The CMO's Guide to Surviving the AI Era

Gary: And we're back. Welcome to the latest episode of Block by Block, the UAE's number one prop tech podcast. And we're just getting started. Today I have a very, very special guest in the seat opposite me. I cannot do him justice, so allow him to introduce himself. Alastair, tell us, what's your name and where do you come from?

Alastair: Yeah. So, Alastair. I'm from the UK originally, but I've been in Dubai since 2012. I work in marketing, and I've been doing this for about 20 years now. I've had a lot of interesting roles in a lot of different places. I've been agency side, I've done corporate time working at Google, I've run my own startups here and there, as well as consulting across the years for various businesses. I've worked across telco, gambling, fashion, insurance. I've kind of done it all, which has been a super interesting journey. And now I am the co-founder and CMO of Tribe.

Gary: Well, what a beautiful segue. Before we get going, allow me to mention that we are in a different location today. We are right here in The Block's brand new space in One Central, on Block Street. Come down, check it out if you haven't seen it. Incredible space, incredible events, and most importantly, an incredible team. So, thanks for having us. How did we find ourselves here? And by that, I don't mean in The Block, or in a podcast studio in One Central. I mean, how on earth did we start a business together? 18 months ago, we didn't even know each other.

Alastair: Exactly. I think it's that classic Dubai thing, which is, it's all about your network, which I think is truer here than it is back in the UK, for example. So I was consulting at the time. I was putting out a lot of content on LinkedIn, especially around what I see as being wrong with marketing and advertising, and also hating on a lot of AI clickbait posts, which was a favorite pastime of mine.

Gary: Yeah, your reputation for commenting on AI slop precedes you.

Alastair: It still makes me so angry, the amount of rubbish that's out there, because of how good AI is. And there's just so much stuff out there. Oh my god, you'll get me going. But yeah, I was putting out a lot of content. And I think you saw one of those posts, and, as is the Dubai way, we've got a couple of mutual friends and people we've worked with, and I think you reached out to check, am I someone that's trustworthy. And then we had that first meeting, that first coffee.

Gary: I mean, that check is still to be verified, but we won't go down the VAR route after what happened to West Ham on Sunday. So, yes. That's a great point. The Dubai network effect is a very real thing, and we have to express our gratitude to Natalie, in this case, for connecting us and verifying both your identity and your trustworthiness. And just 18 short months ago, your little boy Max wasn't here yet, your wife was pregnant. I've recently had a little girl, and the world has changed a lot since then as well. But it's an incredible testament to that Dubai network effect. So, when we first met, we had a couple of coffees. I came to you with an idea, or more of an itch that I wanted to scratch in prop tech. We didn't have a brand, we didn't have a business model, we didn't have anything. Tell me your version of events of how we got started.

Alastair: Yeah. I mean, look, for me, I've been in Dubai for quite a while now. I spent a lot of that time in prop tech, so I spent a long time at Property Finder. I worked for them twice over the years, actually, combined for close to seven years, and ended up running their marketing. It's an industry I've always loved, but at the same time, the property world is something I've always found very frustrating, having worked from the inside of it, in terms of the perception of it, in terms of how it's presented, and also how marketing and brand was being executed within that world. So when we first sat down and you mentioned you were looking to go into prop tech, it immediately sparked my interest, because I believe things can be done in a better way. I think one of the most frustrating things you find, even as a consultant, but especially as an in-house marketer, is that so many times you have to compromise, because you can't necessarily do things in exactly the way you want to. And it's always been my ambition to have my own business. I've run businesses in the past, I've had an agency, I've consulted for a number of years. But to build something from scratch, and build it into something big, that's always been an ambition of mine. And the one thing I wanted to make sure of, and we spent a lot of time on this, was making sure that the people I was going to go into business with were people I trusted and liked on a human level. I've worked with a lot of founders, a lot of growing and scaling businesses, and I haven't got on with all the people I've worked with. That's just life. But when you're going into something like this, one of the most important things, in terms of our relationship in those early days, was, do our values align enough? They're never going to completely match, but do they align enough that I can see us building a business, and more importantly growing a business, because that's where the problems often come up. How would we interact together? What would our relationship look like? And that was something we spent most of our first few meetings talking about, as opposed to the brand and the business, to make sure we'd get on together as co-founders. That, for me, was incredibly important.

Gary: So you've already highlighted a great area for us to go off-piste immediately, so let's stay there. Building a business with others is hard. There's a weird dichotomy in that venture investors always prefer businesses to have co-founders, and in order to have that, you have to have people that you really trust, really like, respect, and bounce off of. Let's talk a little more about how, mid-career shall we say, with kids and responsibilities, that leap of faith of going from working for a business to building your own from scratch, because starting from scratch is also very hard. You have to build the plane whilst it's taking off. What is that leap like for someone mid-career with responsibilities? What was going through your mind? What were the things telling you not to do it?

