Vaibhav Namburi

Founder @ SmartLead | 1x Exit | Always Hiring The Best

I like buying coffees, leading passionate people and building great products - FAST.

I'm recommended by C - Level Execs of Billion $ companies, I've been given prestigious awards and lost my hair in doing so.

I started Five2One in May 2017 with $500 and grew it to 7 figures and 10 team members in 11 months & 28 days (the day I closed the deal that got us the 7 Fig mark)

I started & sold Cenario.co 1.5 years post the pandemic outbreak.

I started SmartWriter in June 2021, grew it to 14,000 users including Facebook, Stripe & VaynerMedia.

I started Smartlead in June 2022, currently (Aug) at 6,000 accounts.

We've been recognised as one of the best in Australia and have built 62 production-grade applications for start ups and corporates.

I've worked with The UN, PwC, NewsCorp, Carsguide, AutoTrader, IAG, WilliamHill, Maoneng, SocietyOne, Lumachain, UNSW, Archistair and many other multi-(b)million dollar companies.

I have taught at 2 software bootcamps on how to build quality software products in various technologies and authored 3 courses on Udemy that gained nearly ~35,000 students online.

I've spoken internationally and nationally at over 46 events from meetups to paid conferences.

We've helped clients raise Millions in blockchain and worked with companies that are changing the world as we know it.

During this time I learnt how important having a strong team (that aligns with you) is, how important it is to believe in yourself and to enjoy what you're doing.

I still forget to put semi-colons and eat dessert before the main course.

I'm now building what I've wanted to from the beginning - our own products (smartwriter.ai, smartlead.ai)

You'll often find me on stage sharing advice and tips on bootstrapping a B2B business to talks on AI's position in the future, the best software development and product growth tactics.

I've been called a tech lead, CEO, CTO, coder, engineer, founder, leader, coffee buyer, non-sleeper and many other things -no one seems to realise i'm an excellent singer 😂

I've had the amazing opportunity to mentor for world-class accelerators like Startmate, Antler UK, Incubate, UNSW Founders and Australia's largest VC fund Blackbird as a Giant

I can be your "thought leader" too, just beware that I think a lot about potatoes

So, you've read this far ... coffee?

Member

RevGenius is a group of revenue-generating sales and marketing professionals brought together to learn, share, support and grow with each other.

AI Never Sleeps

Founder and CEO of AI Never Sleeps – leading a 24/7 AI Automation Agency that streamlines operations, automates repetitive tasks, and empowers businesses to focus on innovation and growth.

Chief Experiment Officer

Westpac Group

Leading Westpac’s Personal Loans business.

Executive Director

Fundo Loans

Chief Executive Officer - Australia

Helping Fundo to grow and be more efficient while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.

Chief Operating Officer

Empowered Leader

Our mission is to empower and grow young leaders by providing cutting-edge online tools combined with self-serve online training courses. 🚀

Founder and Chief Empowerment Officer

MoneyMe Limited

SocietyOne

Ensuring that we are bringing brilliant funding moments to life and delighting our customers.

Overall responsiblity for Credit operations and Customer Service in SocietyOne.

Acquiring customers through any channel and means necessary to grow in a profitable and sustainable way.

Responsible for partnerships and brokers.

Chief Growth Officer

Changing the face of lending in Australia

Chief Product & Strategy Officer

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Focused on serving clients to help them solve their biggest financial and technology problems in Australia and across South East Asia.

As the lead Principal, helped to co-found BCG's AP Digital Transformation Accelerator (DTA - previously known as DTEC - Digital and Technology Enablement Centre). A BCG internal capability which helps clients train their teams on digital topics (eg. Big Data, Agile, Information Security, etc.)

Other achievements: Co-head of Recruiting (KL) - 2015 - 16, Head of SOCCOM (KL) - 2015, Training Node (KL) - 2014

Principal

Westpac

Responsible for:
1. Strategy for the Retail Bank,
2. Delivery of key projects that create value for the Retail bank,
3. Business management and operational support for the General Manager of the Retail Bank.

Head of Strategy, Retail Banking

1. Group wide strategic planning, identification of strategic options, evaluation & prioritisation of strategy formulation and communication
2. Competitive, industry research and evaluate current and forward looking trends of the financial industry
3. Complex financial modelling and detailed analysis to support decision making on specific group and business unit issues
4. Business unit/divisional strategic reviews together with key business stakeholders

Strategy Manager, Group Strategy

Senior Strategy Analyst, Group Strategy

Strategy Analyst, Group Strategy

Graduate Analyst, Group Strategy and M&A

Trustmarque Solutions

Full stack dev, focussed on ASP.NET, Javascript and Microsoft SQL

Technical Consultant

I help empower young leaders through online tools & leadership training courses

Jonathan is the Chief Experiment Officer of AI Never Sleeps - an AI Automation Agency that helps Small Businesses automate their boring tasks.

