, the worlds and the making of the whole thing, the full case study is over on th3m.com/royal-mint. Go and have a look at the rats. I'm quietly very proud of the rats.

It worked. It grew into something worth millions, talked about all over the world, with a community that crackled with energy. One of the proudest moments of my life was seeing the logo on my boys' sports kits and hearing them point and say, "that's my Daddy's company." I'll carry that forever.

I eventually exited. Some of that was life. I lost my mum, and my family went through real health struggles, and when that happens, the noise goes quiet, fast. You start asking what actually matters. But the honest version is that life wasn't the only reason. I'd made mistakes too, the kind you only see clearly with a bit of distance, and I want to share them, because I think a lot of founders are quietly making the same ones right now.

What I got right

I played to my strengths. I'm a creative. Brand, marketing, story, the wild and slightly unhinged ideas that make people stop scrolling. That's my home, and it's where this thing came alive. While everyone else was running the same tired playbook, we were doing things that had personality, and personality is the one thing in this game that money cannot buy.

There is little better than building something real alongside people you love and trust. Almost everyone I brought in was a friend of old, people I knew were exceptional at what they did and knew had my back. For a long time it was everything I'd hoped it would be.

When I was in my lane, surrounded by those people, I was good. The growth proved it. I don't think you should ever apologise for being great at the thing you're great at, and I won't.

What nearly broke me

Here's the part that's harder to write.

I loved my lane so much that I barely left it. I poured almost everything into the brand and the marketing, the parts that came naturally, and I quietly avoided the parts that didn't. Product. Operations. The unglamorous machinery underneath that has to work for any of the shiny stuff to mean anything.

I told myself I was playing to my strengths. What I was actually doing was avoiding the parts that scared me. The marketing got louder while the foundations got shakier, and the gap between those two things is where the real trouble was building.

The culture shifted too. The thing I'd set out to build, the values I wanted at the centre of it all, slowly drifted into something I didn't recognise. I can't put that on anyone else, because culture is the founder's job and I'd taken my eye off it. I was busy in the lane I loved while the heart of the thing moved somewhere I hadn't chosen. My team have spoken about it since, openly, and they're right to. I felt it too. I just felt it too late.

And then there was the part nobody warns you about. Building something with your friends, the wins feel bigger, because you're sharing them with the people who matter most. But when things get hard, that same closeness becomes the heaviest thing you carry. It stops being headcount on a spreadsheet. It's your mates. Their mortgages. Their families. Their belief in you. Holding that when the ground starts to move is a pressure I don't think you can understand until you've lived it.

By the time I properly looked up, a lot had drifted. Not because anyone was the villain, but because the founder, me, had been watching one half of the company and trusting the other half to take care of itself. It doesn't. It never does.

What I'd tell you now

Mind your weak lane harder than your strong one. The part of the business you love will always get your attention. It's the part you avoid that decides whether you make it.

Culture is a job, not a vibe. It does not look after itself while you do the fun stuff. It drifts the moment you stop steering, and by the time you feel it, it's already moved. I know, because mine did.

And do not lose yourself in any of it. No valuation, no community, no amount of being talked about is worth becoming someone you don't recognise, or missing the people and moments in your real life that you never get back. I learned that one from both directions at once, and I wouldn't wish that timing on anyone.

Where I am now

I run TH3M.com, a creative agency I've been building since 2016. I work with founders every week who are exactly where I was. Brilliant at one part of their company, privately terrified of another, watching their brand and their culture pull in directions they didn't choose.

I'm not writing this to look wise. I made every one of these mistakes with my own name and my own money on the line. But I also had wins I'll be proud of for the rest of my life, and the two are not separate stories. They're the same one. The wins came from knowing my strengths. The wreckage came from hiding inside them.

If you're a founder and any of this feels a little too familiar, that's not a weakness. That's just the job showing you its hard edge.

Mind the whole thing. Not just the half you love.

Years later I was diagnosed with ADHD. And everything suddenly made sense. I don't learn through text. Never did. I download information through audio, through visuals, through conversations. Had one teacher known that when I was eleven, everything would have been different. I wouldn't have spent years thinking something was wrong with me.

ADHD has given me some incredible things. The hyperfocus, the creative thinking, the ability to see patterns other people miss. It has driven my entire career and I wouldn't change it. But I'd be lying if I said it was always a gift. There are days when it's an achilles heel. The overwhelm, the executive dysfunction, the inability to start the thing you know you need to do. The world isn't set up for brains like ours and sometimes that grinds you down no matter how far you've come. The truth is it's both. A superpower and a struggle, sometimes in the same hour. And I figured all of that out on my own because the system never showed me. I had to find my path despite it, not because of it.

I keep hearing the same story. Entrepreneurs, founders, creatives. A staggering number of them are neurodivergent and almost all of them will tell you the same thing. School didn't see them. Work didn't get them. They made it anyway, but they carry the scars of being measured by a system that was never built for the way their brain works.