Alastair: I mean, the fact that you've got kids and a wife and responsibilities, because it is a big risk. But also then having an incredibly supportive wife who said, this is something that, a, you're going to love, and b, the long-term impact of it could be massive. So having that support was super important to me. And then also, to be very transparent, when I look at where marketing is at the moment, and we're going to get into AI and how we're using it at Tribe, and I look at the position I'm at and the type of roles that are out there, the entire market of marketing roles has fundamentally changed. I wasn't going to go back into a big corporate role, because I'd been out of corporate for too long, and I didn't want to work for another scale up unless I had that seat at the table. So for me, it was either carry on consulting, which was going pretty well, and I was doing some interesting projects, or take that leap of faith, no, not even a leap of faith, take an educated move, with people I'd got to know and trust, with a business idea I fully believe in. And if those other parts hadn't been in place, people I trust and a business idea I believed in, then we wouldn't be sitting here.

Gary: Correct. And a lot of people thinking about taking that leap may either be coming from a place where they're happy in their job but want greater satisfaction from a different challenge, or they're coming from a place, and I think this is possibly the majority of cases, where they hate their job and thus hate their life, and they want to do something different to change their whole life, not just their career. And you went from consulting into a job you didn't particularly like, if I may say that out loud. So talk me through that emotional or psychological process of going from somewhere of dissatisfaction, where you weren't being challenged, weren't able to use your intellectual capacity, to somewhere that I hope is now stretching it on a daily basis. And just from me observing, seeing the difference in you where you were in a job you didn't like versus where you are now, building something phenomenal. Talk people through that emotional, psychological shift.

Alastair: Yeah. I mean, when you're in a job you don't enjoy, in an environment you don't enjoy, and your ideas aren't being listened to, and things are being done in a way you know is not correct but you have to do it anyway, it is incredibly frustrating. And I didn't have a great time.

Gary: That's an understatement.

Alastair: Well, yes. However, what I didn't want to do was just jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Again, that's why it was so important that we took our time, and I personally took my time, to really go through everything in as much detail as I possibly could. So, rather than it being a leap of faith, it was an educated move, and I had confidence in it from very early on. And I think that's the key thing. The main thing that got me from where I was to where I am was the fact that I was engaged, I was posting content, engaging with my subject matter area and putting it out there. And that's how you found out who I was, and that's how we met. So, thank you, LinkedIn. That's what you've got to do. You've got to put yourself out there, take those risks, say yes to those meetings, say yes to those random coffees. And again, this is Dubai. I think every single job or client I've ever got in Dubai hasn't come from applying for something. It's come from somebody recommending me, oh, you should meet this person, they're super interesting. And that's it. You've got to be consistent, and keep pushing. If it is your desire to do that, then you need to make the right moves to give yourself the best chance of it happening.

Gary: Yeah. No, it was definitely a journey. And we call this Block by Block for good reason, because there were many micro steps before there were leaps. We took the best part of six months to really iron out what this concept might be: the regulation, the technology, the business model, the brand, and we'll come on to that in a moment. But from when we first met in January, it was really June when we incorporated and set up. So it wasn't a quick, oh, let's do something and see what happens. No, it was a calculated series of moves, because we had to time things with regulation and government initiatives as well. So when we made the decision to go in and actually do something unified and build a business, we ultimately had nothing from a brand perspective. So, coming from Google, or a big prop tech scale up here in the region, to a day-one, ground-zero startup, talk us through, what do you do, where do you start?

Alastair: Yeah, for me it's about the fundamentals. This is something I speak about a lot, that I don't believe a lot of marketing is done in the right way. I think it's very one-dimensional, and for a lot of people, it's not their fault. Often marketers aren't trained in marketing. I didn't study marketing at university. I've since studied it as much as I can. But the fact is...

Gary: I did, sorry to interject, but I did study it at university, and you don't learn much. So you didn't miss out.

Alastair: Okay, fair. But marketing, especially in the last 10 years, has become performance marketing. Stick some money on Meta, let it run away, and off you go. Which is fundamentally wrong. Advertising and marketing has worked essentially the same way for hundreds of years. And the thing I saw so many companies I worked for, or clients I consulted with, get wrong was not building a brand properly. It's not something that gives you immediate returns, and unfortunately it's not something where you can attribute, down to a dirham, exactly what you get out for what you put in. But history tells us, and academic studies tell us, that brand is the most important thing you can build. And when I looked at the space, not just prop tech as a whole, but the subvertical we now exist in, that was something that was lacking, and I saw it as a huge advantage for us. It's not going to pay dividends immediately, but over the long term it's something that will compound and create a real moat for us as a business. So I wanted to really understand how we build a really strong brand, from an academic point of view, what is it you need to do to build that brand. That was the starting point for me.

Gary: And where would you say, in the context of Tribe still being an early stage startup, where do most early stage startups, or even growth companies, get brand or branding wrong?

Alastair: I think they misconstrue the idea of brand with a color palette and a logo. That's not what brand is. Brand is very research-based. So even when we'd only been speaking for maybe a month or two, I was already doing user interviews, pulling in friends, ex-colleagues and family, to understand what their problems were, to understand what frustrations they have with real estate, with real estate investment, because it's that kind of research that's the foundation of building any brand. So it was a matter of building out who our core personas are going to be, what problems they've got, what jobs to be done we can serve, what the category entry points are for them. All those things that a lot of people just skip, and go, well, we're going to be this color, here's our logo, and we'll be a bit like the Netflix of, or the Uber of. That's not what a brand is. Brand comes from all of the boring stuff, in inverted commas.

Gary: Boring stuff.

Alastair: I quite enjoy it. Building that up and really understanding it, and then that's the foundation on which you can build a brand.

