Fake It Till You Make It in Bahrain: Marcus Gaughan on Agentic AI and Scrappy Growth

Jack Tompkins
Aug 2
4 min read

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Marcus Gaughan didn't start his consulting career with a polished pitch deck or a defined niche. He started with a pair of goggles held together with Raspberry Pi wires, a light therapy treatment he'd experienced firsthand for a vision condition, and an optometrist who pulled the rug out in a single email. That rejection became the foundation of a philosophy that still drives Minds on Fire today: push on the walls, and sometimes they crumble.

On this episode of Scrappy But Successful, Marcus walks Jack through a career that spans nanoscience, manufacturing tech platforms, pandemic-era pivots, investor conferences in Bahrain, and - now - building agentic AI tools for businesses of all sizes.

The First Startup That Almost Wasn't

At 19, Marcus walked into his first entrepreneurship class at the University of Waterloo and immediately lined up after class to take his professor up on three offers at once: a job at the incubator, introductions, and help developing a business idea. The idea was personal - a portable version of the light therapy treatment that had improved his own vision by 70% after years of being told his amblyopia was permanent.

He built a working prototype - screens taped inside a pair of glasses, wires running to a Raspberry Pi, displaying light sequences designed to retrain the eye. He got the head of the School of Optometry engaged. Iris, a major eye care company, was watching. Then the original optometrist who held the treatment license sent one email: no. That was it. The whole thing gone in a single reply.

Marcus walked away with something more durable than a product: the belief that pushing on seemingly immovable walls is always worth trying, because you never know which ones are made of dust.

Fake It Till You Make It: From Bahrain to Riyadh

In 2022, with Minds on Fire rebuilding after the pandemic wiped out its core clients, Marcus's friend and event organizer Nick Batchy offered him an unusual opportunity: fly to Bahrain for an investor conference. Nick would handle all the marketing, Marcus would get exposure to a room of 300 hand-selected global figures - all because Marcus had been in the trenches with Nick during the reset years.

Marcus scrambled to look the part - new business cards, a better logo, a redesigned website, international banking. He walked in projecting a company that had been continuously building since 2017 and came home with two clients: a UK sustainability platform, and Sultan al-Sultan, the son of the governor of Riyadh, who'd been circling Marcus for two days before sitting down and asking if he knew anything about smart cities. He didn't, exactly. He took the meeting anyway.

He also had an ordinary conversation with a woman at the event - until Nick pulled him aside afterward and showed him a photo: the Queen of a major Indonesian indigenous population, managing roughly 3.2 trillion dollars in wealth. The takeaway from the whole trip: everyone puts their pants on one foot at a time, and the rooms that look inaccessible from outside are more normal on the inside than you'd expect.

Offensive vs. Defensive AI: Where the Real Money Is

Minds on Fire today is a scaling agency using technology and workflow optimization to grow businesses - and for the past year and a half, that means agentic AI. Marcus frames the work in two modes: offensive and defensive.

Offensive AI goes outward - content creation, cold outreach on LinkedIn and Reddit, social distribution - anything aimed at generating and capturing attention. Defensive AI goes internal: scanning invoices, surfacing overdue payments, summarizing CRM data, routing workflows. For a team of 5-15, a well-built defensive agent can save tens of thousands of dollars annually by eliminating the work that fills mornings and kills focus.

Marcus's next project: a self-serve platform where businesses pick their problem - reduce estimating time, add outbound intelligence, improve AP/AR visibility - and get an agent built into their stack. His pitch: it doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to replace anyone, and it can start delivering ROI fast. "Defensive," he told Jack at the end of the episode, "that's where all the money is."

Lessons from a Decade of Solo Founding

For most of his twenties, Marcus handed out equity reflexively - 20% here, 10% there - to anyone who might round out a team. Most of those partnerships went nowhere. His last formal co-founder arrangement, a CNC manufacturer marketplace from 2017 to 2020, ended when the pandemic made continuing impractical and their product visions couldn't be reconciled.

Today he partners arm's length - defined scope, revenue splits for specific projects, clean exits. He runs Minds on Fire solo and doesn't see himself taking on equity partners unless it's specifically for a product or SaaS launch. He's also expecting his first child in January, which is quietly shifting how he thinks about what he's building and who it might eventually be for.