Draper

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 founders and A16z portfolio companies, founders building companies that will be household names in five years. And I was taking those calls from my restaurant. There's this memory I keep coming back to. I'm on a call with a founder talking positioning, narrative strategy, how to become the voice of their space. Elite player. The kind of person you'd expect to be advising from some nice office somewhere. And I'm standing next to our Simply Smashed punching machine. I had to be on site that day. Couldn't leave. So I just found a corner, put my noise-cancelling headphones on, and took the call anyway. My resume said: Restaurant Owner. My calendar said: Strategy Call with a16z Portfolio Company. They had no idea where I was. Most people didn't know I was doing this at all. Here's how that even happened. When Simply Smashed took off, people started asking how we did it. Highest rated burger joint in London with no marketing budget. Pure organic storytelling. My brother saw it before I did. He introduced me to someone at a content strategy agency - the kind that works with YC founders and a16z portfolio companies. They were looking for someone. My brother knew this was exactly what I'd been doing without realising it. That someone was Mustafa Khan, ACA. Who would end up becoming my co-founder. I said yes immediately. Everything I'd learned at Simply Smashed was from first principles. Pure instinct. I wanted to see what this looked like at scale with the smartest founders in the world. That became my arena. I started advising founders. Got them over 25M+ views across X and LinkedIn Then I got promoted to Head of Training. Responsible for training writers and creative directors on how to do what I'd been doing on gut feel alone. And it fit like a glove. Looking back, the thread was always there. Every project I've ever worked on grew through storytelling. I just didn't have words for what I was doing. It was instinct compounding over years. Last year I left the agency with Mustafa. We're building Draper. AI agents plus human taste for founder storytelling. Same instinct that's been compounding this whole time. Same playbook that took a burger joint to number one. Now we're helping other founders do it for their companies. we've been cooking like crazy btw. can't wait to share more.

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 weekend and you feel it in your bank account by Friday, not next quarter. → We got burgled → I dealt with literal fires → One supplier issue and the whole menu changes overnight → I had staff not show up while I was two hours away with no way to get back → You learn to read people very quickly because you genuinely don't have time not to Simply Smashed started from a kitchen we were already using and maybe £100 on a new grill. That was the entire business plan. When every pound counts you develop this instinct for what's worth spending on and what isn't. That instinct doesn't go away when you move into tech. It just gets applied differently. Every decision I make building Draper now, whether it's hiring, spending, prioritising, I can trace back to something I learned in that kitchen. That's not from a textbook, it's from a Friday night that went sideways. And honestly I'd take someone who's survived a Friday night service with half their staff missing over someone who's only ever seen pressure in a case study. It's the most expensive MBA that I never paid for tbh

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 building an AI content company on Replit. I had my laptop wedged into whatever corner I could find, squinting at code I barely understood while delivery drivers walked in and out. I'd be mid-prompt and someone would shout that orders were backing up so I'd get stuck in packing rice boxes and saucing them up. Then come back to my laptop trying to remember what I was even building. If the rush got too much the laptop just got closed and that was that. I'd been training writers at a ghostwriting agency and I could see so clearly that the whole industry was about to flip. Like I could literally feel it. And I had this thing in my head going if I don't start building this right now, from this kitchen, on this dying laptop, someone else is going to do it and I'll be watching from behind a fryer. It wasn't a plan btw. I didn't sit down and map anything out. Two food brands running, a kitchen that's too small for any of this, and my brain just going "yeah but what if we also built a tech company from here." I physically couldn't not do it. That was a couple of months ago. Draper is now past ramen profitable and growing every month. Peruvian Street Kitchen is opening its second physical location soon iA. Everything is better now. Better setup, better tools, actual laptops that work. But I keep coming back to this photo because something about building from that kitchen felt different and I can't fully explain why. P.S: I'm a firm believer that being in the trenches means delaying your trim, you have to earn it as a reward.

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 posting it, and that was doing the job a £5k/month ad budget would've done. We became the highest-rated burger spot in London and never boosted a single post. Then MiniDeed happened. The product was good and the impact was real and nobody knew it existed. The thing about having no distribution is it doesn't matter how good your product is. Nobody sees it. Completely opposite outcomes that somehow taught me the exact same thing. The founders who get this are building content into the product from day one. The GTM isn't a department you bolt on in month six, it's the whole thing. If you just raised and you're trying to decide whether to invest in content or put it off, the thing you're actually deferring is distribution.