Gary: So something I liked about you from the early days, and I still like about you but don't tell you often enough, is that you're not afraid to say no to things. And myself and Cormac, I'm going to talk on behalf of Cormac, find that really frustrating, because we're the yes-men and the hype men, but you're the no, the discipline, the structure, rightly so. So what did you consciously decide not to do in the early days with regards to building the Tribe brand, and how can others learn from your example?

Alastair: Yeah. One thing I think I said to you in our first ever meeting was, I have very strong opinions, but I hold them very loosely. So what I didn't want to do in the early days was try to be everything to everyone. I wanted to focus in on particular personas with particular problems to solve, and build it that way. Now, of course, because we're a startup, that has evolved, gone left, up, and sideways on a monthly basis, but we're in a position now where we've got it pretty well locked in. And, to your point, I wanted to say no to a lot of stuff, because marketing is one of the few disciplines, and I don't disagree with this by the way, but it can be frustrating as somebody in marketing, it's one of the few disciplines where everybody can have an opinion.

Gary: Because everybody consumes marketing.

Alastair: Yeah. But if I were to turn around to Dennis, our head of finance, and go, hey, I've got a bit of advice for you, I read this great LinkedIn article about how we should be doing this model or that model, rightly, he'd probably give me a stern look.

Gary: Pick a fight with Dennis.

Alastair: Well, no. He could respectfully tell me where to go. You don't understand what you're talking about.

Gary: In Dutch, which sounds even more scary.

Alastair: Yeah. But marketing, understandably, is something where everybody has an opinion, and one of the hardest things as a marketer is to take all those ideas in, filter through them, respectfully reject most of them, and pull through the ones that work. Something I always try to do is give good reasons as to why that's not a good idea, either at all, or right now.

Gary: I can confidently say the idea-rejection pile is significantly greater than the idea-accepted pile.

Alastair: As it should be.

Gary: As it should be, and as it always will be whilst you're on watch. And I think it links nicely, because ultimately we are building a brand in the finance, investing, asset space. So yes, we're building a tokenization engine, and yes, we're building a tokenization platform, and tokenization is used as the magic word and the magic wand, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later on. But actually, the business we're in is not tokenization. The business we're in is building trust. And it is made infinitely harder if you don't have a brand that stands for something, that is known for something, that is known for the people behind it who are not afraid to stand by their principles, not afraid to say no. That trust-building exercise is mission critical to Tribe's existence, both now and in the future. But tokenization is still relatively new. Real estate assets have been historically very stable, but recent conflicts have shaken things up a little. So how do we, as Tribe, build a brand that exudes trust to its customers and gives them confidence, when really we don't have a track record?

Alastair: Yeah. I mean, not only are we in that tokenization space, we're also in the real estate space, which has always had a trust issue as well. That was the biggest thing.

Gary: And the virtual asset space.

Alastair: And the virtual asset space. Triple threat. When I was leading marketing at Property Finder, that was the number one thing I kept coming back to, this trust issue. And the fact that we're not an established brand, I don't see so much as an issue, because it's about the quality of content and ideas you're putting out there. And again, that comes back to what I said right at the start about building the brand, which is about the research. It's about understanding who our potential investors are, what problems we can solve for them, what their entry points into the industry are, and communicating to them on their level. The fact is, as a business, we'll have investors investing 2,000 dirhams, and we'll have investors investing 2 million dirhams.

Gary: Maybe even more than that, hopefully.

Alastair: Hopefully, right. How we communicate to those people, and where, and why, are fundamentally different. And I think that's how you build trust, by truly taking the time to understand your customer and talking to them in a way that's relevant for them.

Gary: Yeah. The other thing for me is that because we're in such a heavily regulated space, our brand has to be built on the regulatory rigor and infrastructure we've put behind it. So 99.9% of our clients, possibly even 100%, will never understand the depth of information, policies, processes, and compliance procedures we have in place to build that security and protection of assets, in the form of client money, or the tokens they invest in and hold, the virtual assets that reference the real estate behind them. So whilst we haven't moved at speed, which is always my biggest frustration, actually we can't, because you can't rush trust, much like you can't rush many elements of brand building. So as we've evolved from literally nothing 18 months ago, to 12 months ago shaking hands between the five of us to form, to in August applying to VARA to say, please, would you let us become a licensed broker-dealer, to then receiving our in-principle approval and going through that licensing process, you've spoken to hundreds of investors, future and current registered members on the app, future prospective customers of Tribe. What signals actually matter to those investors, versus what we thought in the early days with our strong opinions loosely held?

Alastair: Yeah. I think one of the biggest things is, our aim is to bring the best real estate assets for people that want to invest in real estate. We are not a property portal.

Gary: No, we are not.

