Journey Of Launching An AI Startup. Win or Perish Challenge 2025!

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  • Part two of analysing the local norwich web development community websites.

    DesignTec

    These guys are the first so far to offer clear packages and pricing. So for a one page site that’ll be £300 but won’t include much. I think, personally, they should promote the videography more since that’s got more of a moat than web dev and is a nice addition to their website that most can’t offer. Website is clean and white; tiny bit blocky I would go for more whitespace. But overall decent site.

    Egg Cup Web Design

    The second one man band, Ian Pegg … fairly standard stuff in terms of web delivery. Not sure about the deep blue I think there’s some colour theory on that, and it burns the eye. But interesting reading through he’s obviously got some good results and in 2020 he shifted to YouTube marketing which makes a huge amount of sense actually… up against insane SEO & PPC competition/costs, video marketing is a huge growth area still.

    Tessellate

    Yup really like this website. After burning my eyes scanning this many website agency sites, there’s is quiet, easier to read, has stronger more concise statements easier to scan, and I like the way their recent work comes up. Love their Annual Report designs! I like the clean layout of their site very much, and their work looks good as well.

    OneAgency

    Similar to Tessellate, really clean site, type face. Not sure I like the scroll inertia/momentum effect. Really like the portfolio because they give a ton of information on the project, more than any other so far in this review. So that really shows the thinking that goes into the project, which I think customers would like. The scroll momentum irks me but I can get over it. Navigation works well. Overall a really, really nice minimalist design. Really like it. Would make the nav open slightly faster though … and see if the scroll momentum switch off produces better results.

    NetMatters

    The first agency so far to add an AI Consultancy bit to their website. I like their header – in fact, it’s a toss up between theirs and OneAgency’s for my favourite nav so far. NetMatters are quite a big local company … web design has quite rightly been shifted to a lower priority with a larger focus on consultancy in general. Plenty of interesting stuff on here.

    Phase Three Goods

    Working down at Rouen Road is Bruce @ Phase Three. Clean website. Plenty of design services. For some reason I don’t feel grabbed by anything on the website though. He’s been around for a long time and probably super knowledgeable.

    Passionates.com

    First to use Clutch as their reviews (not heard of them before). One of the few to add a ‘book consultation’ on their site. Passionates are charging $200 per hour on ad-hoc basis. In fact their overall service is about renting out senior resources to larger companies, which isn’t a bad idea actually… The competition for low cost webdev is so low that positioning yourself at higher amounts leads to the value perception premium. Banner for email capture for keeping up to date with online business and AI news is good. First active blog to be talking about ChatGPT prompts. So these guys are more targeted at the enterprise market, with premium targeting. Really interesting. They also have developed a tool called crolytics.ai … which I will have a look at another day!

    Affinity Agency

    Despite a long video load on the homepage, the hero video really is beautiful. I like it a lot. But I would optimise the loading experience because it was a giant white space at the start. I like their ‘in the news’ block layout. Some of their links have a weird token at the end which is somewhat annoying but no real big deal. Nice clear design. Portfolio is extensive but could be improved by explaining more about each project. Overall really nice branding.

    Candour

    Before I get super tired after hours of looking at all these, I’ve got a few more. Candour are all about marketing based on solid SEO experience. They do a weekly podcast. Nice branding. Clear communication with enough detail.

    They are the first company to have a profile on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/withcandour.co.uk)

    And last but not least…

    AlexScotton.com

    I know Alex well and have worked on several projects with him over last few years. He runs NorfolkDevelopers which has great hoodies and a conference that will keep you well fed and intrigued each year. He is slightly better than me in that he actually has a website … but the last blog post was 2014. Alex is phenomenal at developing web applications but like me finds it difficult to find the energy and time to put into his own website. But what a wonderful website it is 🙂

    Alex is well worth contacting if you want any Laravel websites.

  • Uni Dome (UniDome.co.uk)

    On my local electro-culture group I just saw this company that provides nice small domes for events. I’m a big fan of geodesic domes as per Buckminster Fuller, and whilst these domes don’t quite look geodesic (could be wrong), I think they look great, so am posting them here. I want to start more engineering content on this website since its one of my interests, so perhaps this is the first step toward that.

    https://unidome.co.uk/

  • Norwich web development – a quick review of all the agency websites in the area. My personal opinions based on a quick scan only. Part one.

