The Unlock with Oliver Bruce

Matt Kelly built a seven-figure neon sign business, lost it in two months, settled £1.8 million in personal guarantees over three years, then launched Spacegoods, the UK functional mushroom brand behind Rainbow Dust, now doing eight figures in revenue with VC backing and national retail.

In this episode of The Unlock, Oliver Bruce sits down with Matt Kelly to break down exactly how it happened. From selling fake logos as a teenager to building Midnight City jewellery and Neon Beach, to the Love Island campaign that coincided with a supply chain collapse, a Daily Mail article calling him a fraudster and a business going from seven figures in the bank to insolvent in eight weeks.

Matt is unusually honest about the lowest point of his life, why he made the first episode of his own podcast to come clean about it, and how he raised money from founders who had watched him fail.

The conversation also covers the practical side of scaling a DTC brand: what Matt spent on Meta in month one, why he launches at 70% ready, how he found a supplement manufacturer with a Google search and 50 emails, when to raise capital and what you give up when a VC takes a board seat. Plus how Spacegoods now uses Claude and ChatGPT to replace agency work, why their best-performing ad is AI-generated, and why raw iPhone content still beats a £20K shoot.

Key topics covered:

How Neon Beach went from seven figures in the bank to administration in two months
 Settling £1.8M in personal guarantees and starting again
 Why bootstrapping before you raise makes you a better founder
 Angels vs family office vs VC: what each one actually costs you
 How Spacegoods scaled on Meta ads in the first 90 days
 Why Rainbow Dust was inspired by psychedelics and launched as a chocolate powder
 Launch at 70% ready: why product perfectionism kills brands
 Handing over to a CEO while remaining the largest shareholder
 Why the UK is harder on founder failure than the US
 How Spacegoods uses AI for websites, ads and admin
 The one piece of advice Matt gives every new founder

Key takeaway: Nothing exists until you create it. Stop planning, stop scrolling, launch the thing and let real customers tell you what to fix.

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More from Oliver
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Everything you know about leadership is about to expire. AI, generational change and geopolitics are rewriting the rules faster than most CEOs can keep up, and the leaders who survive will be the ones who validate every orthodoxy instead of inheriting it.

Mike Soutar joins Oliver Bruce on The Unlock to break down the frameworks behind his book Next Gen CEO. Mike went from writing horoscopes at 17 to editing FHM, running Kiss FM with zero radio experience, co-founding Shortlist Media and grilling candidates on The Apprentice. Along the way he turned down a million pounds from YouTube, nearly died from a chicken wrap and built a business on a freemium model the industry said could never work.

This is a practical leadership episode. Mike walks through the PISA Framework (Pause, It's not about me, Separate the issues, Am I the only person who can solve this) that stops leaders wasting time on low value problems. He explains the one distinction that would have saved his early mistakes at Kiss FM: strategic decisions are the ones you cannot reverse, tactical decisions are the ones you can. He also makes the case for reasonable leaders acting unreasonably, for telling people bad news early enough that they can do something about it, and for why nobody feels qualified, most CEOs just keep going.

Key topics covered:

Why everything you know about leadership is about to expire
The PISA Framework for delegating problems and protecting CEO time
Strategic vs tactical decisions and why the difference matters
How to get into an industry when AI is eating entry level roles
Why acronyms and jargon block challenge inside organisations
How leaders should handle bad news they cannot yet share
Bringing your whole self to work vs curated authenticity
Reasonable leaders acting unreasonably and the Elon Musk timeline
The believable pathway as an alternative to 30, 60, 90 day plans
Why a fifty fifty co-founder split needs a nominated final decision maker
The freemium magazine model behind Shortlist and Stylist
How a near death experience in 2006 pushed Mike into founding his own company

Key takeaway: The best leaders solve only the problems nobody else can, make tactical decisions fast, give strategic decisions time, and validate every orthodoxy before they inherit it.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:
Website: https://www.oliverbruce.co.uk/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

AI voice agents are not replacing contact centre jobs. They are answering the calls businesses stopped picking up years ago.

In this episode, Oliver Bruce sits down with Nikola Mrkšić, co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, the London-founded company building AI voice agents for customer service. PolyAI answers the phone for FedEx, Metro Bank, NatWest, Caesars and Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, and around 80 percent of its revenue now comes from the US. Nikola joined Apple's Siri team when it acquired his previous startup, then left to build something smaller that actually worked.

He explains how an AI voice agent handles a real customer call, why response times under 300 milliseconds matter less than understanding the UK's 63 dialects, and why contact centres with 200 percent annual attrition were never a safe place for people anyway. Most companies, he argues, have spent a decade deflecting customers rather than serving them, and AI is finally reopening the phone line.

