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Ali Aydan – British Manufacturing Means Little Until You Give It Meaning
Ali Aydan says; What Exactly Is British About It? A buyer asked me that at a trade counter early on. He’d picked up one of our boxes, looked at the flag on it, and asked the one question the flag couldn’t answer. My reply was thinner than I’d have liked. He nodded politely and…
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Ali Aydan – Operating Under Load
Ali Aydan says; The Certificate Was Due in Eight Weeks.It Took Five Months. By the time it arrived, the product had been finished for a season. The packaging was printed. A launch plan built around a promised date had quietly come apart. Nobody in the test house had done anything wrong. The mistake was…
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Ali Aydan: Built, Not Borrowed: Recurring Revenue Is Earned Not Installed
Recurring Revenue Is the Reward, Not the Prize The first revenue model I built for our software platform charged a monthly fee on every line. Remote unlock, a fee. Extra users, a fee. Even the log showing who came through the door. On paper it was beautiful. Recurring revenue on everything. I killed it…
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Ali Aydan: How to Sell a Premium Product In a Market That Starts With Price
“Match their price and the order is yours.” Early on, I matched. We discounted to win a large order against a cheaper competitor and told ourselves it was a foot in the door. The customer haggled every reorder after that. They were gone within the year. The discount didn’t just cost us margin. It…
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Ali Aydan: 5 Channel Partnership Mistakes That Cost More Than Lost Revenue
New on Forbes Business Development Council this week, the opening instalment in my Partnership Playbook series. The worst channel partnership I ever signed looked perfect on paper. Strong regional presence. Experienced sales team. National footprint. Within six months, that partner had repositioned our product into a price bracket we’d spent two years building away…
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Ali Aydan: Control your home from anywhere.
There’s a test we run on every piece of software before it goes live. I hand it to someone who didn’t build it and say nothing. No tutorial. No walkthrough. No PDF guide. If they can’t figure it out in under sixty seconds, we’ve failed. This sounds obvious. It isn’t. The smart home industry…
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Ali Aydan: What is on my desk.
Every founder I know has a book that arrived at exactly the right moment. Not the one everyone recommends. The one that found you when you needed it. For me, right now, it’s “Secrets of Sand Hill Road” by Scott Kupor.Kupor spent two decades inside Andreessen Horowitz. He wrote this book from the investor’s…
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Ali Aydan: The line between commercial and residential is blurring.
And most buildings aren’t ready. Walk into a new co-working space in Shoreditch, and it looks like someone’s living room. Velvet sofas. Soft lighting. A kitchen island where the reception desk used to be. Walk into a new luxury flat in Battersea and it feels like a members’ club.Concierge. Controlled entry. Digital access management…
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Ali Aydan: London is changing. Security must adapt.
In 2024/25, the Met recorded over 951,803 crimes across the capital. Robbery is up nearly 9% year on year. Theft from the person runs at five times the national average. I’m not sharing those numbers to frighten anyone. I’m sharing them because most people I speak to, smart, successful people, have no idea how…
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Ali Aydan: Hardware is a transaction. Security is a service.
For decades, the access control industry operated on a very simple model. You build a metal lock, sell it once, and walk away. The customer takes all the risk from that moment forward. At DORIX, we realised this transactional approach is fundamentally broken. A physical lock is static. The threats it faces are dynamic.…