Featured
How I Use AI to Run a Startup Alongside a Full-Time Job
SEAR Plugs gets evenings, weekends and whatever focus is left after a full working day. Here is how AI and automation make that workable — and where they don't.
Read now →
Practical AI for founders
and small teams.
I'm Julia Raciniewska. I write about practical AI adoption, building SEAR Plugs, and using automation to run a startup alongside a full-time career. Real workflows, honest experiments, and lessons from building with limited time.
I work at the intersection of AI adoption, customer outcomes and entrepreneurship. Alongside a full-time role in high-growth AI, I co-founded a specialist water-sports brand with high B2C demand, stocked by 30+ UK retailers and EU expansion in progress. Running both has forced me to be deliberate about time, systems and automation — this site documents the workflows, mistakes and lessons behind that.
02 / Selected work
02
Flexibility Is Not the Same as Freedom
Remote work and flexible hours are conditions someone else sets. Freedom is what you own: skills, assets, systems and options. Notes on the difference, from someone building both a career and a company.
Read now →03
What I Automated First — and What Was Not Worth Automating
A walk through the first year of automating SEAR tasks: which ones paid back the setup time, and which quietly became more work.
Coming soon
03 / AI workflows
AI workflows for small teams.
I co-founded SEAR Plugs with Andrea Ferrario — a specialist water-sports earplug brand with high B2C demand, 30+ UK retailers and EU expansion in progress. It's also the live testing ground for this site: below are the AI workflows I've built to run it well, from SEO to outreach to operations.
- High B2C demand
- 30+ UK retailers
- EU expansion in progress
Website Optimisation
The Weekly SEO Audit: A Rules Engine Instead of 'The Agent Decided'
Every Monday at 07:00, a scheduled audit pulls Search Console signals, checks them against declarative rules, and emails a prioritised action list — with every finding logged and deduplicated in BigQuery.
Read more →Market Expansion & Outreach
B2B Outreach at Founder Scale: 236 Personalised Pitches, Every One Human-Sent
How we ran SEAR's UK wholesale outreach — segment-specific research and drafting by Claude, with a hard rule that no email leaves the account without my review.
Read more →Operations & Systems
Monthly Paid-Social Review on a Fixed Analysis Budget
A sequenced monthly Meta Ads review — fatigue, audience overlap, budget allocation — designed to fit a strict limit on analysis calls and hours.
Read more →04 / Builder mindset
Start with value, not with an agent.
Choose the least complex architecture that can deliver the outcome — and add human control where risk demands it.
01
Frame the value
- Strategy fit
- Baseline
- Impact hypothesis
- Success metric
02
Choose the operating pattern
Deterministic automation
Code follows fixed rules for stable, repeatable processes.
AI-assisted task
A person directs AI to complete a bounded task.
AI workflow
A predefined process combines AI and deterministic steps.
Agent
AI dynamically selects steps and tools within defined boundaries.
Use the simplest pattern that can reliably deliver the outcome.
How it runs·On demand·Event-triggered·Scheduled·Continuous
03
Design the system
Context · Instructions · Skills · Tools · Orchestration · Guardrails
04
Set the control level
Human-led · Approval gates · Monitored autonomy · Automated assurance
Control can vary by step.
05
Measure & improve
Quality · Adoption · Reliability · Cost · Business impact
What you learn in measurement, feeds the next “frame the value” decision.
Off the laptop
Outside work I surf, train and travel whenever I can. Those parts of my life aren't separate from the professional story — they're why I care about building better systems and more ownership over my time.
More on that thinking in Flexibility Is Not the Same as Freedom.
05 / Field notes
Field Notes
Occasional notes on AI workflows, building SEAR and what I'm learning. Written when there's something worth sending.