Owen Hagenes

Why this persona fits the audience

He runs a 2-person lead generation consultancy in Manchester and spends part of each week pulling contact details and directory listings into Airtable and Sheets. For larger lists he has a few Playwright scripts and browser profiles running on a laptop used mostly for client work.

• Age: 29
• Location: Manchester, UK
• Occupation: Founder
• Income: £52k owner draw equivalent
• Education: Some university, no degree
• Company size: 2 (himself and one junior contractor)
• Years in role: 3 years

“If I'm not building the thing that does the work, I'm just paying someone else to do my job for me.”

Owen Hagenes is the architect of his own friction. At 29, he rejected the traditional career ladder of university degrees and corporate stability, opting instead to carve out a niche in the unglamorous world of B2B lead generation. Based in Manchester, he operates a lean, two-person consultancy that thrives on agility but struggles with the inherent volatility of web scraping. His background is a patchwork of self-taught Python and incomplete computer science modules, a combination that has made him fiercely pragmatic. He doesn't care about clean code for aesthetics; he cares about code that extracts data before the site changes its layout. The reality of Owen's life is defined by the tension between manual labor and automation. While he champions the efficiency of tools, his daily existence involves dragging and dropping thousands of rows of data into Airtable, a task he loathes but accepts as the cost of doing business. He recently made the decision to upgrade his laptop to a machine with better thermal handling, a costly move necessitated by the constant crashing of his browser profiles during heavy scraping runs. This investment reflects his core value of speed; downtime costs him money directly. Owen's relationship with technology is transactional yet intimate. He treats his scripts like living pets that require constant feeding and grooming. He is currently navigating a period of stagnation where his manual efforts have plateaued, and his automated solutions are hitting a ceiling of complexity. He is exploring new ways to aggregate data but remains wary of 'all-in-one' platforms that promise ease but demand high subscription fees. For now, he survives on a delicate balance of grit, custom-built tools, and the relentless pursuit of the next profitable lead.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

Owen wakes up at 7:15 AM, skips breakfast, and immediately checks his servers and email for any failed scrapers overnight. After a quick espresso, he cycles 12 miles to a co-working space in Ancoats, using the commute to listen to tech podcasts. At 9:30 AM, he sits down to tackle the 'dirty work': manually cleaning CSV exports from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and cross-referencing them against Google Maps to ensure accuracy. By 11:00 AM, he switches contexts to coding, debugging a Playwright script that stopped capturing phone numbers due to a CAPTCHA update. Lunch is a sandwich eaten at his desk while reviewing a potential client's CRM setup. The afternoon is reserved for client calls and delivering reports, followed by an evening of 'hacking'—building a new automation for a different client's niche. He finishes around 9:00 PM, exhausted but satisfied that he hasn't wasted a single hour on low-value tasks.

Lifestyle

Owen lives in a modest, slightly cluttered terraced house in Fallowfield, Manchester, sharing the rent with two other creatives who are often out working late. His evenings are split between cycling on the local canal paths—usually a grueling 15-mile ride to clear his head—and tinkering with home automation or mechanical keyboards. He is financially cautious; every pound spent on software is weighed against its immediate ROI. He eats cheaply, mostly cooking pasta or curry at home, but splurges on high-end coffee and ergonomic gear for his desk. Socially, he prefers one-on-one drinks with peers who understand the grind of solo entrepreneurship rather than large group gatherings, often discussing the latest API changes or cycling routes instead of party gossip.

Work life

His day is dominated by the dual reality of being both the product and the sales force. Mornings are spent manually curating leads from directories, pasting data into Airtable, and verifying emails—a tedious bottleneck he tries to automate. When he switches to 'build mode', he deploys Playwright scripts on his primary laptop, which doubles as his client workstation, forcing him to manage resource contention carefully. The pressure comes from the fragility of his revenue; if a script breaks or a target site changes its structure, income halts immediately. He works irregular hours, often coding until 11 PM when the internet traffic is lighter or after clients go offline, driven by a need to prove that his small operation can punch above its weight.

Relationships

Owen maintains a tight-knit circle of four close friends, all fellow founders or developers, with whom he shares a private Discord server for venting and troubleshooting. He has a strained but cordial relationship with his parents, who view his lack of a degree as a missed opportunity but respect his financial independence. He interacts daily with his sole employee, a young coder he mentors, treating him more like a junior partner than an subordinate. His influence stems from his technical competence; people ask him how to fix their own broken automations, reinforcing his identity as the 'go-to guy' in his local network.

How they decide

Owen operates on a heuristic of 'verify before you buy.' He is highly skeptical of marketing fluff and will only commit to a new tool after a rigorous, hands-on trial period where he attempts to replicate his current workflow. He relies heavily on community validation, specifically looking for niche discussions on Reddit or Hacker News where users admit to failures. If a solution requires a steep learning curve or a significant upfront cost, he will default to extending his existing manual or semi-automated process unless the time savings are mathematically undeniable.

How they sound

Speaks with a clipped Mancunian cadence, dropping 'g's and using rapid-fire sentence structures. He favors direct, imperative language ('Just run it,' 'Fix the selector') over polite hedging. He rarely uses corporate jargon like 'synergy' or 'deliverables,' preferring terms like 'bottleneck,' 'pipeline,' and 'regex.' He avoids admitting uncertainty, often framing unknowns as 'edge cases to solve' rather than gaps in knowledge. Slang is used sparingly, mostly related to tech or cycling culture.