Alastair: So one of the key things, even in the early conversations where I was asking people what they care most about, was, I just care about the numbers. I want to know, if I put in X, what am I going to get out at the end of it. And whilst I knew that intuitively, it was surprising how universal it was, and almost how cold it was, that people were like that. I don't really care what it looks like inside. You're not living in it. Which makes sense. You don't care what the offices of Netflix look like if you're buying Netflix stock, you just want to know what the performance is going to look like. But I think that was a really interesting one. And then the other part, which brings us back to trust, was, when you go online and start to do the reviews, how untransparent some people are, especially when it comes to their fees. We had conversations back and forth on this, and I was always 100% bullish that we need to list every single fee we have upfront, before people even complete their KYC or deposit cash. Because that's something that, if you just go onto Reddit and have a look, is a justified frustration for people, when they think their fees are only maybe three fees, and then when they're inside, actually there's this fee, and the other fee, and another fee, which then causes them problems in terms of their returns. So again that comes down to trust, and it's something we've always wanted to do as a brand, to be as transparent as we possibly can. Because of the two worlds we intersect, property and virtual assets, both of which have a lot of hype and a lot of rubbish. And if you remember, the headline of my first internal brand guidelines was "no BS". And I stand by that, because there's so much rubbish out there in both of those worlds. And for us to be able to cut through and earn that trust over the long term, that's something we have to hold dear. And that comes down to even the recent report we put out about Q1, and how we broke down what had happened since the conflict began. The update we're putting out now is going to look at what the market is saying, the brokers saying demand is back, versus what the numbers are telling you. There's a big difference between a load of people clicking on a phone number saying I'm interested, and people actually buying. One story is hype, and is being used for a very specific reason, and the other one is reality.

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. We've talked about you being the person within Tribe to say no to things, but we also have the small matter of a regulator that rightly enforces its rules. Building a brand in a regulated space like Tribe is in, the virtual asset space, with VARA as our regulator, how has that changed the trajectory of building a brand, particularly in the early days where you might want to spray and pray to a certain extent, get everywhere and anywhere, but actually we couldn't take that approach? How has that differed in Tribe, as opposed to if you were building in a non-regulated space?

Alastair: Yeah. I mean, I actually really enjoy it, because it means you can't have too much BS. Because you might get a slap on the wrist if you do.

Gary: Or worse.

Alastair: Or worse. Exactly. Although there is still some of it going on out there.

Gary: Not on Tribe's watch.

Alastair: Of course, not on Tribe. But I think one of the key things is that a lot of the hacks, or things you read in terms of how to get engagement on social media, we can't do a lot of those. We can do a version of it, whether that's having a contrary view, or trying to create some kind of FOMO, which we can't do. So those classic, "these 10 hooks will skyrocket your engagement" type things don't really work for us, because we're not allowed to. And also, the business we're in, we're not selling a skin cream that's going to take five years off your age, even though it doesn't.

Gary: Or hair regrowth.

Alastair: Or hair regrowth, which, you know.

Gary: I'll get that in there before Cormac gestures it to me.

Alastair: Yeah. I mean, but you can get a good deal on a flight to Turkey, so we'll see how that goes. But I think working within the parameters that we do actually forces us to think harder about what we're saying and why. To give you the example of using a hook in social media, well, actually, if we're talking to a qualified investor who's looking to invest 20,000 dirhams every other month into our platform, is a TikTok-style hook something they're really going to engage with? No, it's not. So what is the language we need to be speaking to them? What does that person care about, and how do we give that to them? Again, our customer goes from someone that invests 2,000 dirhams up to 2 million, 20 million. Us just pushing out "invest from 2,000 dirhams, invest from 2,000 dirhams", well then we're only talking to a very small minority of our potential universe. So the constriction of compliance, as well as all the research done before, means we now have a very clear idea of who we're talking to, why, where, and what we're going to say to them. Which, from experience, is often something a lot of businesses miss, and they just go for hype tactics without a strategy. And if you're just executing tactically without a strategy underneath it, it isn't going to work. I mean, it might work for a while, but not long term.

Gary: Yeah. And those things you mentioned are foundationally the principles of marketing. And oftentimes most people don't enforce those principles into their strategy, and what follows is just quick wins or one-off wins. Let's stick with content for a moment, because I want to move into AI, because AI is such an integral part of everything we do at Tribe, how we operate, how we move, particularly in the content space. It's a tricky space, because AI has now made it easier than ever for a lot more people to create content much quicker. Quality is still a challenge for most. But if everyone can now create content much quicker, much more easily, what becomes scarce? What's the magic ingredient in producing good quality content at speed and scale?

Alastair: Again, it comes back to strategy. It's garbage in, garbage out, with AI. And actually everything's always been garbage in, garbage out from a marketing point of view. Even in previous roles where I've had an offshore content team writing blog posts in a second language, if the brief was rubbish, the output was rubbish. It's as simple as that. And as soon as, with that offshore team, I started working with them a lot closer, explaining the why behind everything, giving them the full strategy and setting very strict parameters within which to work, and saying, within those parameters, go nuts, it moved from generic rubbish output to high quality. The same applies with how we use AI, it's garbage in, garbage out. If you don't have that strategy, if you don't have all of those things in place I've already mentioned a couple of times, those category entry points, the jobs to be done, the full psychological profiles of your personas, your tone of voice, how you're going to write, what all the regulations are, if you don't have all those parameters in place, then what you're going to get out is going to be AI slop. And that's what we all see a lot of on social media, this kind of same stuff, because essentially the snake's eating its own tail. What happens, especially with these LinkedIn posts you see, is they all look the same. Why? Because when you search on AI and go, give me the structure of a viral AI post, it gives you that one. It's eating its own tail. So again, it's all about old-fashioned strategic thinking, strong parameters, being very clear in what you're not going to do. And then that's how you can start making use of AI properly.

