BEATNIK DESIGN

Hey Reader! It was the 17th of May, a Sunday, and I was on a call with a business buddy, when a hot flash arrived exactly the way they always do. No warning. My heart palpitating like crazy. I had to stop mid-sentence and just breathe through it. I was walking her through the second stage of a framework I'd built and hadn't even finished testing yet. The ROOT Framework. She was telling me, in that particular way people talk once they've stopped performing for the room, that she'd spent years...

Hey, Reader! Three headlines landed in my feed this week within about an hour of each other. Forbes, MediaPost, and AGEIST, all running some version of the same story: women over fifty are the most powerful, most overlooked founders in business right now. The invisible majority, one of them called us. How very dare they! I read all three with my tea going cold, and felt two things I wasn't expecting to feel at once. Vindicated, because someone in the mainstream is finally saying the thing out...

Hey Reader I'm two weeks on from the Creator Live event and I'm still thinking about one thing. Not the 110k views I got from one post. Not the people I met or the amazing talks or the London air. Just this: three types of content. That's all there is. I heard it on the day and it stuck. I'm also coming to the end of a course I'm in with the Creator Live team, and I've been out with Benny every morning listening on my headphones, taking mental notes. This morning something clicked. Most of us...

Hey, Reader! I'm in a coffee shop right now, aptly named Life on High. The woman at the next table has a voice that goes straight through me, like it's found some nerve I didn't know I had. That's menopause life for you. Sounds that never used to bother me now feel painful.M y daughter's whine does it too. So do pots and pans clanking. It's the same raw, heightened feeling I remember from being pregnant, like someone turned the volume up on all of the high-pitched noises and forgot to tell...

Hey, Reader! It is a million degrees outside. The kind of heat where the laptop fan sounds making loud noises, the dog has melted into a puddle on the wooden floor, and thinking in full sentences feels way too ambitious right now. 🔥 So I've been doing something that feels almost rebellious in a week like this: building little robots to do the boring bits of my business for me. Not in a grand, tech-savvy way. In a quiet, practical way. I've been teaching Claude to handle the repetitive jobs I...

Hey, Reader! I’m writing this from week three of an experiment I can’t stop thinking about. I’ve been working with a founder (a brilliant product strategist building something genuinely good for the world) who has the same problem nearly every founder has: she knows exactly what she wants to say, she just has no time to make it. Her strategy is sorted. Her content execution is quietly drowning her. So we’re building her a system. A custom Claude skill, trained on her brand voice, that...

Hey, Reader! I'm writing this completely wiped out! Yesterday I spent the whole day with 24 people from the digital media and comms team at a police force in the southwest and it was so much more than "post more reels." We went deep. Which platform actually suits which audience, and which kind of content belongs where. What needs sign-off, and at what level, before anything goes out. How to handle mis- and disinformation before it runs away from you. And how to hold steady through a flood of...

Hey, Reader! At the start of this year, I moved my newsletter day from Thursday to Tuesday. The logic seemed sound at the time, I’d start the week strong, the newsletter would be sorted early and everything would be flowing. Reader, it has not flowed. Five months of scrambling to get this to you on time. Five months of mild Sunday dread. Five months of quietly wishing I hadn't touched what wasn't broken. So. Effective this week: we're back on Thursdays. Where we've always belonged, I think. I...

Hey, Reader! The UK has actually produced proper summer weather this week. I know! I'm as shocked as you are! 🥵 I've been outside every spare moment I've had with my hands in soil, completely in my element, repotting the sunflowers I've been growing from seeds into their own individual pots. I grew them from nothing. And just a few weeks later, they're ready. So I've been lining them up and sending them off to friends and neighbours. Letting my babies go out into the world and grow. Whilst...

Hey Reader 13 years ago. May 19, 2013. I was bouncing on an exercise ball watching the Eurovision Song contest with Scout (my dog) watching me intently. She knew what was happening. By 4am I was listening to Bob Dylan, eating almonds, waiting for Miss Tilly to arrive. At 7:18am on the 20th, she came into the world eyes wide open and a cry that filled the room. 13 years on, she's still letting out belters that fill rooms, only this time on stage in front of hundreds, completely fearless. ✨ And...