    About 25 years ago I was one of a handful of web developers in Norwich. Over the years I have really neglected my own online presence – with no social media at all, and a continually neglected personal website! Seems totally counter intuitive but I always found live commercial projects to take all my energy and focus away from building my own one properly.

    Norwich has an amazing array of talent now and I love seeing the designs they come up with. So let’s go through a few. I searched for ‘norwich web development’.

    Nu Image

    I’ve always liked Nu Images websites, they have a really talented art department backed up by great developers. Their websites are always lively, plenty of animations without being over the top. Even the way their contact form opens up has been engineered to be something different.

    Fluffy Egg

    Not seen these guys before but I like their big and bold designs. Since people just scan websites these days, lots of whitespace, nicely designed cards, text animations, and they do Laravel/Statamic too which is awesome.

    Omni Search

    Nicely designed own website, with plenty of portfolio examples on there. Slightly less creative than the previous two but still some nice page transitions. Really like the animated icons on the web design page.

    JMJDigital.uk

    Really refined and professional look to their website. More word press specialists. I went off WordPress a long time ago as I moved away from designing websites to work on learning how to build web applications… but I think if you are building websites for people WordPress is now the obvious choice despite many developers hating it. Laravel Statamic is a decent choice but WP is just quick, easy and gets the job done, which is what most people want these days. Problem is that the market is totally saturated with agencies that do it, and the theme templates are going to get better and better. Anyway, really nice website for JMJ Digital with more visual testimonials than the others.

    Georginas Web Design

    Well, considering shes in the top rankings for Norwich web developer, it’s a pity her site has gone offline. Probably only temporarily I imagine!

    Wensum Print

    Although predominately printers, they’ve got ranked for norwich web developers … I like the instagram feed in the footer, and the Google Reviews popup. Overall nice website, no animations and quite blocky but nothing wrong with that. Love a good video hero. I need some new business cards so will probably reach out to them!

    Design Vibe

    Really liked the homepage hero (although am testing only on desktop atm) … plenty of good portfolio examples. Potentially need a little more whitespace on the site. Another site with Google Reviews.

    JDR Group

    These guys have the feel of a slightly larger company with more capacity to support bigger corporations; but they can still pump out quick websites for SMEs. More of a focus on marketing, hubspot integration, and they are the first so far on my review to have an email capture program in return for a PDF explaining how to improve your business. The PDF is a bit text heavy, but it’s a good idea. These guys also have good rankings across the UK so whilst they are actually based in Derby they still market for all the individual towns and cities. Personal opinion is that they could tweak their website to be a bit more creative, but it’s probably a good lead generating machine for them.

    Also one of the few so far to put contact details right at the top, and a hero video of the owner (which kinda works but i dont always like to watch them).

    Grit Digital

    These guys are well known in Norwich. It’s suprising they operate everything from a single page landing page. Potentially a little bit over the top bravado in their messaging, but that’s life these days. Clean website, I like the way they demonstrate their portfolio pieces. Good use of testimonials.

    Coder Agency

    These guys have quite a large office in Norwich. I must have been travelling for a while back then, because they popped up out of nowhere. I’m actually disappointed by their website. The text is way too small, it looks like its been designed by developers, and there’s nothing too exciting about this that makes me want to use their services.

    Nine2

    Nine2 had an SSL problem and I couldnt connect to their site.

    SemiBold

    I quite like this guy. Never met him on the rounds, but he’s got the branding and he’s very down to earth in his offering. Really like how he added an EDP article on his article launch (good example of personal PR there) and he’s done a lot at such a young age. It’s very clear it’s just a one man band but that’s why it works. He’s got a great portfolio – the websites are very clean and do the job. I’d love to see him put more of his work over his site, but I suppose it’s on the My Work page, so can’t complain too much.

    KH Digital

    I’m not sure what this site is built in, but it has a different loading effect than the others. The pages still load fast, but there is this one second of non responsiveness when you click a link, and then the page loads. Anyway, these guys are a small team… plenty of team photos so it’s not a faceless company which is nice. Fairly straightforward website nothing breathtaking or exciting, but the work they do gets the job done by the looks of it.

