Faster ideasaren't better ideas.

The fire hose

My co-founder and I had both spent more than ten years in agencies. Me in strategy in Dublin, her in UX design in New York. We’d watched the same thing happen from different sides.

Agencies were meant to be about creativity. Doing what nobody else had thought of. Being a bit left of field, sometimes a bit outrageous. Then digital arrived and the job changed. It became about volume. A fire hose of average work to keep the billable hours ticking over. The busier agencies got, the more the quality slipped. Meanwhile, the most interesting content in the world was coming from TikTok, often from people with no brand behind them at all.

Brandip

So we built Brandip. The idea was simple. Clear out the meetings and admin that kill creativity, and give creative people the space to do what they’re good at.

You typed in a brief. Brandip pulled inspiration from music, film, art, street culture and the news, and turned it into short videos, all anchored to the brand’s strategy. We were tired of watching AI tools make animations that looked great and did nothing for the business. Our line was that Brandip worked with professionals, not for them.

No more big reveal

The part I loved most was that agency and client worked in the same space. Both could say what they liked, what they didn’t, and which ideas they kept circling back to.

That killed the big reveal. You know the one. Six weeks behind closed doors, a dramatic unveiling, and a client who quietly hates it. With Brandip, the client was on the journey from day one.

Fewer wrong turns. Far less going back to the start.

The investor

Then we met a US investor who took it apart in about ten minutes. Kindly, but firmly.

He pointed out that we had a B2B idea, and B2B is very hard to prove. A consumer app can put up a landing page and show a thousand signups. That’s proof. A B2B pitch is mostly a promise. Someone else told us we’d bitten off more than we could chew, trying to fix an entire industry in one go.

They were both right. We’d fallen for the technology and aimed for the stars, when what we needed was one sharp problem, solved well, then built on step by step.

Forty jobs a day

I’ll say this for startup life. It’s never dull. In one day I’d pitch the business, write the strategy, run interviews, draft video scripts and sketch scamps. Every job in an agency, rolled into one person and a laptop. Some days it was chaos. Most days it was the best education I’ve had.

What faster really means

Here’s what Brandip taught me. Faster ideas aren’t better ideas. Rigour is still what separates good strategy from bad. You have to get under the hood of a problem and understand a business before you can diagnose anything.

But a faster process can be a very good thing.

Cut the meetings. Cut the admin. Cut the reveal that sends everyone back to square one.

Then spend every hour you’ve saved on the thinking.

Brandip never launched the way we first imagined. But its AI video assistant became the foundation for Matey, the next thing we built.