The conversation also covers what makes an AI business sustainable and profitable, why PolyAI owns its own models rather than renting them, why a B2B company spent millions on a Super Bowl advert, why raising venture capital is harder in the UK than the US, and where voice, gaze and Neuralink take us once the keyboard starts to fade.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How AI voice agents work in real customer service calls
 Whether AI is replacing contact centre jobs
 Why latency and dialect recognition decide if a voice agent feels human
 What makes an AI company sustainable rather than hype
 Why PolyAI ran a Super Bowl advert as a B2B business
 Why raising capital in the UK is harder than in the US
 How voice, gaze and Neuralink could replace the keyboard
 Why vibe coding is a phase and the one person company is a distraction

Key takeaway:
 The AI companies that last will be the ones that own their technology, distribute it widely and give people the tools to transform their own businesses.

Full episode notes and more episodes at https://www.oliverbruce.co.uk/

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver:
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Most AI rollouts fail because businesses try to automate everything at once. The fix is to start with one tiny test.

Oliver Bruce gives the exact step-by-step playbook for rolling out AI inside a business, testing it without burning budget, and building a system that gets smarter every day.

The problem is not the tools. Founders open a blank chat window, type a generic prompt, get a generic answer, waste twenty minutes fixing it, then repeat the same thing tomorrow. AI has zero compounding value without a system around it.

Oliver walks through the Tiny Test Framework: find one specific, repeatable, high friction task, map exactly how a human does it today, write a brief with identity, goal and rules, then run AI and human side by side and compare.

He then explains the part most businesses skip. When the output fails, you do not fix it manually and move on. You go back to the prompt and add a constraint. That is what turns a tool into a system.

The episode closes with a real example from Pinpoint Media, where one twenty-minute recording now produces native content across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube in fifteen minutes instead of three hours.

Key topics covered:

Key takeaway: the goal is not to replace your thinking, it is to scale your execution.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Predictive analytics fails at exactly the moments that matter most, and this episode explains what to use instead.

Every predictive model ever built is trained on historical data. It looks backwards to tell you what happens next. That works brilliantly right up until something happens that has never happened before, and then the model has nothing. Oliver walks through the last decade of black swan events that no algorithm saw coming, and the operators who felt them arriving anyway.

This is not an argument against data. Oliver runs PinPoint Media, a performance marketing agency that lives in the data every day. It is an argument against the uncritical worshipping of it.

He covers the three specific ways data misleads decision makers, the difference between optimisation decisions and direction decisions, and a five-step process for making the calls that models cannot make for you.

The framework is simple. Data for optimisation. Intuition for direction. Feedback loops for everything.

Key topics covered:

Key takeaway: the businesses that win the next decade will not be the ones with the best models, they will be the ones with the best judgement.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Building an AI agent starts with one thing most people skip. Purpose. Get that right and the platform choice becomes obvious.

In this episode of The Unlock, Oliver Bruce walks through the workflow he has refined over six months of building agents and platforms on OpenClaw, Manus and Lovable, all anchored in a single Claude project.

It starts with the Three Ps Framework. Purpose is what your agent is for. Product is how you package that into something you could explain to a client. Prompt is the detailed brief that drives the build. Skip the purpose and you get hallucinations and code you never asked for.

The hub for all of it is a Claude project. You upload your knowledge documents and your prompt, then tell the project to treat that prompt as the heartbeat of the build. From there you use Claude Code as a consultant, running a two way loop between the code and your terminal to keep the agent on track.

Oliver breaks down where each platform fits. OpenClaw is the most robust and operational, but it needs a Mac mini that stays on and carries some security exposure. Manus, acquired by Meta in late 2025, is the creative engine that plugs into Instagram, Gmail and Nano Banana, but it burns credits fast. Lovable is the lowest barrier to entry and the quickest to monetise, because it ships a real platform you can charge a SaaS fee for.

The thread through all three is the same. Start small. Set tight parameters. Ship slowly and methodically.

Key topics covered:

Key takeaway: Get the purpose, product and prompt right and Claude will tell you which platform to build on. Start small and ship slowly.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUnlockOliverBruce
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Stop starting from zero every morning. Build a Claude project that acts as a living knowledge bank for your business and every piece of copy, strategy and decision gets better the longer you use it.

In this episode of The Unlock, Oliver Bruce breaks down why most businesses get zero compounding value from AI, how to build a Claude Projects workspace that acts as a second brain, and the iteration loop that makes that knowledge bank smarter over time.

Most businesses use AI like a search engine. Every morning you open a new chat, spend 20 minutes explaining your context, get something usable, then repeat it tomorrow. That is not leverage. That is Groundhog Day. AI outputs sound robotic because the model has no context for what you stand for or what you have tried before.

The fix is Claude Projects. A project is a dedicated workspace where you upload your core business documentation and train the model on how your business actually operates. Oliver shares how he did this at Pinpoint Media, uploading brand guidelines, tone of voice docs, case studies, onboarding materials and sales call transcripts, then writing a master prompt that turned the project into a strategic sparring partner rather than a yes machine.

