I'm building two digital businesses, growing an audience to 200K+ with 140M+ impressions, and partnering with founders and creators - generating millions in revenue.

How I got here:

2015: Graduated with no connections, no network and no one who looked like me in the rooms I wanted to be in.

2017: Joined BT (£20bn company) as a graduate. One of 200 selected from 26,000 applicants.

2019: Started posting on LinkedIn. Built Gradvance on the side. Began placing graduates at Google, TikTok, Amazon and more.

2023: Moved into BT's innovation team. Launched first in-house digital marketing agency. Scaled start-ups and SaaS businesses with Meta Ads and Google Ads (£100K+/month paid media spend).

2024: Became Chair of BT's Ethnic Diversity Network. Won multiple awards for DE&I and leadership across a business of 100,000+ people. 

2025: Left corporate to go all in. Co-founded Launchpad Creators and scaled fast.

And on the 1st January 2026, I welcomed my first-born son into the world. A very special time.

What I've built:

Gradvance is a UK leading graduate career academy. 450+ placements, £12.4M+ in salary outcomes. (6 figures)

Launchpad Creators is a growth marketing partner for founders and creators. Full funnels, paid ads, creative execution and everything in between. Partners include some of the world's leading founders and creators. (7 figures) 

🚀 Interested in partnering with us? Visit launchpadcreators.com

If you want to learn more or you're building something of your own, I'm documenting the full journey in my newsletter - growing a personal brand, running paid ads without burning cash, operating and scaling digital businesses. The lessons, failures, frameworks and insights. 

And if you're not ready for any of that yet, welcome anyway. I share actionable tips on entrepreneurship, marketing, leadership, careers and personal growth 🌱

📩 Subscribe to my newsletter: dan-mian.com

📩 For sponsorships or brand partnerships: dan@dan-mian.com

Dan Mian

Employers look for “the perfect candidate.”

Flawless CV.
Top university.
Years of industry experience.

But this is short-sighted.
Incredible talent is overlooked.

Some of the best performers I’ve ever met didn’t tick every box.

But they showed:

→ Hunger
→ Growth mindset
→ Coachability
→ Curiosity
→ Genuine drive to get better

You can teach skills.
But you can’t teach attitude.

Here’s what great employers do differently:

1️⃣ Hire for mindset
↳ Ambition beats a perfect CV every time.

2️⃣ Look beyond industry experience
↳ New ideas and perspectives are valuable

3️⃣ Invest in development
↳ Great training can nurture top talent. 

4️⃣ Encourage failure early
↳ Growth happens when failure is encouraged.

5️⃣ Build trust fast
↳ Give people ownership and autonomy.

Perfection is a myth.
Hire for potential too.

♻️ Repost this if you agree
👋 Follow Dan Mian for more on careers + leadership

Founder of Launchpad Creators & Gradvance | Building digital businesses | Marketing partner to founders who want to scale | 2x LinkedIn Top Voice | Follow for posts on business, marketing, leadership & personal growth

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Most people don’t fail because they lack talent. 

They just stop too early.

I’ve seen people quit when: 

– They get rejected
– Their effort isn’t recognised
– The honeymoon period wears off
– Business had a bad month (list goes on)

Social media will have you believe that everyone is an overnight success, and it will look easy. 

But the truth is, growth isn’t easy. 
It isn’t glamorous, or super exciting.

Most of the time:

It’s boring
It’s repetitive 
It’s discipline

It’s doing the same small things, over and over again.

The gym when you don’t feel like it.
The applications after another rejection.
The content when engagement is low.
The business work when sales are quiet.

Overtime, those small actions compound.
Ultimately, it’s a game of endurance.

So to be successful and achieve your goals: 

1. concentrate on your own journey
2. and just keep showing up

♻️ Repost if this resonates

Young people are being exploited.

I’m part of the first generation the government ran this experiment on.

University fees went from £3,000 to £9,000 in 2012 (Plan 2).

I’ve worked consistently since graduating, progressed my career, started 2 businesses, and made monthly student loan payments. 

And I owe significantly more now than I did when I left university…

This system is designed to grow balances through interest while telling young people it’s “manageable”.

In 2024–25 alone, graduates repaid £4.8bn.
And £15.2bn of interest was added to balances.

That’s not “education policy". 
That’s profit extracted from grads at scale.