Gary: That really resonates with me. I thought I'd use that, "from LinkedIn", because I see it everywhere. What I see on LinkedIn more than most is your unbelievable, human-only responses to the AI content flooding the platform. And I'm going to hold you there in that frame of mind for a moment, because I want to know from you, what worries you the most about AI use in marketing, whether that's the startup space or the corporate space? You've talked about personal brand, or people posting on LinkedIn, we know that's an absolute shambles, but from a company level, whether it's strategy or tactics, what worries you the most about how organizations are using AI in marketing?

Alastair: Again, I think where a lot of organizations struggle, and this is an advantage for us, is that most organizations are set up in what is now the old way. I've managed teams as large as 30 people across a marketing department, across four countries. Introducing AI in a consistent, thoughtful way that can scale and be used across different departments, when you've already got a pre-existing department with different people at different skill levels, and different levels of resistance to wanting to use AI, it's going to be really, really hard. Which, for us, is an absolute advantage. Right now in the marketing team it's myself and Cormac, and I don't see us growing any larger than that, or needing to, because of the way we're using AI. Now, where it worries me is, where does the future generation of marketers come from? The reason I'm able to execute AI in a helpful way is because I've got 20 years of experience behind me. So I understand how to build strategy, I understand the inputs, the parameters, and the constraints that need to go into the AI to make it give us the outputs we want. I also understand my own limitations with AI currently, and the limitations of the models themselves. I don't see it as magic, but it makes me worry, where does the next generation learn? A bit more of an existential issue, rather than for us individually, but that is something that concerns me. And then also, a lot of people think AI is magic. I remember sitting in a meeting a year and a half ago, and obviously things have moved on so much, but it was when vibe coding first came out, and someone wanted to rebuild a website that had a full ERP integration, over 15,000 different listings on a marketplace that were changing regularly, all coming in from different countries, without data cleaned and all this kind of thing. And this guy's like, yeah, yeah, we can vibe code that, I've read about this vibe coding, we don't need to pay $10,000 to an enterprise-level agency, this is an enterprise company, we'll just vibe code it. I was like, okay, good luck with that, see how you get on, and see how they come back on Monday morning.

Gary: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's the other problem, people have unrealistic expectations of what AI can and cannot do. As I mentioned, AI and tokenization are used as magic-wand expressions, a catch-all or a fix-all, and realistically it's not. At Tribe though, with regards to AI, where do you think it's given us a genuine advantage, I wouldn't say just over competitors, but over other startups trying desperately to survive the pre-seed to seed, seed to Series A hurdles? Where has AI given us that opportunity or advantage?

Alastair: I think in the broadest sense, it's given us all the gift of time. We can move so much quicker, execute things so much quicker, which actually gives us the time to think more, on either the problems we need to solve, or the strategic imperatives we have. It allows us a bit more time to go and explore other avenues if we want to. And I think that's the biggest thing it's given us. And then also, from a marketing point of view, it allows us to produce at volume. It allows us to have a system where everything is talking to each other. I can be a lot more hands-off than I ever have been in terms of physical production, and I can focus in on what's working, what isn't, and why. So it's given us the opportunity to test and iterate and learn at a speed and scale that previously wasn't possible unless you had mega budget.

Gary: For startups or early stage ventures getting started, what do you find are the things that are still being over-engineered? And, a more personal question, where have you caught yourself out, overthinking or over-engineering in building a brand or a marketing engine from scratch?

Alastair: I think perfection can be a real issue, especially with people who come from more of a design background. I don't fall into that trap too often, because I'm actually more of the opinion that done is better than perfect, in terms of what we're doing. But I think that's a big trap that smaller companies can fall into, they get obsessed with every minor thing. Well, let's just move this like five pixels that way.

Gary: No one cares.

Alastair: Get it up there, see how it works. The point is, you don't know if it's going to work or not. So why are you going to spend all this time trying to perfect something? Especially when you're in that testing stage, that learning stage, which is always there, but obviously much greater in the early stages of a business. And I think also a lot of people just go in and start spending money, especially on performance marketing, either without understanding what they're doing, or again thinking it's 2019 and you can literally print money on Meta. Which you could in 2019.

Gary: You can't do that in 2026 anymore.

Alastair: No. I think that's another thing a lot of people get wrong, this addiction to performance marketing. And I was guilty, when I used to be agency side, of selling the snake oil of, you can put the right thing in front of the right person at the right time on the right device, and we can measure every single penny you spend. I sold that because I was at an agency and we needed to get clients.

Gary: That's your job.

Alastair: It was my job. We all kind of knew it wasn't true. However, that belief has been very pervasive over the years, and you'll sit down with CFOs now who consider themselves very educated in marketing, and they go, well, I know you can measure everything you do, so unless you can tell me the exact ROI of this exact dollar, then you're not going to do it. It's not true. It's never been true. But it's now a barrier to overcome. Which, again, when we sat down together as co-founders and had conversations around this, one of the red lines for me was going to be if people were in that belief mode and wouldn't change, wouldn't understand actually this is how it does work. And thankfully it wasn't a red flag, and it was all good.

