The story
Where Conigrum came from — and where it's going.
I was mid-dream, inside a puzzle built from quantum logic — the kind where being human was one of the moving pieces, not the player. Somewhere in it, a word surfaced. Conigrum. I'd never heard it. I checked later, half expecting to feel foolish. It didn't exist. I'd been handed a word with no owner.
A conundrum is a problem with no clean answer. Conigrum felt like the same thing on a quantum level — the puzzle beneath the puzzle, where the rules themselves are still in motion. It was the right name for the work: taking the problems a business can't yet see the shape of, and finding the idea hidden inside them.
The road here
Before Conigrum, I spent years in senior executive roles across European and local businesses — learning how growth actually happens, and how rarely it happens by accident.
Then I founded Acorn. It started in a basement office. It grew into a team of a hundred, multi-award-winning, and twice named Agency of the Year — and was eventually acquired (Hyper Marketing, later Epsilon), having created work for brands including Google, Dell and Bank of Ireland.
Every step taught the same lesson. Execution gets you in the room. The idea is what wins it.
Ten thousand hours is the rough price of mastery. I've spent more than that on a single question — why do a few ideas move people and markets, while most simply disappear? Conigrum is what that time learned, turned into a practice.
What comes next
AI has made the making of things almost free. Anyone can produce competent work now, endlessly. Which means competent is worth nothing — and the original idea, with the judgement to know it will land, is the last real advantage a brand has.
That's the bet Conigrum is built on. Not more marketing. Better thinking. And a difference you can measure.