Jonathan has a track record of more than 20 years of consulting and project delivery experience in Financial Services and Technology. He loves solving business problems to create value for organisations, has a history of end-to-end project delivery (idea inception to strategy development to execution and change) and loves working with people to ensure that outcomes are delivered.

He spent 8 years in a range of fintech startups to listed companies in various leadership roles from COO to CTO to CMO to CPO to CSO and Chief Growth Officer.

He 5.5 years with the Boston Consulting Group with their Sydney and KL offices where he worked on a diverse range of topics: from creating 5 year visions and strategies to M&A target selection and deal support to Inventory optimisation.

Prior to BCG, he worked for 5 years in Westpac (one of Australia's largest banks) in Group Strategy and Retail Banking. His last role was the Head of Strategy for Westpac Retail and Regional Banking where he was responsible for developing actionable initiatives to create value for the bank's branch network and led and assisted the delivery of both projects and operational issues.

Prior to joining Westpac, Jonathan worked in South East Asia for 4 years and was based in Singapore.  

Jonathan has a Bachelor of Business and Information Technology from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), as well as a Masters of Management and a Masters of Business Administration from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM).

Jonathan Chan

6 months ago, I left a job paying $420k a year.

Today? I have more money in my bank than when I started.

The crazy part?

I almost didn't do it.

This is my 2nd entrepreneurial journey (the first taught me lessons rather than yielded profits 😅). 

And honestly, the inner voices still deafen:
Can I really make it? Should I just go back to (safe) corporate?

But here's what 6 months of building has actually looked like:
📹 Ran 18 webinars for my paid newsletter community
💻 Built 5 mini SAAS web apps
🏗️ Assisted 5 clients with automating their businesses
 🔧 Built 3 Chrome extensions 
🚧 Completed 2 consulting projects
📱 Built 2 mobile apps 
👨‍👩‍👦 Spent more time with my family than I have in years

That last one? Wouldn't trade it for the world.

The numbers (because I'm building in public):

MRR is at $10k/month:
AI Automation Agency = $8k
Newsletter = $1k
Mini-SAAS web apps = $1k

Still a long way from my $30k MRR target. But growing steadily.

Consulting is what has brought in most of my (one-off) revenue, but I hope to change that.

My approach? I'm making the decision to continue 3 months at a time.

We've extended to March 2025 now.

I don't have all the answers. Some days I wonder if I'm crazy. But I'm learning more about building businesses than I ever did in corporate and working for big companies.

And I'm loving every moment.

If you're standing at the edge wondering whether to leap - maybe start smaller. Build something on the side. Stack those steps.

Because right now, I'm thanking past Jonathan for taking the jump and starting early and small.

What would you build if you had the time?

I write about AI experiments that automate my life and business

I saw this story and it hit different.

A broke Indian kid is sitting on a German metro.

Tired. Worn out. Worried about whether he'll make it through the day.

Sitting next to him? Maisie Williams. The actress from Game of Thrones. Millions of fans would lose their minds just to get a selfie with her.

He doesn't even notice.

The photo goes viral. A German magazine (Der Spiegel) tracks him down. Turns out he's been living illegally in Munich, broke, riding trains without a ticket.

The journalist asks: "Why didn't you react? Don't you know who she was?"

His answer:

"When you don't have a residence permit, not a single euro in your pocket, and you travel illegally every day… it really doesn't matter who sits next to you."

The magazine was so moved they offered him a job. 800 euros a month as a postman. That job got him a legal residence permit.

One random photo. One moment he didn't even notice. Changed everything.

Here's why this resonates with me.

When I left Westpac, people thought I had a master plan.

I didn't.

I was just trying to figure out what was next. Some days I questioned everything. Some days I still do.

But looking back, every "random" moment connected to something bigger.

The newsletter(s) I failed at for 25 years? Suddenly worked when I stopped writing about AI news and started showing people HOW to use it.

The LinkedIn post I almost didn't publish? Led to being featured in LinkedIn News Australia (twice).

The client I met by accident? Became my first $5k/month retainer.

You can't connect the dots looking forward.

You just have to trust that the metro you're on is taking you somewhere.

Even when you're too tired to notice who's sitting next to you.

Is there a random moment changed your trajectory?

Coming home to heartbreak

Landed back in Sydney from holidays yesterday.

My eldest son checked his phone and said "there's been a mass shooting at Bondi". My stomach dropped.

Bondi Beach. A place synonymous with joy, summer, families. A place I've walked a thousand times.

