I’m Tamas Mihaly. I do AI-native marketing, and I teach it.
I do the work for businesses, and I teach teams to work the same way.
I’m a full-stack marketer based in Bristol, with over ten years across freelance work, in-house roles, agency life and businesses of my own. Today I do two things: I run marketing for businesses the AI-native way, and I teach business owners, marketing teams and agencies to work that way themselves. Thriving Colibri is how I do both.
How I got here
- Transylvania to Bristol
I’m originally from Transylvania, from a Hungarian family. After school I spent a couple of years in Greece, until I got bored of the good weather (I’m joking, obviously) and moved to the UK in 2014. I landed in Kent first, and I’ve been in Bristol since 2017.
- Hospitality first
My first work here was in hospitality, and it taught me things I still lean on every day: how to stay flexible, think on my feet, and read what a customer actually needs.
- Teaching myself the trade
During those years I taught myself digital marketing and website development, taking on freelance projects on the side. I worked my way up to assistant manager at a Best Western hotel, where marketing the place became part of the job. Then I co-founded one of the UK’s first t-shirt subscription businesses and ran the marketing side of it.
- A degree, then the agency years
After I exited that startup, I did my business and marketing degree at UWE Bristol, studying while I worked and, through lockdown, getting hands-on with a property development project on the side. Then I moved into the agency world: paid media, SEO, content, landing pages, the full mix, across a real spread of clients. That’s where the hospitality years quietly paid off, because half of account management is communication and relationships, and I’d been doing that since my first job.
- 3 December 2022
Then AI arrived, and I remember the exact day. Three days after ChatGPT launched, I told my partner Monika:
“This is going to disrupt the marketing industry big time, and I want to be part of this.”
Part of it as a builder, making the new things it makes possible. I went all in, experimenting, testing, working out how it could actually be used in real marketing.
- Convinced, while others weren’t
Plenty of people around me weren’t convinced.“It’s just hype.”“It’s rubbish.”“It can’t even count the r’s in strawberry.”I didn’t agree. To me this was clearly here to stay, and I wanted to be ahead of it. A few years on, I run client accounts with a setup of AI agents, built in Claude Code, that surface rare anomalies I’d never have spotted by hand.
- So I went out on my own
Before I left, I’d taken on getting an agency’s team to actually work with AI, day to day. That taught me the real lesson: the hard part isn’t the tools, it’s getting people to change how they work, which is exactly what I now teach other teams. The gap between what AI made possible and what the agency would adopt kept widening, until it was too wide to ignore. So I left to build the alternative: one person, AI-native from the ground up.
One model, two sides
Most people who find me want one of two things.
Some want their marketing handled, the whole of it: strategy, paid, SEO, content, landing pages and reporting, run by one accountable person.
Explore marketing servicesOthers want to build the capability in-house. For them I teach the exact AI workflows I use in live client delivery, the thinking behind them rather than the tool of the week, and I stay with it until the team actually adopts it. There’s a version built specifically for marketing teams.
Explore AI trainingDoing it for real every day keeps the training honest and current, never theory from a slide.
Teaching it forces the clarity that makes my own work sharper. Each side raises the other.
Not an agency. Not a freelancer.
Most businesses think they get two options. I built a third.
Thriving ColibriAI-native marketing partnerFast and affordable, but usually one specialism, and disconnected from everything else.
Everything under one roof, but slow, layered and expensive.
Joined-up and strategic like an agency. Lean and fast like a freelancer. AI-native, so one person can actually deliver the whole thing.
What “AI-native” actually means
AI runs through the whole process: research, first drafts, production, reporting. That’s where the speed and the fair pricing come from. The strategy, the judgement and the final call are mine, because that’s the part that decides whether the work is any good. I use this on real client work every single day, which is also what lets me teach it properly.
It only works because of the systems I’ve built to keep a human woven into the AI. Here are a couple of examples.
The Voice Fingerprint
Captures exactly how a business sounds, so the writing reads like them and not like a machine.
The Refine Loop
A human editing pass that sharpens every piece before it goes anywhere near your audience.
Small, fast, precise, agile
Colibri means hummingbird and it’s a deliberate choice. A hummingbird is small, fast, precise and endlessly agile, and far more powerful than its size suggests. That’s the kind of operation I set out to build.
And because AI moves so fast, agility is the whole game. A hummingbird changes direction in an instant, and that’s how I work with it: adapting as the tools shift, staying precise while everything around me speeds up.
A hummingbird beats its wings up to 80 times a second, with a heart that can pass 1,000 beats a minute. Small, but relentless.
I sit in the owner’s seat too
Beyond Thriving Colibri, I co-own a hair salon with my partner, Monika. So I read marketing the way an owner does, by asking whether it’s bringing money in. That shapes how I work: the focus stays on what actually moves the business, and the reporting comes back in plain English, so you always know what your money did.
You’re looking at how I work
Rather than talk about my approach, I’d sooner show it. Everything here, the positioning, the words, the way it’s built to be found and to convert, was done the AI-native way, the same one I’d bring to your marketing. What you see is what you’d get.
Let’s talk
Whether you want your marketing handled or your team trained to work this way, the next step is the same: a thirty-minute call to talk through where you are and whether I’m the right person to help.