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 actually works after working with YC and A16z founders. When Simply Smashed took off, it wasn't because we posted more than anyone else. It was because we told our story. In our voice. People could feel the difference. That's why they kept showing up. The founders I worked with who won - same thing. Their story, told properly, compounding over time. The thing is, most founders don't have time for this. They're building. You can't cook with one hand on a phone trying to document yourself. You need both hands in the work. That's what me and Mustafa kept talking about. Builders should be focused on building. AI should be documenting you cooking. That's what we're building with Draper. Right now the human taste is us. We work with founders closely to get their voice right. But we're codifying what we've learned into systems. The vision is the human taste becomes you. Your stories. Your voice. The way you actually talk. Not repurposed slop. But actual authentic human stories that's told at scale. Right now we're deep in LinkedIn. But the vision is bigger. Content engines for entire teams, not just founders. Content marketing is shifting on how companies attract customers, investors and talent (will share more on this soon). We're building the infrastructure to make it scalable. we've been heads down cooking too. finally got some time to pull out the phone. lots to come, more soon.

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 replace my work, I started using it as my editing coach. I upload my real burger photos to ChatGPT and say: "Help me make this pop." It gives me specific tips: adjust the shadows under the patty, boost the saturation on the lettuce, sharpen the bacon edges. My first result? A Wagyu Bacon Burger that looked like actual food porn instead of AI slop. But here's where it gets interesting. This "AI as coach" philosophy is now how we're starting to operate across everything. We feed our 2850+ Google reviews (4.9 stars) into AI systems that analyses patterns invisible to human eyes. Then it coaches our front-of-house team with surgical precision. Not replacing our people. Making them superhuman at reading customer needs. The insight that changed everything: AI isn't good at creating. It's incredible at teaching. It can't make a perfect burger photo, but it can teach you to see light and composition like a pro photographer. It can't serve customers, but it can turn your team into service ninjas by analysing thousands of data points you'd never notice. We're not just London's highest-rated burger joint anymore. We're staying there because we learned the difference between automation and elevation.

AI has scraped nearly the entire internet. It still can't touch the one thing that matters, and it's sat between your ears. Here's what keeps me up, and I run an AI content startup so this should be the last thing I'd say. Every tool works the same way. It scrapes what's already online, except half of online is already AI now. Slop in, slop out, blander every pass. A machine writing for machines to scrape. Dead internet, live, and my own industry flooring it. You can copy the point but not the vector. You can copy where someone landed. You can't copy the mind that keeps getting them there. That's the whole reason Draper doesn't just scrape the internet. It scrapes you. The calls, the thing you've said out loud fifty times and never thought to write down. So what goes back out is actually new. Not more slop on the pile, it's you, amplified.

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 how we work completely. → Monday and Wednesday: all client calls, stacked back to back → Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: just building That's it. (revolutionary stuff I know) The thing is most founders think they have a time problem. They don't. They have a transition problem. That Gen Z meme where someone books two hours before a meeting to stress about it and one hour after to recover is funny because it's basically true. The actual work takes 15 minutes but the mental commute between tasks eats the rest of your day. A 15 minute task that felt impossible at 3pm just flows on a quiet Tuesday morning. So we stopped trying to manage it and just stacked everything. six months in and honestly I don't think we could go back.

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 each other. He shares screen, I keep my camera on, and we both talk through our sections. Between us we've got one working laptop and we've just accepted it as normal operations at this point. We were on a call the other day and I froze on screen mid-sentence. Mustafa just goes "yeah this happens whenever he shares his screen, his laptop crashes and my camera crashes. So like it's an arm and a leg." Then casually explained our whole system to the person on the call like he was describing how we make coffee in the morning. The guy just started laughing. We're an AI content startup btw. We talk about technology all day. And we can't run Google Meet on one machine without it catching fire. (the irony is not lost on us) One of the founders we work with found out and went full big brother on us. "Get the Pro. Don't get the Air. The Air doesn't even have a fan." Didn't even wait for a response. Just told us what to order like he'd been through it himself and wasn't letting us make the same mistake. Fair enough honestly. We ordered two M4 Pros that same day. They arrive in about a month because of the chip shortage. Prices have gone up too. So we're paying more to wait longer to be able to do our jobs properly. Cool. Everyone thinks early stage startups look like the pitch deck. Clean. Intentional. Two co-founders who've got it sorted. Behind the scenes your hardware is failing and your processes are held together by habits you invented out of desperation. And somehow they still say "that was a great call" at the end. oh btw - we should be fully operational humans by April. probably.

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 that. So why would you go into a domain you haven't earned? Go into the one where you've put the most reps in. That's your edge now. We grew Simply Smashed to the highest rated burger in London organically and that whole experience pulled me into writing for founders at agencies. I did that for a year, which led to Draper. With Vibenasheeds same thing. Grew a YouTube channel first, figured out what hit and what didn't, then started building. It reminds me of something Abdel once said to me... AI gets you 60% of the way there, it's on you to fill the gap. That 60% is everything that's ever been publicly scraped. The other 40% doesn't exist in any dataset. You learn it in the arena. P.S: If you want a break from the arena Kotor (it's like a less busy lake como) is one of the most underrated places in Europe, definitely recommend :) .