Gary: One example I want to share, and you can shed more light on it because you owned it, both when it wasn't working and when it was done and you took, rightly so, the praise for it, was the website that we built. We went from a simple landing page, because we didn't have a need for anything else, to all of a sudden being very close to in-principle approval and being able to market ourselves. We have a dedicated engineering team building the app, what we call the product, but the website had always been an afterthought. It could no longer be. And we worked with an external agency who we thought might know better and do better, but it turns out they couldn't, and it kind of got us stuck. Is that fair to say?

Alastair: Yeah. And it's something you find a lot, especially with things like websites, but also in overall content strategy and even brand strategy. We ended up with a Frankenstein's monster of a website, because we started with a couple of pages, then we'll add some on here, oh, we need to add this in now. We're actually going through that process again right now, where we want to add in some other things. And thankfully we learned from that first iteration of the website. I said, right, we're going to pause, and rather than just trying to stick something on the side and hope it looks good, let's take a pause and go, what are the fundamentals, from an architectural point of view, that we need to do. The same applies with our brand strategy. Because we've pivoted, because we're a startup and certain things have arisen where we've had to change direction, it was starting to go in that direction, so we did a hard reset. We created a new brand architecture that was a lot more forgiving to small pivots within our business model or direction. And again, this is where AI did come in to help us. Whilst I'm somebody who has worked with technology teams and understands their language, in no way am I a coder. I've tried it, my brain just isn't wired to do so. But what AI enabled us to do, given that we had a really strong visual brand basis, was to go in with Claude Code, and for me to build that website with Cormac, with very little technical support. Obviously the engineering guys guided us and gave us the don't-do-this and don't-do-that, they set those parameters for us, but we were able to rush off and essentially build our entire website in a week.

Gary: Yeah.

Alastair: Which is unheard of. And then the crazy thing on top of that was, I could then go in, again using the AI setup we've got, and do a full SEO and AI technical audit, and implement all those changes in literally a weekend.

Gary: Yeah.

Alastair: I remember in big corporates, where I was owning SEO, it would take six months, from here's the recommendation for technical SEO, going into a product team, going to a design team, going back to a different product manager, going to the strategy team, and we'd get like three or four changes done.

Gary: We did it in a weekend. That's what I'm talking about, that gift of time.

Alastair: Absolutely. Time and speed.

Gary: And I think that ability to evolve the brand, whether it's through content, through website, through the app even, because we're all now, the marketing team and operational team members, contributing to the product in a way that product has never been built before. And that's really exciting. I think the website is such a good example of where, like you said, we rightly had to say, right, stop what we're doing, this isn't going in the right direction, it's rubbish, we need to start again and build it from the ground up. If you had to strip Tribe's brand and marketing strategy back to just three principles or values, what would they be?

Alastair: That's a great question. I mean, number one is trust, which we've always spoken about. And whilst this is related to trust, the second one would be transparency. I think it's distinct from trust, it can help build trust, but transparency in everything we do. It's why we do this podcast. It's why we'll put every single fee up on the website. It's why, if we make a mistake, we'll hold our hands up to it. For me, that's a fundamental part of it. And then it's about relevance. I think that's quite a broad term, but I mean relevance in terms of what we're talking about and to whom, our relevance as a brand in an industry, and how we contribute to that as well. And I think those three things together probably have their fingers in everything we do. Whether that's a carousel we put on Instagram, the podcast, when we talk on a panel in the industry, when we're talking to press, I think those three are the ones that tie everything together the most.

Gary: They sound slightly generic, and again it's about how you then interpret those.

Alastair: But principles are generic.

Gary: Yeah, exactly.

Alastair: They should be.

Gary: Yeah. So we've gone back to 18 months ago, where we first formed the founders, Tribe, the five of us. And if we look at how marketing and AI and content and platforms have just accelerated in the 18 months, let's fast forward another 18 months. What do you think marketing will look like for startups, because we're pretty agile, we tend to adopt new tools far quicker than enterprises. What do you think marketing looks like for startups in 3 to 5 years from now, especially in prop tech or regulated industries like Tribe operates in?

Alastair: I mean, I think it will be plug-and-play. Genuinely. I was saying earlier how a lot of people get AI wrong because they don't have the relevant inputs and strategy behind it. But that's going to be solved in six months. A very easy onboarding process, with some agents, you put in all this information, and out comes a strategy. So it will be plug-and-play, I think not even in two or three years, in six to 12 months, we're pretty much there already, which is going to improve the output of AI, because all the inputs, there'll be a very seamless onboarding to doing that. So then it comes back to the quality of the product, and are you serving a problem that needs to be solved, and are you communicating that in the correct way. I don't think AI will ever override creativity. From a marketing point of view, you'll always need that input. The fact is, whenever I sit down with our strategy agent that I've built, which is trained on the best white papers and award-winning work, it still comes out with some absolute pony ideas, absolutely ridiculous things. And that's where that human element and that experience will always come in and trump it. I think we're a way off still from AI genuinely being able to think like a human from an emotional point of view. And that's where, I always say with Cormac, it's like, we'll get the majority done, we'll get the meal cooked, then it's all about the seasoning you put on top that lifts it. The AI is getting better at getting those ingredients and making the main meal, but Cormac and I are still the chef at the pass that's doing the seasoning. We're wiping the plate, getting it out, and then calling people an idiot sandwich.