And now the government wants to freeze the Plan 2 repayment threshold at £29,385 until 2030.

So more people in low-mid paying jobs get pulled into re-payments (tax for life).

And it’s even worse for new graduates today (Plan 5)

- Plan 2 repayment threshold is £29,385
- Plan 5 repayment threshold is £25,000

- Plan 2 is written off after 30 years 
- Plan 5 is written off after 40 years 

It’s ridiculous. It's exploitation.

Here’s why the system is damaging to UK economy:

1️⃣ Broken Promises - Profiting From Young People
 ↳ This was sold as “invest in your future and you’ll be better off”. But they lied - increasing interest, changing / freezing threshold. Lower-mid income graduates will suffer most.

2️⃣ Cost-Of-Living Not Considered
 ↳ Rent, bills, food all cost more. Wages haven’t kept up. Freezing the threshold means graduates pay more in real terms at exactly the worst time.

3️⃣It Kills Life Milestones, Ambition & Mobility
 ↳ Saving for a deposit, taking career risks, moving for better jobs, starting a business — all so much harder when a chunk of income is permanently siphoned off and the balance is growing.

4️⃣ It Widens Inequality
 ↳ If your parents can help, you’re fine. If they can’t, you’re screwed. They’re piling more debt on a young person who is already struggling to afford life.

5️⃣ The Degree Doesn’t Guarantee Opportunity Anymore
 ↳ Job market is brutal - entry-level hiring is down, and a degree is less valuable than it used to be, yet the price (and interest) keeps rising.

The UK student loan system is not only unfair — it’s immoral.

Policies have been set to make entire generations suffer.

With youth unemployment the highest in a decade. 

And the median home in England (£290,000) costing 7.7x median full-time earnings (£37,600).

Seriously... 

What kind of future are we building for?
How do we expect the UK economy to thrive?
How are young people meant to build wealth and prosperity?

If this resonate with you please repost ♻️ to raise awareness
And comment below with your thoughts ⬇️

Helping non-tech businesses build software products in 8-12 weeks | DM me your app ideas | Owner - Ionio |

Hi, I'm Rohan! I run Ionio — a strategic AI consultancy for Retail & Ecom SaaS. We help mid-market platforms ($5M-100M ARR) build AI features that reduce churn, justify premium pricing, and turn their product into something merchants can't live without.

Over the past 5 years, we built 40+ products and helped founders go from zero to seven figures multiple times. Same playbook, over and over: take an idea, ship it fast, make it work, scale it.

After doing that tens of times, we wanted to take everything we learned and bring that energy to companies at the next stage. That's how we ended up focused on mid-market Retail & Ecom SaaS.

I'm genuinely passionate about this space. Generative AI lets us do something that was never possible before: personalize every single customer interaction. Not segments. Not cohorts. Actual one-on-one conversations at scale. Retail and ecom is where that has the biggest impact.

I've been working in AI since 2016 — back when that meant computer vision, not ChatGPT. Smart cameras, facial recognition, number plate recognition. That foundation matters when you're building production systems that actually need to work.

Previously: From 18 to 20, Sr. Software Engineer at SmartCow (Deep Tech AI company in Malta). At 17, Python work for a Mumbai startup, who are YET to pay me. At 15, building websites and apps for family friends in Java. It's been over a decade.

I started Ionio as a college junior, from my parent's bedroom, while hiring someone to do my assignments & a chauffeur to take me to college. Now it's a little less grunge than that.

In another life: rapper, musician, and cinematographer. Now I just build AI for retail... :(

What our clients say:

"Working with Ionio felt like having an extension of my own team — professionals who genuinely cared about delivering results, not just collecting a check."
— Stefan Georgi, Founder, 9-figure ecom founder

"Fastest I've ever launched a polished product. From wireframes to +1000 paying users in <8 weeks."
— Brad Milne, CTO, SupplierHQ

"Ionio has the character to navigate challenges and the technical depth to turn our 'AI-first' vision into reality."
— Sallyann Della Casa, CEO, Gleac

Read 35+ case studies on our site.

I post about: AI strategy for retail, technical deep dives, and behind-the-scenes of building Ionio.

If you're leading product, engineering, or strategy at a Retail & Ecom SaaS company, or a founder in any space — DM me, I always reply. If you're in Mumbai, I'll buy you a coffee.