  • ChatGPT Release

  • Day 232 of AI Startup

    The value of having LLMs as a programmer is soooo good. Yes, if I were to blindly use the suggestions it gives me I would end up in a mess. Maybe one day very soon, further LLM evolutions will completely render this point void – but I think it’s really necessary to have a good grounding in programming, a specific framework, architecture and plenty of experience. I’ve not had time to use lovable or bolt much at all, but they appear to be brilliant prototyping solutions at the very least. I’m totally open to being wrong but I have a feeling when things start going wrong with those, it’ll be difficult to pick stuff apart unless you know what you are doing.

    That’s all for today.

  • Day 225 – 231 – Software Milestone reached!

    Day 225 – 231 – Software Milestone reached!

    It’s quite funny thinking how far things have come in 231 days – in terms of AI and my own progress.

    I started this process off with a desire to use some runway that I had in order to build something for myself. Some sort of system which I had a vague idea of what it was going to do.

    In the 200~ days I have worked a couple of months freelance to bring in some cash, had another couple of months during the summer off to deal with some personal issues, taken my health habits to a new level which has resulted in a much higher level of vitality, energy and drive; and I’ve also helped a local company resurrect their platform resulting in having a very solid base of an AI platform now.

    The Future Of Software

    Ultimately, as I’ve said many times now on this blog… I think software is going to radically change. Voice and gesture activation, Facebook glasses, etc all change the game in terms of user interface … as well as MCP servers changing how applications can interact with each other (with security caveats!) … add automation ‘flowgramming’ tools to that and suddenly we’ve got businesses that will have processes effectively running in the background with only minor oversight. Or to put it another way, businesses will have a fully automated schematic process flow which will prompt humans for input and then carry on. Any company that doesn’t add this digital backbone to their business will not take advantage of the cost (time/money/energy) savings that this will enable. It will require, however, upfront consideration of how the business works, and for that – people will need to think!

    How AI Has Stopped People Thinking

    This is a really serious topic and is fundamentally taking us into the age of stupid. Children can’t write properly anymore because they do all their typing on laptops. I’m shocked by how poor adult handwriting is anyway, to the point where my standard handwriting is considered ‘beautiful’ and I have many compliments on it. Now, children can barely think through answers to questions … instead they just google it, and now, they just ask ChatGPT!

    I’ve only really been using ChatGPT Plus so far, I haven’t used Grok yet, or any of the other ones … but it has got really good. If you give it a great prompt to begin with to template the sort of levels of response you want, it can give some very, very good answers that mimic wisdom. I can clearly see how it is good for people to talk their problems through with AIs but I do worry about giving that sort of private data away to private corporations. Thankfully language models are available open source and we’re only a few years away from hardware evolving where many people can run LLMs locally.

    Local platform

    This year I was asked to look at a platform built on top of the Graphile framework. It’s a high end opinionated stack that works well for experienced javascript devs, but in the end the complexity and lack of support/documentation for such an obscure framework … meant that it was very difficult for developers to understand the system. Overall, I knew from the beginning that it was going to be an uphill task; we did TRY; but it ultimately failed. I was able to rebuild a better system that did the same thing within two months and that’s the AI platform that we are moving forward with now.

    This week I finished a long sprint (scope creep lol!) that really got the system to a very solid working state. It currently allows the user to run and manage a website by curating content with AI from news sources, and also build layouts using AI. This may not sound very ground breaking and it isn’t from a limited perspective, but the infrastructure has been put in place for sending any items of data to AI workflows (with structured responses available) and then looking at the output. It’s back to the basics of Input-Process-Output.

    This will eventually link with flowgramming tools like N8N and Zapier to take fuller advantage that those ecosystems offer.

    Whilst I wasn’t entirely happy about replicating much of the functionality of WordPress, and subsequently having many thoughts that I should have just written a WordPress plugin, I think the Laravel infrastructure is a far better bet, and I will provide a WP integration at some point so posts and pages can be pumped to websites for people who don’t want to switch CMS’ (which is a very good decision in most cases).

    Having deployed this latest iteration internally, I’m very happy with it. There’s a ton of things we can now put on the roadmap and deploy very quickly. I’ve got a snag-list of quality of life improvements for the workflow, since it’s a bit clunky at the moment. Once those are done we’ve got some internal projects planned that will use the system – we want to use what we build not only as demos but as fully fledged side businesses/hustles to our main product. We’ve also got some demos planned to a couple of companies that have shown some interest. And we’ve got a secondary platform niche started up in the affiliate market.

    This all sounds pretty good, but there’s lots of work ahead to continually refine the product to something that will suit the market. But at least we’re getting somewhere.

    That’s it for today!

  • Days 217 – 224

    Work doodle. The days are flying by as I’m working on getting this AI web application together.

    This was AI’d from:

  • Day 214 – 216

    Day 214 – 216

    Whilst I’m enjoying traditional web programming enhanced by my AI partner (using Cursor still, but may move onto another one soon since it feels like it’s gotten worse)… I am constantly aware that the software world is going to be dramatically different very soon. I don’t think I will, in particular, be out of a job… but it is definitely a chance possibility. However inertia of software stacks will probably keep me employed for the next decade or so.

    Inertia & Junior Software Roles

    I don’t know with 100% accuracy, but I believe some financial and insurance institutions are still running on COBOL software. These are extreme examples but I think there is going to be caution on the uptake of new forms of software in many areas – there will be inertia and things will change slowly for some industries. So there will be web software that needs to be maintained … I don’t know how massive this market is, it may well drastically shrink as companies merge, but I’m fairly certain old school web tech will be a niche job that can pay potentially well. Coupled with the ongoing worries about juniors finding it incredibly difficult to find jobs I think an entire generation of programmers will go missing, which will decrease the supply of traditional web development talent. So hopefully good for me.

    I was speaking to someone from the printing industry who worked in it many decades ago. He transitioned through from traditional printing (magazines) using HUGE rollers in factories, to digital printing…, *almost* overnight (months to within. year) most of the workforce lost their jobs because technology steam rolled them. And we lost all that clever skill that put magazines together – if you aren’t aware of the skill that went into magazine printing it was a labour intensive process … now we can just colour laser print onto glossy paper and think nothing of it.

    And so it will be with programming … so you need to stay up to date.

    Future Software – Automation & Machine Learning… + Cyber Security

    If I had to start all over again, and had the energy to do it … I’d be focusing now on applying automation tools to companies, which is a first stepping stone to AI’ing companies… the tools are so simple now that almost anyone can make really quite good solutions or prototypes for their companies.

    Then I’d be focusing on learning actually Machine Learning stuff, for instance image/video recognition i.e. counting the number of chickens going past a certain point on a video; and then the potential for smart cities is very much there already. And finally cyber security will just get more and more important.

    Some thoughts on Brain Inputs

    In other cases, I think software will leap ahead. We haven’t even touched upon the brain-input mechanisms which would change everything in mind-bending ways … there’s the story of a teenager with a disability able to use Musk’s brain chip to play Call of Duty with his friends; as with most things these days, I take them with a pinch of salt; but I do think the blending of the biological and digital (eventually quantum…) worlds will remove the input restrictions that we currently face. Sometimes you can think far faster than being able to actually implement.

    That’s it for now, demo coming soon.

    It’s not that we’ve been in stealth, we’ve just been working on something quietly. It’s still traditional web albeit blended with AI workflows.

  • Day 212 – 213 AI Workflows and Structured Data & MCP Stuff

    Day 212 – 213 AI Workflows and Structured Data & MCP Stuff

    Another week flies by. At the moment I’m working on one platform which is a very thin layer that interacts with data sources and LLMs. This week I got it to a very solid state and was able to do some preliminary demos as we are now going to start applying it to some real world scenarios.

    Ultimately, all IT stuff is basically IPO – input process output … back in the 90s when you are doing computer science lessons, it’s the fundamental thing that makes software valuable to people. People put information in, the system does something, and it outputs something of value to that person. That value is then monetised.

    LLMs have actually changed the whole IPO paradigm – the inputs are now completely different – you can talk in natural language and through LLMs it can somewhat guess intent correctly (even without ‘intelligence’, the prediction is good enough) …some of the processing can be done via MCP and finally, and now the output UI can be voice, or it can be a UI generated on the fly.

    I expect LLMs to become more optimised to the point where the bigger devices like MacBook Pros have them running locally, so you really can have more privacy when using ChatGPT-esque UIs … once we’ve got local LLMs running and you can plug into them how you want, I think that’s going to be really interesting from a creation point of view.

    All fun and games.

