Chris Johnston

Just build. It's the best advice I've ever got. Last year I was 100% certain I was failing an exam. It was my first exam in over two years. I tried to revise the material and ended up closing my textbooks. Instead I opened my laptop, opened Claude Code, and began developing an app to help me pass. Flashcards, multiple choice questions and essay examples. I pulled it all together and let it generate thousands of potential questions that might come up. My revision time turned into building time. I still felt like I knew nothing, despite acing my own app. I got 68%. The app actually worked. I can't make myself sit in a room for hours and revise. Haven't been able to since I was 16. But I can always make myself build something, and I'm very comfortable losing a day to it. So I didn't beat the exam with revision discipline. I beat it by turning the thing I hated into the thing I love. Procrastination, with a really good disguise. And now that's how I love to solve my problems. Tell me i'm not the only one.

74% of Gen Z now use Instagram for professional networking. 69% have landed a job or internship through it. Only 26% say LinkedIn is where they go for career advice. As a 22 year old, I am part of that group. And I won't lie, those numbers don't surprise me. Instagram got serious. LinkedIn, strangely, got silly at exactly the same time. Scroll LinkedIn today and you'll see selfies. "My daughter taught me this B2B lesson" (yeah, sure she did). A personal essay saying "I drink alcohol, I don't work 80 hour weeks" (again, LinkedIn gurus, do better, I've seen two of those this week alone). Now go on Instagram. Founders explaining their pricing. People breaking down their outreach. Real footage from inside their work. The platforms have swapped. Because nobody can trust a CV anymore. A job title tells you nothing, and now you can't even tell if a person wrote it. So everyone started looking for the thing that can't be faked. Instagram was built to show real. LinkedIn needs to learn how to be real. Stop posting like a CV.

At the start of this year I killed the product I'd spent most of 2025 building. Nobody prepares you for how much that SUCKS. Not because it failed, because it had been my whole identity for a year, and then it was gone. Here's what killed it. I'd taken Nunterei, my newsletter ad-sales business, and started turning it into software. Months of building. Fully convinced. Then I started demoing it. And this is what I heard: "This is really clever." "I can definitely see the use." "Great questions, love the thinking." "Send me the link, I'll take a look." You know what I never heard? "How much is it. I want in." It took me an embarrassingly long time to hear what that silence meant. Polite interest isn't demand. "That's cool" isn't "I need this." People will admire something to your face all day and never once reach for their wallet, and if you want it badly enough, you'll mistake their manners for traction. It wasn't traction. It was manners. So I killed it. I don't regret building it. I regret how long I let enthusiasm do the job honesty should've been doing. Now, before I build anything, one question: Is anyone trying to give me money for this yet? Not do they like it. Do they want it enough to pay before it's even ready. That question would've saved me a year.

Saw this on X the other day and it doesn't surprise me one bit. If anything, 41% feels low. We all see it every day now. Either A) Dave from accounting can suddenly form a coherent sentence B) Your favourite creator's content is suddenly 10x worse (not naming names) And to be clear, I've got no problem with AI. I use it every day. The problem isn't the tool. It's that people have stopped thinking BEFORE they reach for it. They're not writing slop, they're generating it, and half of them aren't even reading it back. AI can write a sentence. It can't have your idea for you. It can't have been in the room. The moment you outsource the thinking instead of the typing, everyone can tell. Thankfully, from my own writing for clients: the slop is starting to lose. Posts with even a little genuine thought behind them are pulling ahead again. Turns out the bar isn't "use AI or don't." It's "did a human actually think about this."

For six months my whole LinkedIn strategy was, connect with as many YC founders as physically possible (preferably ones who just started their batch). Six months wasted. 432 requests still sitting unanswered, 191 accepted, a few friends BUT ZERO work. And WOW That was the worst strategy ever. 1. It's the most obvious 2. These people have money and everyone knows it I thought my idea was great, get in the room with the newest founders, recently funded and needing to get their business in front of as many people as possible. What I forgot was these are the founders that anyone who has any interest in business knows exists, knows how to contact them and is also looking for their money like vultures. These founders are therefore on high alert when someone is trying to sell them something (they are also in that phase themselves). Lesson... Don't be captain obvious and plan your life around the most popular kids in school.

Last week I was given the opportunity to go deep into out-of-home marketing. And I actually loved it. Over the past few months I've noticed more and more modern tech companies getting a billboard or a bus ad. OpenAI (yes, ChatGPT) being a large spender in this space. Apple and Amazon too, as well as a large variety of YC's latest and greatest. Companies who've sold the world these modern ideas are still using a marketing channel that originated in the 1800s. And I think I know why... For years the industry focused in on everything that could be tracked perfectly. If you couldn't count every eyeball it touched and where it looked, it wasn't used. This produced a world where every ad is hyper-personalised and every impression tracked. Now, with AI, precision has got cheap. And when precision gets cheap, it doesn't mean anything anymore. An out-of-home ad can't be personalised to you. It can't follow you around, and it can't be made in someone's bedroom in the middle of the night. It costs money and it exists in the real world. That's no longer a weakness. It's its strength. It's now the last channel that proves something just by existing, a real company, spending money in public. The biggest companies on earth figured this out first. So marketing teams, get on it ASAP. Anyway. I did not expect to get so excited by billboards.

The best productivity upgrade I’ve made this year cost me £85. I’ve been wearing the Fitbit Air for a month. I got it to track my heart rate and sleep. I’ve kept it for the alarm. No noise. No bright lights. Just a light buzz on my wrist when I’m in a light sleep stage. It’s completely changed my mornings. I’ve always been slow and lethargic getting up. Now I wake up when I’m ready and get straight into the day. Same 7am. Completely different morning. Most new tech tries to win by adding more. Google won me over by removing everything and getting one moment perfect. 10/10

I started writing content for others 9 months ago. When i started i would shove everything into claude "TURN ALL THIS INTO A VIRAL LINKEDIN POST AND MAKE NO MISTAKES" I thought I was great, a week's worth of work done in a few hours. Over time i quickly noticed when i actually wrote posts myself, shockingly the posts read better (and done better). Now i've just seen this report online (go check it out https://lnkd.in/eR6r4Usw), showing that AI has a distinct shape, even once you sneakily delete those pesky em dashes. The researchers here found the ai written content 93% of the time. so in short Your ai post looks great, but it's getting less likes because we all can tell you didn't write it.

Well... there it is. Last week I graduated Queen's University Belfast with a 2:1 in business management I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Queen's, and I'm especially grateful for the support I had during my placement year. It gave me the room to start and grow my own business, which has been hugely valuable both professionally and personally. A great four years as a whole, and I am very excited to see what the next chapter brings.