Rohan Sawant

Every week I get on a call with a CEO who spent a weekend on Lovable and now thinks his engineering team is lying about timelines

It always goes the same way. They find Lovable, Emergent, bolt.new or Replit Agent, mess around for 2 days and suddenly they have something that looks like a real product.

They screenshot it, show the engineering team on Monday and go “I did this in two days why the fuck are you telling me 5 months”

And honestly? The CEO is right to be pissed

Not about the Lovable prototype being production ready, it’s not. But about the speed. 

Any engineering team in 2026 still operating at pre-AI timelines is just doing something wrong. 

If they’re not shipping at least 3x faster than they were 2 years ago you need to have a hard conversation with your developers

The leading players in every category are already building at this speed. 

The problem is both sides are delusional. The CEO thinks the Lovable thing is the product. The engineering team thinks 5 months is still a reasonable timeline. Both are wrong

We show up to the second call with a working prototype before the contract is even signed. Then we throw it away. 

Its only job was getting everyone aligned in 3 days instead of 6 weeks of arguing about button placement

Then we rebuild it properly. Production grade. In 6-8 weeks and not 5 months

If that sounds fast it’s because it is. And if your team can’t do it that’s the conversation you actually need to be having

Nobody in B2B is competing on this one thing - “taste”

I’ve been looking at companies that have raised 50, 70, 100 million dollars and their landing pages feel like templates, their content is educational but forgettable and their product demos could belong to any of the hundred other tools in their category.

Then you look at the brands they’re trying to sell to, luxury D2C, premium ecommerce, companies that obsess over every pixel on their product page and the SaaS vendor pitching them can’t even get their own site to feel intentional.

What most founders miss is that when anyone can ship features in a weekend and the tech gap is shrinking by the month. 

A great product gets you in the room, but taste is what closes the deal.

When everyone is using the same models to write code, the same tools to ship faster and the same frameworks to build products, every app starts to look and feel like every other app. 

The UI feels generated, the experience feels generic and nothing has a point of view.

Taste is what defines your pricing, gets you into the premium segment of customers and increases your margins when everyone else is competing on features and discounts.

Nobody in B2B SaaS is competing on this. Everyone is racing to ship more AI features faster and the company that slows down enough to get the look and feel right will win deals they have no business winning.

PS: Pinak F. is on the 6th iteration of the UI just to get this right. That's the work nobody sees but everyone notices.

"bae pls go to sleep you are not on linkedin anymore, it's 3am on saturday"
.
"Last week I got on a call with a SaaS CEO. Retail space. <$5M ARR. Sideways growth.

He told me they'd been planning an AI feature since December. Two months in, they JUST had wireframes and a Figma prototype. Bunch of screens that looked pretty in a presentation. Fake demos on the landing page.

His exact words: "We're probably ~5 months out from shipping something."

5 MONTHS. GPT-4.5 was 5-6 months ago. The entire landscape shifts in that window.

"This is not even 2 months of work," I told him.

2 days later, we took the call transcript and showed up to the next meeting with a clickable Lovable prototype of the same feature. The call after that, we'd started fleshing out actual React components — 20% of functionality done.

Here's how: Pinak F. sketched rough screens in Excalidraw — maybe 15 minutes — then recorded an audio walkthrough of what each screen should do. 

That audio got fed into Claude to generate component-level prompts. Those prompts went into Antigravity IDE, which generated the full UI. Then Cursor Claude polished everything into clean, production-ready React.

Total time from "here's what I want" to clickable prototype: half a day.

His designers spent weeks on wireframes that could've been a 5-minute sketch. His product team spent weeks in Figma building pixel-perfect mockups nobody outside the company ever saw. His engineers hadn't written a single line of code in 2 months of "planning."

Meanwhile his competitors — GenZ YC brollihaired founders — are turboramming and rebuilding his product brick by brick.

The month most teams spend going from idea to mockup? Now less than a week. The 4-6 months of dev after that? Closer to two. Timelines have 1/3rd-ed themselves.

You don't have to work with us. Work with anyone who understands this. 

But if your team is still running the wireframe, Figma, sprint planning, dev, QA pipeline for EVERY feature...

Do they not know these tools exist? Or do they know, and they're just not telling you? 

Godspeed.

taplio

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taplio

The Battle

Dan Mian

Rohan Sawant

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