The real power is iteration. Every campaign result and strategic breakthrough gets dropped back into the project, so it compounds into a living record of what works. It also lets new senior hires quiz the project on day one and compress months of onboarding into days.

Oliver shares the five step playbook. Gather your foundational documents. Create the project and upload them. Write the master prompt. Use it for a week and refine. Then feed it results to get the compounding effect.

Key topics covered:

Key takeaway: Stop starting from zero. Build your brain, feed it with data, and never explain who you are again.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUnlockOliverBruce
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Stop trying to make one perfect ad. The brands winning on paid social are building a machine that makes 50 or 100 good videos and letting the data decide what scales.

In this episode of The Unlock, Oliver Bruce breaks down why the old model of one big hero ad is dying, how AI tools like Opus Clips have changed the economics of creative production, and the exact testing framework for deploying high volume creative on Meta.

The old paid social playbook was simple. Build one hero video, put your budget behind it, let it run for months. Try that today and you burn through budget in a week. The algorithm cares about engagement, retention and relevance, not your production cost. Creative lifespan is now measured in days and hours. You do not need one perfect ad. You need 50.

Meta and TikTok are content hungry machines. Give them two videos and the audience exhausts fast, then your cost per acquisition skyrockets. That is ad fatigue. Give them 50 or 100 different hooks and the algorithm finds pockets of profitability across your total addressable market.

The friction is production. Opus Clips solves it. It turns one long form recording into 15, 20 or 40 short form clips with dynamic captions, speaker framing and virality scoring. Record one 30 minute conversation and you have a month of creative in half an hour.

Oliver shares the four step loop. Record dense anchor content. Extract clips with Opus Clips and quality control the hooks. Run a dynamic creative testing matrix on Meta with small budgets. Then double down on the winners and feed the insight back into your next recording.

Key topics covered:

Key takeaway: The brands dominating paid social are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the fastest iteration cycles.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUnlockOliverBruce
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Treat YouTube as your most powerful evergreen sales asset, not an entertainment channel, and it becomes a discovery engine that generates high intent leads on autopilot.

In this episode of The Unlock, Oliver Bruce breaks down why YouTube is the most underused channel for B2B and high ticket B2C sales, and how to turn it into a revenue generating asset using a simple four step playbook.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, owned by the largest. A long form video that solves a high value problem gets indexed and searched for years. Someone finds it at the exact moment they need the answer. That is high intent discovery.

YouTube Shorts changed the model. Shorts push high retention content to people who have never heard of you. They earn attention. Long form earns trust. Most brands do one or the other and fail. You need both. Shorts for reach and discovery, long form for depth, authority and conversion.

Oliver shares the four step playbook. Define the core problem your ideal client searches for. Record a 20 minute anchor video that solves it. Extract the sharpest moments as vertical shorts. Run a distribution loop that links viewers back to the long form video. By the time a viewer books a call, they are pre sold.

If you are a CMO, a business owner or a founder selling a high ticket offer, you do not need a million views. You need 500 of the right people.

Key topics covered:

Key takeaway: YouTube is not for vloggers. It is a scalable, evergreen sales asset that turns your expertise into high intent leads on repeat.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
 https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUnlockOliverBruce
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/

Oliver Bruce breaks down the biggest shift in marketing since the internet: you are no longer writing only for humans. You are also writing for AI agents. Google crawlers, ChatGPT web readers, Perplexity indexing systems and autonomous procurement bots that research vendors before a human is ever involved.

The problem is these two audiences want opposite things. Humans buy on emotion. They respond to story, humour, design and a little ambiguity. AI agents have no emotion. They want clarity, structured facts, verifiable claims and consensus across the wider internet. Optimise only for the human and AI cannot understand you. Optimise only for AI and the human feels nothing. Most brands sit in the middle doing neither well.

Oliver gives a seven-step framework for serving both from the same page without compromising either. How to audit your pages for dual audience readiness, how to write an AI executive summary that orients the machine without disrupting the human, how to use structured data, headings and formatting that both audiences pick up, and how to build the verified consensus that makes AI trust your claims.

This is a concrete action plan you can start executing this week.

Key topics covered:

Key takeaway:
The brands that win in 2026 will be bilingual. They will speak the language of human emotion and the language of machine structure from the same page.

Sponsored by Incard. Sign up now. All your finances. One platform. For 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped. Here's your promo code: UNLOCK2026
https://www.incard.com/?fpr=theunlock

More from Oliver:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliverbrucefounder/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUnlockOliverBruce
PinPoint Media: https://pinpoint-media.global/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unlock-with-oliver-bruce/id1526266908

Connect with Oliver: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbruceonline/