2025 –
We turn founders into industry authorities. Me, Mustafa and Aaquib.
“Draper is quietly becoming indispensable. That's the best compliment I can give.”
Ibrahim KhanCur8 Capital$5M+ leads generated
“Traced enterprise contracts directly to Draper, plus top talent reaching out to Sahl AI.”
Ammar KhanSahl AI$1.3M contract closed
“Something is working. You guys really tickled the algorithm there.”
Daniel FraaiYLookup, EQT Ventures400K+ impressions
If you want this run for you, book a call. First post goes live in seven days.
What I say about it now, and what I was actually posting at the time.
For the last two years of the restaurant I was quietly advising Series A founders on their content on the side. Nobody knew. I was taking calls with YC founders between burger orders.
I've been lying to you. Every time you saw me at Simply Smashed, there was something I wasn't telling you. For the last two years while I was running the restaurant, I was also advising Series A founders on their content strategy. Part time, on the side, mostly in secret. I was on calls with YC…
I got more out of running the restaurant than out of anything else I have built. Then I wanted to build the thing that scaled it.
I built the highest rated burger joint in London. 4.9 stars, 3000+ reviews. Those two years taught me more about building than any MBA ever could. The thing about the food industry is nothing is theoretical. From day one you're making decisions with real money on razor thin margins. One bad…
I was building an AI company between burger orders and honestly I miss it. I keep looking at this photo and it's kinda crazy. Simply Smashed was on its second location. Peruvian Street Kitchen was on its first. And somewhere in between both of those I decided this was also where I'd start…
The thesis I keep repeating, to the point that Mustafa has told me to stop. We ran a burger joint to the top of London on zero paid marketing by documenting the mess of building it. The documenting was the product.
Content is product. Product is content. I've said it maybe 200 times now. Most founders nod and then go do the opposite anyway. We ran Simply Smashed with zero paid marketing. Literally zero. We were just documenting the messiness of building a burger joint from the back of a flower shop and…
Most AI content is slop, and everyone can feel it while scrolling even if they cannot name why. The point of AI here is to sound more like yourself, not less.
Let's address the elephant in the room - most AI content is garbage. Here’s why: LLMs copying from other LLM generated articles. Repurposed slop from Reddit dressed up as insights. You can feel it when you're scrolling. It all sounds the same. But here's what I've learned about content that…
I've been using AI wrong this whole time. For months, I tried getting it to create viral food photos for our burger joint. It kept spitting out fake-looking garbage with weird textures and plastic-looking elements. Then I realised something that changed everything. Instead of asking AI to…
Mustafa brought a deep work system over from his old agency. I thought it was rigid. It doubled our focus time without adding an hour to the week and it cost nothing.
We 2x'd our deep work without adding a single hour to the week. it's the best thing we've done for Draper and it cost us literally nothing. Mustafa brought this from his old agency. When he first suggested it I remember thinking it was a bit rigid but we tried it anyway and honestly it changed…
On the division of labour, there is not much to add.
I think we need to talk about this because it's gotten quite bad. I'm the leg. Mustafa's the arm. Together we're one person on Zoom. Every time I screen share my Chrome crashes. And every time Mustafa turns his camera on his laptop just dies. So we've developed this system where we both cover for…
You can open Claude right now and start building in a field you know nothing about. Twice now, and I would do it again.
I keep entering domains the slow way in the fastest era in history. Twice now and I'd do it again. You can go to Claude right now and start building in a domain you have zero expertise in. And it might work tbh, in fact, we're in the most competitive era of software in history because of…
I got 6 A*s and 5 As at GCSE. Then I got BBDD at A-level. Nobody's mentioned the GCSEs since. But I still hear about the A-levels. At 16 I was coasting and I didn't even know it. I thought being smart was a personality trait and not something you actually had to maintain. And A-levels are the…
A hacker posted crypto slop from Brian Chesky's account and nobody thought he'd been hacked. They thought he'd started using ChatGPT. We're so deep in the AI content era that a founder posting something that sounds a bit off just reads as normal now. Every post gets filtered through "did they…
I live tweeted an entire demo day last month without typing a single word. Last year I had ChatGPT open in a tab, a volunteer next to me snapping photos, and I was trying to live tweet Deen Developers demo day between pitches while half-listening to the next one. It was a mess but it kind of…
The founders with the most interesting things to say are the ones who never have time to post. Everyone knows volume matters. That's not controversial. Most founders fail at content because they're not posting enough and they know it. AI has made the volume problem basically solvable. You can…
What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI? The coolest art social experiment I've seen in a while. Someone posted a painting online and told people it was AI-generated. Asked them what made it inferior to the original. "Looks like sh*t." "Not as vibrant as Monet's typical…
We raised £26,000 for charity through an app where every like was worth 1p. We made exactly £0 in revenue. I was 18. First year of my degree apprenticeship at Goldman Sachs. I met the co-founder in the basement prayer room. We'd just finished praying and I asked him how he was doing, just being…