    OpenAI structured output

    Whilst I haven’t played with the other LLM APIs yet, the thing I really like about the responses API is the structured output where you can enforce a response in a specific format. So if you want information back as an article, or a car, or an animal, or whatever, you can enforce the attributes that you want.

    MCP Stuff – Tool discovery

    After initiating a connection, it’s really easy to request what tools are available:

    { "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 2, "method": "tools/list" }

    Unsure entirely what the ID corresponds to at the point, but I’ll figure it out.

    The server will respond with something like 

    {
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 2,
  "result": {
    "tools": [
      {
        "name": "calculator_arithmetic",
        "title": "Calculator",
        "description": "Perform mathematical calculations including basic arithmetic, trigonometric functions, and algebraic operations",
        "inputSchema": {
          "type": "object",
          "properties": {
            "expression": {
              "type": "string",
              "description": "Mathematical expression to evaluate (e.g., '2 + 3 * 4', 'sin(30)', 'sqrt(16)')"
            }
          },
          "required": ["expression"]
        }
      },
      {
        "name": "weather_current",
        "title": "Weather Information",
        "description": "Get current weather information for any location worldwide",
        "inputSchema": {
          "type": "object",
          "properties": {
            "location": {
              "type": "string",
              "description": "City name, address, or coordinates (latitude,longitude)"
            },
            "units": {
              "type": "string",
              "enum": ["metric", "imperial", "kelvin"],
              "description": "Temperature units to use in response",
              "default": "metric"
            }
          },
          "required": ["location"]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

    The server responds with a list of available tools, and as you can see it describes how you are meant to respond if you want to use those tools. So name, title, description are fairly straightforward … inputSchema describes the inputs and data types needed.

    The OpenAI docs recommend that you do a ‘tool discovery’ routine that cycles through all MCP servers that it’s connected to, and then put them in a tool registry. The LLM can then understand what it has access to.

  • Day 211 – A Happy Programmer, Why Pitch Deck & Financial Projections Program Your Brain When You Actually Think About Them … and a brief future of software

    Finally got to a decent point this week on the software side. The prototype I built a while back needed to be reworked into something with proper architecture. I’ve been experimenting with different “vibe coding” apps—mainly Cursor lately—but that’s been getting worse. The prototype was interesting, but I knew I had to put it into a solid framework. That meant spending some time learning, then implementing.

    Now that’s done, and I’ve got a platform where you can manage your data, apply AI workflows to it, and get useful output. There are still a few things to iron out, but overall I’m happy with the progress. Such are the wonders (and headaches) of programming.

    Why thinking through pitch decks and financial projections matters

    Over the last 24 hours I’ve started working on the pitch deck and financial projections for this AI platform. We needed to define a clear initial niche, and this exercise forced that thinking.

    The brain—mind, subconscious, whatever you want to call it—feeds on the information we give it. Your future reality is largely shaped by how you use your mind. When you actually spend time thinking things through (not just asking ChatGPT to spit something out), your brain begins mapping the future. It starts planning at a subconscious level.

    (As an aside: Psycho-Cybernetics is worth a read on this topic—there’s evidence the conscious/subconscious dynamic doesn’t work quite the way we’ve been taught.)

    So when you see a spreadsheet forecasting customer numbers on specific dates, your brain takes it as truth and begins working toward it. Of course, it all depends on your mindset at the time, but clarity + projection = momentum.

    Progress this week

    I finally integrated AI workflows into the platform. It took time because I wanted the right architecture around it, but it’s now functional.

    I’m fairly certain the software of the future will be heavily abstracted away from us.

    The future of software = Speech recognition + LLM + MCP + Generative UI

    Here’s my best guess: most of the software we use today will eventually be abstracted away. Speech recognition + LLMs is already good enough that you can just talk to your software, which is sufficient for many use cases.

    A simple example: forms. Instead of filling out endless fields, you’ll just say what you want. The system will validate your input, confirm it, and submit. In fact, an AI “agent” that already knows your preferences will fill it out for you automatically—eventually you won’t even need to speak.

    For now, point-and-click interfaces will still exist, because they’re efficient for certain tasks. But speech → LLM → MCP → Generative UI is where things are heading. LLMs understand intent, query services, get the data, and then spin up a UI on the fly if needed.

    — note … super tired so this is half tidied up by AI … may rewrite it tomorrow with fresh eyes