I help founders get ready and connect with investors • Seasoned entrepreneur • Building tech startups for 25yrs (zero→£mil ARR, twice)

With 29 years in startups, I now run the Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days. www.gipity.com

𝐌𝐲 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲... 👇

1968 BC (Before Computers): Born into analogue world

1982-86: Discovered computers! Vic 20, BBC micro, ICL 2900 mainframe & more

1986-89: Computation degree, UMIST (University of Manchester, Institute of Science & Technology)

1989-99: IT consultant/project manager: Logica, IBM, Reuters, Bankers Trust & Deutsche Bank

1994-97: first side hustle: scuba diving instructor & own London dive school

1996: published first website & first ever disk-mounted website on a UK magazine cover

1999: developer/project manager at 2 early London digital agencies

1999: vision/architect/investor. created first UK under-a-tenner domain name business, Easily

1999: built+launched early/successful dot-com: domain/email/web hosting ISP

1999-2001: ceo. managed growth from 0 to 2,000 daily domain sales & 30+ staff in under 2yrs

2000: invented the web-based DNS dashboard for domains

2000: created early no-code solution for one-page websites: £100k ARR

2000: highly commended "Entrepreneur of the Year": European E-commerce Association E-business 2000 awards

2001: 64th in Sunday Times "Top 100 pre-IPO e-businesses in Europe" E-League

2001: ran one of the first successful web affiliate schemes, generating 40% of rev

2004: hit 400,000+ domain registrations, 30,000+ websites & 40,000+ email accounts

2004: 3,500 commission earning affiliates & word of mouth to 100,000+ customers

2004: negotiated successful multi-million pound dot-com exit/sale of Easily

2002: vision/investor. launched one of the first ever B2B mobile text marketing services: SMS Expert

2007-11: early digital nomad: B2B Saas startup from beach/desert

2007-19: ceo. ran leading text marketing B2B Saas: zero to multi-million turnover

2007-19: cto/architect. developed 850k lines of code & supported 1mil daily transactions/API calls

2020... consultancy/advice/support for early-stage tech startup founders

2022... helping hand-picked founders find the right investors

• 2018: vision/architect/investor/cto...
Clickacall: instant video calls from anywhere with single click
Nearevo: proximity discovery for internet of things
Scan+Click: contactless business cards
Secly: personal online security

• 2021 l2o: supporting next generation of startups
• 2022 Venture Cards: all startups, in one place • connecting the right founders and investors

• 2024 The Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days

Steve Procter

CONTROVERSIAL: If you're ready to create an internet/mobile based startup in 2026, you do not need investment. What's that I hear: "but there are a few setup and running costs". Well, no shit Sherlock! That's how business works.

If you expect it to be a free ride and for someone else to take the risk before you've even started, this game aint for you. Your idea, your risk.

Five years ago, sure, it was tough back then. You needed the app ready just to discover if there was even a market. And the developers who would build it saw you coming and demanded £150k just to get out of bed.

But those days are over. Building your MVP is cheap. Signing up to a handful of AI-driven marketing/growth platforms is even cheaper. Your costs for getting from day 0 to day 1 are minimal, and should come out of your pocket.

If your savings account can't cover it, then give up Netflix, or your 2nd annual holiday, or a meal out and bottle of wine each week.

Take your own risks if you are so convinced the idea is that great. And, according to page 17 of your pitchdeck, it is going to be massive and hit a $1bn market within 5 years!

So what's a year without Netflix or dining out when that's the goal? You will be too busy building and making sales for a social life anyway.

Investment is for scaling. Not for creating the damn thing on day 1.

---

* smallprint: yes, sure, we know that if you're in quantum something or other, or deeptech, or need a van to deliver your mince pies to factories, or to buy stock, or do medical research, [or insert 1,000 other ideas], then you are special and this post does not apply to you. So please, walk on by, nothing for you to see here. This is for people building apps, websites and stuff like that.

Launch your MVP in 30 days | 30yrs in startups (exited. 0→£mil * 2)

I just read an expert's idea of a "5 yr plan for startups". More theoretical tosh! As a founder you need to be out in much less than 5 yrs, sat on the beach with a piña colada, and planning your next startup.

Let's be honest, for most founders, if you are still in at the 5 year mark, you've probably missed the exit ramp and are a zombie startup, kidding yourself you're still capable of "scaling" and reaching mythical unicorn status.

The speed of startups in this mad new AI-backed world means, if the business is doing well at 2-3 years, you should find someone bigger who knows how to launch it into the next orbit. For most founders, this is not you.

Exit at 2-3 years. Low £millions. Go again. Repeat until the care home calls.

Oh, and by the way, that exit money needs to be hard cash. And it goes to founders only - no investors to take any cream off the top.

If you spent 6-12 months of those 2-3 years faffing about finding an investor, then you've wasted the most critical period of a startup's early life.

You can disagree all you like, and spend half your days on here, talking the talk and arguing with AI-written posts.

The startup process is simple: Build, sell, sell-out.

If any part fails, then pivot or find a new idea, and go again.

JFDI !

Hey Linkedin algorithm, send this to everyone subscribed to my newsletter. Ask them to let me know if I should start writing it again.

Hey all, I've just remembered I have this newsletter. It was set up about 300 years ago, and somehow it has collected 6,720 of you 😊 So my big questi

Open article: Hello, is anybody seeing this? by Steve Procter • 1 min read

Startup circus 'experts' say "build it and they will come" is wrong. Really? Post daily on social, grow your followers & fans, then give them a little nudge when you launch something new. Watch them come. Selling has never been easier.

Someone asked me if they should create a business plan, pitchdeck, and financial projection for their brand new startup and app idea? My answer is simple: Hell no! Real founders fly by the seat of their pants.

Sure, write down a few pages of ideas and notes. But otherwise, just focus on building, making sales, and pivoting.

That last one, pivoting, is what makes too much planning a complete waste of time. Don't kid yourselves your idea is so solid you won't need to. You will be pivoting so much, you'll feel like a ballerina practicing her pirouettes.

So stop talking the talk. That's what Linkedin armchair experts do.

It's time to build fast and make sales. Which is what real founders do.

I saw this post recently: "has anyone managed to create a profitable startup yet from vibe coding?" Such a stupid question. AI-assisted dev doesn't make sales, that's your job. But it does help you start selling much sooner.

Oh good grief! Can we stop blaming AI dev tools whenever we see a crappy vibe coded app. Platforms like Replit are fantastic and work great when you know how to control them and feed them the right information. But if you don't, then, as us old-schoolers like to say: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

SproutsAI

SproutsAI cuts hiring time by 90%, transforming your recruitment process from a 2-month slog to a lightning-fast 2 days. We tackle over 12 pain points, streamlining the entire journey from job description to qualified candidates.

My role: Customer Acquisition/Success

Chief Revenue/Marketing Officer

Techstars

Mentor

Plug and Play Tech Center

GetJop

JOP is the fast-growing OKR software that allows you to align strategy with execution and achieve faster growth for your business and people.

Advisor

TiE Silicon Valley

TiE Silicon Valley is a 501c(3) California nonprofit and is one of the world's largest ecosystems for technology executives, entrepreneurs, and VCs. TiEcon is an annual entrepreneurship and innovation conference with over 47K registrations in 2022.
· Develop a GTM plan: Put together a strategy to get 5000+ registrations, identify the target audience, define the key messages, set the budget, and select the marketing channels.
· Coordinate a team of 25 volunteers to execute social media and other marketing campaigns
· Create promotional materials templates: Defined marketing theme, and designed Canva banner templates for LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram campaigns, trained volunteers to use the templates.
· Build partnerships: Establish partnerships with organizations, associations, and other stakeholders to help promote the conference and reach a wider audience.
· Track/Analyzing results: Track the success of your marketing activities and analyze the results to identify what worked well and what needs improvement

Marketing and ClimateTech Track Co-Chair- TiEcon

•	Launched first-ever partnership programs with 50 new organizations to increase diversity in conference attendees and increase cross-pollination of ideas
•	Build a market template and leveraged the social capital of speakers/sponsors to expose the conference to a wider audience.
•	Discovered best practices and trained other volunteers to embody them to dramatically uplift their output.

Marketing/Partnerships

IIT Bay Area Alumni Association

The Indian Institute of Technology Bay Area Alumni (IITBAA) is a 501(c)3 California nonprofit dedicated to the professional development of 15,000+ BayArea-based alumni from 23 IIT Campuses in India. IITs are the 4th largest unicorn founder producers in the world.

Board Member, Ongoing Activities

•	First openly gay person on the US-based Indian University Alumni organization board.
•	Led brainstorming and ideation sessions with the 8 member board team, and set KPI for 20+ volunteer team to increase alumni attendance from 1500 to over 6000 that strengths community and creates connection points
•	Build fundraising strategy and ran a campaign to raise funds from VCs and corporate executives resulting in turning around a $60k loss from the prior conference to raising $110k 
•	Founded a hiking club during COVID to offer safe group outdoor activities and career networking during outdoor luncheon
•	Launched and built a speaker series to impact alumni on career, leadership development, and financial planning
•	Led a team of 10 for the hiking club and a team of 5 for fundraising.

Board Member, Sponsorships

FalconX Accelerator 

IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation

Revived the IITBHF chapter post-COVID, leveraging social media to reconnect members. 
Led impactful events (Roadshow, CXO Forum, Pi Day networking, Summer Picnics) and rekindled the IITB bond through visiting professor outreach (e.g., Prof. Phatak, Prof B K Charkavarthy). 
Notably, 80%+ outreach success for the SemiX event secured 20 prominent industry advisors for the center, thanks to a collaboration with Prof. Ganguly. 
Drove partnership with IIT-BayArea.org brought engaging monthly activities to hundreds of alumni families, fostering a thriving community.

