In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Tom Capone about his journey from running a marketing agency to building Lens AI, an AI product marketer designed to replace the work of agencies and consultants. Tom shares his path from dropping out of university in London, growing up in Rome, and starting his first agency at seventeen, to scaling it into a business that generated over fifty million dollars in revenue for brands like L'Oreal, Uber Eats, and Huawei. He explains how repeated exposure to founders with brilliant products but no marketing budget or expertise inspired him to build Lens AI, a platform that uses an AI strategy agent and execution agent to generate and run full marketing campaigns across ads, content, SEO, email, and influencer channels. Tom discusses his belief that entrepreneurship is the best response to AI driven job displacement and describes his vision for democratizing distribution so anyone can turn a product into a real business.
An agency founder explains how he built an AI system to replace marketing agencies and help anyone launch and scale products online.
Where did you study, and when did you realize formal education would not be the whole story for you?
I grew up in Rome and went to university in the UK mostly as an excuse to leave Italy. Almost immediately I started my own businesses around age seventeen, including the marketing agency I still run today, which worked with over 200 brands and generated more than fifty million dollars in revenue for companies like L'Oreal, Uber Eats, and Huawei. That journey is what eventually led me to build Lens AI.
Your mom stopped talking to you when you said you were dropping out to pursue entrepreneurship. What gave you the confidence to push ahead?
Older generations equate a university degree with getting a job, but the economy is shifting fast. Companies like Amazon are already laying off thousands, and I believe that trend will only accelerate with AI. I see entrepreneurship as the real alternative to eventually relying on universal basic income, so my mission is to empower people to become entrepreneurs by making online distribution easier.
Was there a particular campaign or brand win that made you think you had figured something out?
I hired an ex marketing manager from Huawei as my CMO and learned a huge amount from him, which opened doors to work with Huawei and L'Oreal directly. The real turning point was hitting a 24x return on a Q4 campaign and later averaging around a 70x return on Black Friday ad campaigns. That was when I realized cracking online marketing, especially with AI, could generate serious results.
What drew you to marketing in the first place?
I always saw a salesperson as someone who gets a potential customer through the door, and I realized doing that at scale with a website and the right creative felt like a superpower. I had to prove it worked for clients first, building up through the right talent, connections, and systems until I saw the patterns AI could execute faster, more precisely, and without the errors or downtime a human team would have.
When did meeting disruptive founders without enough money or marketing knowledge become a pattern you felt compelled to fix?
It happened organically. Our agency usually worked with medium to higher ticket clients, so we could never serve startups, yet I kept getting inquiries from incredibly innovative founders, some building flying cars or smart toothbrushes, who could not get their products to market. That felt like a real deal breaker to me, and I still believe the main bottleneck to innovation today is founders being unable to crack distribution online.
What problem is Lens AI solving and how does it work?
We are solving how to help products grow from zero to a million users. We trained an AI strategy agent on over ten thousand case studies ranging from 2x to 50x return on investment within three to six months. A founder chats with the agent for a few minutes and gets a full marketing strategy in under five minutes, which then gets handed to an AI execution agent that turns it into actual tasks like generating and launching ads, tracking performance, and reallocating budget automatically.
Where can people learn more about you and Lens AI?
I am on LinkedIn as Tom Capone, on X as Tom Capone 11, and on Instagram as Tomcp17. Lens AI is at lens.ai, spelled l f r e e dot a i, and we currently have a closed beta running with ecommerce, creator economy, and software companies, with pre orders available right now at ninety percent off ahead of a full launch later this year.
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