Gary: Yeah. And you mentioned product's importance, product's role in AI, and as AI gets better and better, and just how much better it's gotten even in the last six months versus when we started 18 months ago, how important then is brand in that scenario? Does it increase in importance, the quality and depth of the brand, i.e. the more robust that brand is, the better the output will be as the AI improves?

Alastair: 100%. And the thing we've kept with marketing, it's only in recent years that marketing has essentially just been about promotion. Marketing used to own price, used to own product, used to own all of those things, the seven Ps. And we're fortunate at Tribe, a, because we're a small team, and b, because we're a relatively ego-free team, that we have awesome conversations where everyone's opinion is heard. People disagree agreeably, or do agree sometimes as well. And bringing those two things together...

Gary: We occasionally agree.

Alastair: Occasionally we agree, yeah. But the output is always better for it. So those two things being hand in glove are so important.

Gary: Again, the purpose of Block by Block is to really shed light on the challenges of building a startup, whether it's in a regulated space or not, whether it's in prop tech or fintech or any other vertical. If someone's listening who's thinking about starting a company, looking at joining Dubai Founders HQ, looking for a co-founder, maybe doesn't even have the idea yet, when they go and form that company and start building, what should they get right about brand from day one?

Alastair: Yeah. I mean, I was chatting to a friend, when I first started talking to you about Tribe, and he's run a couple of successful and a couple of unsuccessful startups, and he said to me, the key thing with any startup is distribution. That's the most important thing in the early days. If you don't have that, there's no point having anything else. So when it comes to brand, you need to think long term, we need to have a strong brand, brand is and always will be an incredible moat long term, and will help drive and multiply your business over time. But you can't lose sight of that early need for distribution, whether that's leveraging network effects, building loops, or from a growth marketing point of view. But also, a strong brand foundation, with strong strategy, with all those inputs we've discussed, is a foundation for a business, not just for brand advertising. I think we proudly have our business strategy and our brand strategy, and those coexist next to each other. One isn't above the other, because they both feed the other. And I think what a lot of businesses fail on is they'll have a business strategy, but then they won't have a brand strategy. And what that does is dissipate the impact of your business strategy. Because unless you've got that lens of the brand strategy, like a prism to push that business strategy through, it's going to go off in all different directions, and the longer you leave something like that, the harder it is to rein it in over time.

Gary: Yeah. And with having the two in parallel, it creates that push-pull dynamic, where you can create momentum, and one may lead the other, but eventually the other will take over and lead, and push or pull you forward.

Alastair: And it's also on the technical side of marketing. The amount of businesses I've consulted with over the years who are maybe two, three years old, and they're just going, oh, we should probably tidy up our data, can you help us? And it's such a mess. I'm the one that's always going, we need to get, I've got a tracking plan, we need to implement it, we need to make sure from day one we're measuring everything properly, because if we don't, again, the longer you leave it, the more knots you're going to have to untie. We don't want, in two years time, to be having to do a full data architecture redo because we've been lazy now, because we're going to have more important things to be getting on with then, if you get it right from a foundational point of view.

Gary: And oftentimes these are things that slip through the cracks, because there are other fires to put out, which I understand, but sometimes it's the unsexy stuff. Tracking is one, SEO is another. You never need SEO right up until the point you need it. You never need tracking right up until the point you need it.

Alastair: By which time it's already too late, and it's going to take you ages to implement.

Gary: Right. So I think one of the biggest things, which I've always pushed with Tribe and we're doing, which is fantastic, is we are putting in those brilliant basics, those foundational things.

Alastair: The hard yards.

Gary: The hard yards now, which we're then going to build the rest of the business on. So you mentioned network effects, that's a principle, from a distribution perspective and a brand perspective, that we believe heavily in. And I'd like to quickly talk for a minute about the Founding Tribe. So tell the listeners what it is, and why is it important in the context of Tribe's launch.

Alastair: Yeah. Look, we're called Tribe for a reason. It has been, and still is, our plan, we want to build a genuine community, which is hard to do, in a meaningful and sincere way, especially when you're early stage. We try and share as much as we can, but really people are engaging with Tribe because hopefully we're going to bring them fantastic real estate assets to invest into in a way they've never been able to before. But the purpose of the Founding Tribe was really clear. Number one, we wanted to start trying to build a genuine community. And number two, we wanted to be able to reward those people who believed in Tribe before we had all of our regulation, before we had anything we could go to market with. And that's what we've already started building. For that reason, I think the Founding Tribe is something that's in its infancy, a community that will grow and be more engaged over time, as we start to bring assets to the market. Because of the compliance, because of the regulations, it's something we haven't been able to talk about as much as we want to. It's a community that we want to reward, because these are the people that believed in Tribe before we'd really had anything to show for it. And for me, that's genuinely important. These are the people I spoke to before we'd even incorporated as a business. These are the people that, when we first started putting out content, engaged with the idea, engaged with us as a brand, saw us as putting out things slightly different to what was already out there. And for us to be able to reward that community is something that's super important.

Gary: And so, as of today, the time of recording this, there's still some spots left in the Founding Tribe. How many spots are there in total, and if you're interested, how do you get involved?

Alastair: Yes. So, with the Founding Tribe, we're limiting it to 500 members. We're getting close to that, which is fantastic.

Gary: Keep going. Keep going. Distribution. Distribution.