Someone told me about a kid recently. Absolutely gifted at computer science. Genuinely brilliant. He was up for a scholarship and got turned down because he couldn't catch a bus on his own due to his autism. Someone had to fight to get that overturned. That kid now works with the Ministry of Defence. We nearly lost him entirely. Because the system measured a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

One in seven people in the UK is neurodivergent. That is not a niche. That is your colleague, your child, your partner. Maybe you. And most of them have spent their whole lives being pushed through systems that were never designed for them. Not because anyone meant harm. Teachers care deeply. Employers want to do the right thing. But they don't have the tools to understand how someone's brain actually works. We have been trying to force round pegs into square holes for generations and then blaming the pegs when they don't fit.

I have spent the last year quietly building something that I believe can change that.

I am not ready to share the name yet. But I will tell you what it does, because I think some of you need to hear it.

It starts by showing you who you actually are. Not what is wrong with you. What is extraordinary about you. Your strengths, your superpowers, how your brain works at its best. In minutes, not months of waiting for an assessment that may never come. It creates something that belongs to you forever. Not a school's database. Not an employer's file. Yours. A living picture of who you are that travels with you from school to your first job to the rest of your life, and that the people around you can finally see and understand.

It gives parents a way to support their children without guessing. It gives teachers a clear picture of how each child learns without adding to the mountain they are already buried under. It gives employers the insight to stop losing brilliant people they never understood. And it shows young people careers they didn't know existed, matched to who they actually are. Not a generic list. Real paths for real minds. Because no kid should ever be laughed at for saying what they want to be.

I have some incredible people behind this. NHS pilots already agreed before it even launches. Government conversations happening. Support from names that would genuinely surprise you. But the people I care about most aren't the big names. They are the parent who has been fighting for their child for years and is exhausted. The teenager who thinks something is wrong with them because school doesn't make sense. The adult who got diagnosed at 35 and suddenly understood their whole life. The employer who keeps losing brilliant people because they couldn't see what they had.

You are who I built this for.

I am opening a small private beta very soon. If any of this hit home, whether you are neurodivergent yourself, a parent, a teacher, an employer, or you just know someone who deserves to be understood better, drop a comment or send me a message. I want you to be one of the first to experience it.

Because I am done watching brilliant minds get overlooked. And I think it is about time someone built something that actually sees them.

There's a strong argument that AI is eroding the value of creative services. These days anyone with a few subscriptions and an internet connection can churn out what looks like world-class content, right? Not exactly.

AI is an incredible technological leap, and when used well, it can be a serious advantage. But it's also a blunt tool. What started as an exciting creative edge for many agencies and founders is now quickly becoming a double-edged sword. Everywhere you look, feeds are filled with the same visuals, recycled buzzwords, and oddly familiar tone. What once looked like progress now feels like everyone's speaking through the same filter.

Even established brands that spent years developing distinct voices are starting to sound like they came from the same prompt. What I once thought might destroy our industry is actually turning into our quietest salesman. As more people blend into the noise, those who stay authentic and human stand out effortlessly.

I'm not anti-AI. Far from it. I use it every day across concepting, writing, design, and production. It's powerful, efficient, and when guided properly, it's an incredible creative tool. But that's exactly the point. It's a tool, not a replacement. AI follows trends and patterns. It predicts. It doesn't imagine. It can replicate tone, but it doesn't feel. As Alan Watts once said, "The menu is not the meal."

If you're not careful, you can lose the very thing that made your brand unique in the first place. So it's worth asking yourself: are we still authentic? Are we creating from a place of truth or just chasing the algorithm? Is what we're putting out there actually us, or just what we think the world wants to see?

You can still spot the difference between real creative work and something that's been generated to fill a gap. It's in the detail, the warmth, and the intention. The human touch still shines through. But the gap is closing fast. Will it soon become impossible to tell what's real from what's generated? Honestly, that's anyone's guess, but one thing for sure is that the brands and creatives that survive that shift will be the ones that know exactly who they are and what they bring to the table.

The trick isn't avoiding AI. It's learning to control it. Let it amplify your ideas, not replace them. Let it enhance your workflow, not define it. Because in a world full of generic, shiny sameness, authenticity will always feel fresh.

I blend strategy, storytelling, and technology to help brands stay original and alive. Whether it's through creative driven content, brand systems, 3D, UI/UX, Development, motion or AI, everything I make begins with intent and ends with meaning.

If your brand is starting to sound like everyone else, maybe it's time we talk.

A few months in, I realised something that every builder's kid learns quickly: labouring is f***ing hard. The kind of hard that hits your bones. Five a.m. starts. Icy Welsh mornings. Hands so cold they barely grip the shovel. Peeing in buckets in the back of the van because the site didn't have toilets. Digging trenches until your back screamed. Loading skip after skip after skip. It was relentless. But truthfully, I loved it.

I loved the physical challenge, the sense of progress, the small wins that nobody else would ever see. My Dad and I would dig opposite sides of a trench and race to the middle shouting, "First one there buys lunch." He always won, of course. It's hard to beat a man who used to win 24-hour mountain bike endurance races. But that wasn't the point. It was about grit, rhythm, and pride in the work.

