01
The lens
I was a photographer first. Fashion, editorial, the lot. What I loved about it was never really the camera. It was that when you look through a lens you are literally choosing someone's attention for them. This is what I'm looking at. This is what I think is worth seeing. Come into my world for a second. I loved wide angles because they show you a version of the world you'd never see with your own eyes, and I loved Tim Walker because he told stories with a lens the way other people tell them with words.
02
The dissertation
At university I wrote my dissertation on the commodification of women in the media. I'd gone down the rabbit hole, Helmut Newton, the male gaze, John Berger, the photographer who was asked what made her work different from Newton's and answered, simply, "I'm a woman." I thought hard about all of it, wrote it all down, got my degree.
Then I went and became a fashion photographer. Fast fashion, first job. Years inside ecommerce brands, running studios, shooting the machine I'd written a warning about.
A while back, at a Buddhist retreat, someone asked me why I'd stopped. And the honest answer came out of my mouth before I could dress it up: I wrote a dissertation about the thing, and then I became the thing. Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. I fell out of love with the work, not the craft.
03
First principles, but for a life
Somewhere in there I worked out how I actually operate. My therapist told me I'd have to learn to live with my issues. I decided I'd rather go and find out what they were and fix them. My physio kept taking payment for popping my hips back without ever mentioning that the real problem was my hamstrings and glutes. So I stopped paying him and went and stretched. That became yoga. That became a habit of mind: find the root, fix the root, and be suspicious of anyone whose business model depends on you staying broken.
Every problem that happens more than twice isn't a problem any more. It's a system waiting to be built.
04
The studio
When the AI work started earning enough, I left and got my own studio. I couldn't actually afford it. So I lived in it. Six months inside 2,700 square feet of damp concrete with a train running over the roof, until enough customers came in to pay for the place and I could move out. Nobody claps for that bit. That's just the graft nobody sees.
Then the damp won. It got into the building and I had to shut the whole thing down. I lost my house deposit with it and moved back to my mum's. I'm not going to pretend I took that gracefully at the time. It was losing everything I'd built, in the ordinary, unglamorous way most people actually lose things.
So I went travelling. And on the other side of the world, with no studio and no clients, I started building.
05
The bet
I'd been playing with AI since the first ChatGPT, the 3.5 days, when it could barely hold a thought together. Everyone around me said learn to code. I made the opposite bet: I'm not spending years learning to code when this thing is clearly going to be able to do it. Instead I got very good at one strange skill, finding exactly where each model breaks, and pushing it right up to that line. Every time the models improved, my ceiling lifted. I've been riding that frontier for three years now.
My first build was an app called MindMirror, which read my journal entries and showed me the patterns in my own head. Root cause, again, just pointed inwards. Then my brother Sam knew someone who needed customer service handled for their parts business, and that little widget became my first paying customer. It's still paying today. I owe my brother a lot for that one. One day I'll get him working with me.
06
The company that runs a company
Omniops is a year old this month. It exists because of a simple, slightly embarrassing truth: I needed a whole company and I couldn't afford one.
Walk into any business and the argument about AI is about replacing people. I never had the people. There was no photographer to let go, no editor, no customer service team, no marketing department, no operations manager. There was me, at my mum's, with one client. So every time I hit work I couldn't do alone, I built the person I couldn't hire. I needed product photography to earn more, so I built an AI photography studio. I needed content, so I built the editing suite. I got sick of paying for Photoshop, so I built that in too. Customer service was already answering questions on my own site. The books, the emails, the social posts, one by one, the staff I never had.
Omniops is the automated automation business of my life. I'm the first customer, and I can't afford for it not to work.
That's also why everything in it looks the way it does. The brand in the demos is the clothing brand I always wanted to start, wearing the clothes I actually wear. The studio on the landing page is what my studio looked like. The person in the pictures is, more or less, me from a parallel universe where the damp never got in. None of it is a mock-up of someone else's business. It's mine, running for real, in public.
07
Where this is, honestly
Right now: one paying customer, a product that does more than any one-person company should reasonably have, a view I wouldn't trade, and a dog called Duncan. I knew AI would let me run all of it from anywhere. That part I got right early, and I just kept the faith through the part where it looked mad.
The goal is not a unicorn. The goal is you, running a proper business with the staff you never had, and doing well out of it. The photographer, the editor, the customer service, the person who keeps an eye on the numbers. All of it, for £500 a month. A whole business for the price of nobody's salary. And when your business needs something specific, tell me, and I'll build it in. For everyone. Same price. It runs my business, so it grows with yours. If it can carry me from a damp studio to here, it can carry you.
08
Duncan
And one thank you above all the others. My best friend has been there from the very start. The studio, the damp, losing the lot, the building back. He slept through most of the hard parts, to be fair, but he never once left. Duncan, I owe all of this to you. The dream was always the two of us, anywhere, and we're nearly there, mate.