Alastair: Exactly. But the premise of the Founding Tribe is, it's limited to 500. Everyone in the Founding Tribe, as a thank you, gets their entry fee waived on their first two investments. And what we've also done is introduce a referral program. These are the people that believed in us early on, and hopefully believe in us still, enough that they'd recommend Tribe to friends, colleagues and family. We wanted to make it something substantial for that Founding Tribe. So if people refer people to Tribe, and you're a member of the Founding Tribe, you can actually unlock up to 15 free investments, where your entry fee is waived.

Gary: Dennis signed that off.

Alastair: He has now. No, all above board, all completely signed off. And we wanted to make it worthwhile, because again, these are the people that believed in us. So if you're part of the Founding Tribe, and you refer people, you can get up to 15 entry-fee-free investments on the Tribe platform. Also invitations to exclusive events. We've already played padel with a number of the Founding Tribe members. As we go live, we'll be doing exclusive investment webinars, walkthroughs of potential fix-and-flips we might do in the future, whatever it may be. That Founding Tribe is always going to be the community we go to for things that have exclusivity. We'll go to them first. Another side of that is, if you're part of the Founding Tribe, our first investment property is around the corner, and it's going to be exclusively available to the Founding Tribe only. Why? Because we want to say thank you to them again for believing in us. So we want them to have exclusive first access to the first investment property we put onto Tribe.

Gary: Very cool. So if you're listening and you want to get involved, get on the Tribe website, go on the Founding Tribe page, and sign yourself up. But importantly, if you think there's anyone else, get them involved too. And like you said, that is the most simple, foundational premise of Tribe, in that we want to enable friends, family, colleagues, peers to invest in assets together, as opposed to having the whole risk and the whole amount of capital concentrated on your own individual shoulders. Two more questions, and let's look ahead for the final two. When Tribe succeeds, which founding principle will have been the most influential in Tribe's successful outcome?

Alastair: I think, and again it's something we spoke about in our first ever meeting, psychological safety. It's something I believe in so strongly, and it's something we have in Tribe as a business. And why is that so important? It's so important because it enables us to have the conversations we need to have. It enables us to disagree agreeably. It allows us to have strong opinions and hold them loosely, without fear of someone calling you out for it. That, for me, as a founding principle of how we operate, is going to be one of the core reasons we succeed.

Gary: And so, to the final question. We are building Tribe very much in public, which leads us here today. What is your prediction for the road ahead for Tribe? And specifically, I'd like you to give me both the biggest opportunity in your mind, let's contain it to six months, or the rest of 2026, and importantly, the biggest obstacle.

Alastair: I'll start with the biggest obstacle, because it's an obvious one, which is cost. Marketing costs are harder and harder to keep down. So when we look at going out and needing to acquire investors, I think it's a lot harder than people think. Again, there's a misconception that you can print money with social media advertising. That era is over. So that's probably the thing that keeps me up most at night, that when we start to scale, which is why I put so much time into the brand and content and experimentation early on, when we start to scale, how does that look? Because it's a really big problem, and it's something you have to invest in, and it compounds over time. That's from a pure marketing lens. In terms of the opportunity, it's the fact that real estate's massive.

Gary: Right. It's huge.

Alastair: But that's the opportunity. Again, not only are we serving someone that wants to invest 2,000 dirhams, we've got products in the pipeline that will serve people who want to invest 20 million, 200 million, whatever it may be. And that's what's super exciting, that's what the opportunity is. Now, can any of us around the table say which one is going to be the one? No. I mean, that's slightly scary, but it's also very exciting. But what gives me confidence is that we've got a very clear eye on a number of avenues, a number of different versions of our product, that serve those different types of audiences. And that's what gives me the most confidence, because I know we've got the brand sitting behind it that can talk to those different audiences and segments in the way they need to be. So yeah, I think real estate is massive.

Gary: Real estate is indeed massive. Well, Alastair, thank you for lending us your brain for an hour or so. It's much appreciated. I always learn whenever we sit down, and you always spark another thought, or many thoughts and ideas. I wanted to say thank you, because had you not accepted my cold LinkedIn request and my cold DM to say hello, you don't know me, we've never met, but can I buy you a coffee, which obviously is a little bit weird, if we'd never met, then we obviously wouldn't be sitting here today. So thank you for that, and for entertaining my thinking, my unpolished thoughts, and for disagreeing with me from day one, for continuing to disagree with me, and with Cormac and Dennis and Seb and Hunter. I think you're absolutely right, that ability to respectfully acknowledge each other's point of view but respectfully disagree where you fundamentally believe that to be the case is so important, and you have brought that and unlocked that foundationally within Tribe. For that I'm very grateful, because we can't build something we're really proud of if we're not really proud of the foundations, the principles, the values. So, whether it's brand, the marketing engine, the product, the website, across the board, I think your influence on that is perhaps even greater than you realize. And not just myself, the whole team are grateful for it, and these conversations are very powerful. So, thank you very much.

Alastair: No, thank you. And look, I've never worked as hard in my entire life.

Gary: Great. Keep it up.

Alastair: I never thought I'd be launching a business with a newborn and in a war, but I've never had as much fun at work, which is testament to the team. Got a great team. And yeah, long may it continue.

Gary: And we'll wrap it there. Thank you.

Alastair: Thank you.