Some of my favourite memories were at the end of those brutal days, jumping back into the van with the heaters on full blast, a bag of greasy chips steaming between us, calling my Mother on the way home to say, "Put the bath on please." The graft, the cold, the laughter, it shaped me in ways no classroom ever could. It turned a shy, skinny kid into someone who could take a hit, stay standing, and smile through it.

But the biggest lesson didn't come from the work. It came from watching my Dad.

He had this rare ability to talk to anyone, posh, poor, angry, grateful, didn't matter. Everyone loved him. He'd often get sent in to smooth over jobs where another worker had upset a customer. We'd arrive to a frosty reception, but within days, they'd be laughing together like old mates. He did it through honesty, humour, and being exceptional at what he did. Watching him taught me how to connect with people, how to listen, and how to adapt.

That's where I learned to be what I now call a social chameleon. Working with my Dad taught me how to walk onto any site, into any room, and find common ground with anyone. It's a skill that's carried me through every stage of my creative career.

After work, I'd get home around five, grab something to eat, and jump straight into freelancing. I'd often work until the early hours, learning design, experimenting, and taking on free gigs just to get my foot in the door. I targeted companies I admired, the ones who were out of reach for someone with no portfolio, and I'd pitch with humility and hustle. It worked. Those unpaid projects led to retainers, referrals, and real opportunities.

Founders respect hunger. They recognise it. If you're transparent, eager to learn, and not afraid to show your flaws, people will open doors for you. I never hid the fact that I was a bricklayer by day, it became part of my story. Honesty builds connection, and vulnerability builds trust.

My first proper paid gig came from a family we'd built a conservatory for near Brecon. The husband had an invention, a wall-mounted clothes airer made from hammered metal and wood slats. He needed a logo and website. I had no idea how to build a website, but I said yes anyway.

"£200," I blurted out when he asked for a price. He looked at me like I'd missed a zero, but I didn't care, I just wanted the chance. He needed it by Friday. It was Monday. "No problem," I said, smiling, while my brain screamed, "What the hell have you just done?"

That week, I didn't sleep. Seventy-two hours straight, learning Dreamweaver through clunky online tutorials, teaching myself on the fly. I hallucinated by the end of it, but I finished the site, logo, e-commerce, everything. It worked. It wasn't perfect, but it worked.

That job taught me more than any creative course ever could. I learned the value of time, the cost of inexperience, and the importance of following through no matter what. It showed me that passion doesn't come from what's easy, it comes from the things that nearly break you but don't.

Looking back, I wouldn't trade those days for anything. The mud, the frost, the aching hands, the mistakes, they built the foundation for everything that came next.

That's where I learned what real work ethic is. That's where I found my grit. And that's where I realised the world doesn't reward the loudest or the smartest, it rewards the ones who just keep showing up.

"Boy, You'll never be anything in life if you skip University"

Those words have echoed in my head for more than two decades.

I was seventeen when my design technology teacher, Mr Griffiths, said them to me. I had just told him I was leaving school to work with my dad as a bricklayer. I had a plan to save enough money to buy a workstation and the software I needed to start my design journey. He didn't see it that way. He saw a young lad throwing away his future because it didn't fit the traditional route.

What he didn't realise was that his words didn't crush me. They ignited something. Every time things got tough, every time I questioned myself, I would hear his voice. It became the spark that kept me moving forward.

Bricklaying taught me more about life than any classroom ever could. Cold, wet 5 a.m. starts, long days, and harder nights. I would come home exhausted and go straight into freelancing until the early hours. For a long time it was unpaid work, done just to build a portfolio. It taught me discipline, patience, and how to keep showing up when nobody was watching.

It also taught me people. On-site one week with down-to-earth grafters, the next on a multi-million-pound build. I learned how to adapt, how to read people, and when to turn the banter on or off. My dad was brilliant at that. He could talk to anyone, and I soaked it up without realising it. Those lessons shaped everything I am today.

Eventually, I built enough clients to go full-time. I left the trade with calloused hands, a stronger mind, and the kind of confidence you only get from building things that last.

Fast forward to today, I run my own agency, TH3M. I have worked with brands I once only dreamed about: Bentley, The Royal Mint, Sony, Under Armour, Coinbase, VeChain, and so many incredible startups full of fearless founders. I have been lucky enough to travel the world, raise two amazing children, marry the love of my life, and know my parents are proud of the man I have become.

I remember the moment it all hit me. The goals I set back then were complete. Debt-free, family secure, business thriving. For the first time in years, I sat still and thought of Mr Griffiths. How those words stayed with me all this time. How they drove me, even though they were never meant to. Back then, I took them personally. I thought he didn't believe in me. But really, I think he just couldn't see a version of success that didn't fit inside a box.

So one day, I went back to my old school to thank him. Because what he gave me wasn't an insult. It was fuel. And I will always be grateful for it.

I have had setbacks, failures, and moments that nearly broke me. But every one of them built me. From laying bricks to building brands, I have spent my life creating things that stand the test of time.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is this: never let someone else's version of your future become your reality. Because the truth is, nobody gets to decide what you can become. Only you do.

And if one teacher's words could light a fire in a kid from Maesteg, maybe your spark is waiting for the right moment too.

From bricks to brands, I learned the foundation never changes. You build it yourself.