Stage 01 · Day zero
Before there is strategy, there is a small fire you have to keep alive.
You do not need a consultant yet. You need to walk the first 100 metres without falling. What follows is what we would give a friend over coffee. Free. Detailed. Yours.
- Build the smallest possible loop.
- Measure before you scale.
- Talk to 10 customers.
- Then 20 more.
- 7
- days to set this up properly
- 1
- number that matters most
- 30
- conversations to clarity
The week before growth
The week before you spend a single euro on growth.
Marketing without instrumentation is theatre. Every founder we have watched burn money skipped one of these. Do them in order. Each one takes hours, not weeks.
Pick one sentence.
Who you serve, what you change for them and the word they would use, not yours. If you cannot fit it in 14 words, you do not know it yet.
Build a memory.
One place where every conversation lives. 5 columns: who, where they came from, what stage, last touch, next step. Customers you forget never come back.
Install the instruments.
2 events on your site that mean money. A hand raised, an intention shown. Test that they fire before you ship. If you cannot see them in real time, your dashboard is fiction.
Define a single conversion metric.
One number that, if it goes up, the company is healthier. Not three. One. Open it before email.
Calculate the economics, roughly.
Revenue per customer, times gross margin, times expected retention. That is your ceiling for what one customer can cost to win. Your first growth budget is a fraction of it, never a multiple.
Open a feedback loop.
Every customer gets a 15-minute call within 7 days. What almost stopped you. What surprised you. What would you tell a friend. The patterns in the first 30 calls beat any focus group.
Pick one channel.
Just one. Run it for 60 days. Read the dashboard daily. 5 mediocre channels is how new companies die.
The companies we admire most were not smart early. They were honest early. About the numbers, the customers and the size of the fire.
7 free field guides.
- 01 The Sentence Compress what you do into one line your customers would actually use. 16 pages · PDF
- 02 The Memory A relationship system from blank page to the first 100 records. 18 pages · PDF
- 03 The Instruments The 2 events every founder should track on day one. 25 pages · PDF
- 04 The Numbers The single metric that defines health, plus the simplest LTV and CAC worksheet. 16 pages · PDF
- 05 The Loop The customer-call ritual: 3 questions, tagged answers, real patterns. 17 pages · PDF
- 06 The Channel One channel for 60 days: choose it, instrument it, read it, kill it. 25 pages · PDF
We do not take new companies into our portfolio.
Not because the work is not worthy. It is the most important work there is. Our model only fits when there is enough signal to read and enough volume to move. Bringing us in too early would burn your runway and bore us both.
So instead, the path and the guides above. Walk that path for 6 months. You will either not need us, or you will be exactly the kind of small company we love.