President - SF Bay Area Chapter

Samsung Semiconductor US

•	𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭/𝐚𝐜𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬
o	Strategized investment areas into various target segments based on industry trends, innovation at startups, and customer needs.
o	Grew innovation pipeline by discovering, evaluating, and proposing startup investment targets in each target segment.
o	Built relationships with entrepreneurs and investors, including the venture community, and monitored startups in strategic areas relevant to Samsung.
o	Lead the development of strategic rationale and build consensus with key stakeholders.

•	𝐀𝐜𝐭 𝐚𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐒 𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐕𝐏 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐝-𝐡𝐨𝐜 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬 
o	Explored many optical and other interfaces that would be needed over the next 5-10 years, distilled how it intersects with Samsung’s roadmap, and mapped out engagement strategy.
o	Drove NewBiz initiatives by leading ideation and brainstorming sessions with colleagues to formulate a strategy for high growth from Tier2 customers.
o	Investigated NFT and Private Equity as a potential option to fund new capital-intensive projects.

•	𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐛𝐲 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬
o	Brainstormed with execs and colleagues about various new markets to investigate and narrowed down on HealthTech, Crypto storage, and Secondary storage.
o	Built a thesis for opportunity by talking to internal/industry market experts and other secondary market data.
o	Leveraged my existing network and new connections to get industry expert validation on the thesis and iterated on the opportunity.
o	Built market models to quantify the size and timing of the opportunity in TAM/SAM graphs.
o	Built a business case with actionable recommendations & presented it to the executives for review and further action.

Director of Product Planning - Special Projects

•	𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥
o	Leading a team of 5 to drive internal cross-functional alignment for EVP's special project (industry first for a storage provider) that would change the fundamental business model to capture new cloud opportunities.
o	Driving internal investigation to access wide impact and gather data points of this business model change to assist EVP in making go/no-go decisions.
o	Presented a new plan to benefit from emerging storage as a service market to the President, SVPs, and other executives and driving activities to make it a new business in the future.
o	Collaborating with a broad set of customer bases to identify synergy and initiate POCs to identify opportunities for collaboration and areas that need further development.

•	𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐫𝐞-𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦
o	Scouted for a broad range of emerging technologies, analyzed trends in system architectures and prioritized NVME-oF based composable disaggregated systems that increase storage performance by 10x. Drove deeply into various applications of this new architecture with key strategic cloud and OEM customers.
o	Initiated a pilot project to place Samsung's Ethernet SSD into OEM systems to iron out architectural bottlenecks to drive integration and interoperability
o	Led a cross-functional team of 20 to discover gaps, drive internal alignment and define product features to address these gaps, and identify synergies between customers and partners for the future generation products

Director of Product Planning - Growth

PrideX

Bringing a collective wealth of experience, a globally established and flourishing diverse network.

We're on a mission to train, educate, uplift the lives, upskill members of the LGBTQIA+ community, to equip every single one in the community with the necessary skills to earn a sustained and flourishing living.

Founding Partner

•	Passionate leader driving strategy, innovation, and growth in Cloud, Storage, and ClimateTech industry.
•	20+ years of experience across Product, Strategy, Marketing, Engineering, and Leading teams
•	My superpowers are networking, building partnerships, and strategic thinking
•	Scout for innovation, align customers and internal stakeholders and drive proof of concept to commercialize innovation.
•	Explored new markets, built innovative products, and realigned business models to markets to drive new growth. 
•	Identified customer pain points and drove a solution to give them an edge to become a market leader
•	Foster Partnerships with customers, eco-system players, and internal stakeholders to drive growth for all parties.
•	As a Chief of Staff, took ownership of EVP's strategic projects, evaluated options, and drove them to success
•	Built a high-performance team to automate workflow, scale operations, and reduce time to market.
•	Social Impact investor: Invest in programs that provide basic needs (food/water) for low-income children so they attend school instead of working as a child labor
•	Social Impact investor: Invested in the production of a breakthrough film to normalize LGBTQ+ stories as a part of mainstream Bollywood
•	Set historical precedence, challenged societal mindset, and made a bold political statement by openly marrying my husband in Yavatmal, a small town in India, to set a new bar for the LGBTQ+ community to follow

𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐬
•	Hiking
  o	Hiked for 15 years in over 20 countries
  o	Organize monthly hikes for IIT-BayArea to build a network and strengthen the community

•	Photography
  o	I have taken landscape, event, and portrait photography for over 35 years in all the 45 countries I have visited.
  o	Created awareness and pull via social media for the different nonprofit organizations I served via creative photography

•	Traveling
  o	Solo traveler to 45 countries who goes off the beaten path to connect with the local culture, history, food, architecture, and people
  o	Insatiable curiosity to always learn, and expand the horizon
  o	Seek out unique experiences during travel such as bungee jumping, parasailing, and tandem skydiving

taplio

The Battle

Steve Procter

Hrishikesh Sathawane

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreSteve Procter's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Steve Procter

Hrishikesh Sathawane

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Steve Procter's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreSteve Procter's LinkedIn Performance