Now a crime scene.

16 people went to celebrate Hanukkah with their families. They lit candles. They ate. Kids played at the playground.

They never came home.

I don't have profound words. I don't think anyone does right now.

But I keep thinking about the fruit shop owner who ran toward gunfire. Who tackled an armed shooter with his bare hands. Who took two bullets protecting strangers.

In the darkest moment, a stranger chose courage over self-preservation.

That's who we are at our best.

Sydney is grieving today. Australia is grieving.

Hold your loved ones a little tighter tonight.

Why are you doomscrolling??

Stop.

Seriously.

You could literally build a mobile app right now.
Or a web app. Or a Chrome extension.

Zero programming knowledge required.

Just ChatGPT. Maybe Cursor. Maybe Claude.

That's it.

I'm not being theoretical here.

Since "retiring" 6 months ago, I've built:
📱 A mobile iOS app (5 days to TestFlight, 12 days to live on the App Store)
🤖 An AI phone agent named Steve that answers calls 24/7 (2 hours)
🌐 www.Bank-statements.co - turns messy PDFs into clean spreadsheets (now makes $350/month)
📧 A Gmail cleanup tool that categorizes and deletes spam
🔌 Chrome extensions that can grab the content from a webpage or youtube video for my own '2nd brain'
💬 An AI chatbot for coaching
...and a bunch more that I use daily.

None of this required me to "learn to code."

I just described what I wanted - in english.

AI wrote it.

I clicked buttons until it worked.

The tools are absurdly good now.

A 60-year-old Senior Director built his own AI agent using my guide.
A non-techie named Olivia pushed through and shipped her first app.

The barrier isn't skill anymore.

It's just... starting.

So here's my question:
If you had nothing to lose and all the time in the world, what would you build?

Drop it in the comments.

You might just talk yourself into actually doing it.

No alternative text description for this image

I shouldn't be sharing this, but here goes...

A Chrome extension that gives you a second brain you can actually talk to.

Last weekend I locked myself in with Cursor and AI (Opus 4.5 mostly).

The problem I was solving:

I consume too much content.
YouTube videos. Articles. Podcasts. Research.
But when I need that ONE insight from 3 months ago? Gone.

So I built something.

Here's what it does:

→ Creates a second brain using Gemini's File Search API (fancy term for RAG, which is a fancy term for "a place to store stuff so AI can find it later")

→ Works with ANY LLM — Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, even Grok

→ Bring your own API key via OpenRouter (your key, your data, your costs)

→ One click to save any webpage or extract any YouTube transcript straight into your brain

→ Chat with everything you've saved using a custom prompt

The result?

I asked it: "What did that Dan Koe podcast say about content repurposing?"

It pulled the exact quote from a video I watched 2 weeks ago.

No more "I know I saved this somewhere."

No more 47 open tabs.

Just your brain, searchable.

I'm giving away:
- The full Chrome extension
- Step-by-step guide to set it up
- Access to Friday's webinar (19th Dec, 12pm AEST) where I'll show you how to build it live

Comment "second brain" below and I'll send you everything.

LinkedIn Post - Sora 2 n8n Workflow

People are paying $25 for Sora 2 invite codes on eBay.

I bypassed the waitlist entirely using n8n.

The crazy part?

It took me 30 minutes to set up.

Here's why this matters for small businesses:
Video converts better than static images. We all know this.
But traditional video production?
Expensive (thousands for basic stuff)
Slow (weeks of back-and-forth)
Inflexible (want to change one thing? Another invoice)

Now I can turn any static image into video for 10 cents per second.

A 30-second ad costs $3.

A video editor would charge you hundreds for the same thing.

What I built in n8n:
→ Basic workflow: prompt in, AI video out 
→ Advanced workflow: feed it a reference image, get animated video 
→ Scene control: different shots within a single clip 
→ No Sora app watermark

The best part?
You can batch process 20+ videos overnight using a Google Sheet.
Set it. Walk away. Come back to finished videos.

Real use cases I'm seeing:
→ E-commerce product videos from catalog images 
→ A/B testing ad variations at scale 
→ Turning legacy brochures into social content 
→ Creating moving images from static photos

Small businesses sitting on years of product photos now have a way to turn them into video content for almost nothing.

I wrote a full step-by-step breakdown on my Substack.

The workflow JSON is available for paid subscribers.

Link in comments 👇

What would you create if video production cost $3 instead of $3,000?

taplio

The Battle

Vaibhav Namburi

Jonathan Chan

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreJonathan Chan's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Vaibhav Namburi

Jonathan Chan

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);}Jonathan Chan's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreJonathan Chan's LinkedIn Performance