Getting it in front of buyers, run as an experiment log
Pricing, positioning and the first acquisition channels — treated as a series of tests with numbers attached, rather than a launch plan that gets written once and quietly abandoned.
Most products don't fail at the build
They fail in the six months afterwards, when it turns out nobody knew how to describe the thing, the price was picked by looking at a competitor, and the first channel was chosen because it was the one the founder had heard of.
That stretch is where we stay attached. A build we hand over that never finds customers isn't a success we'd claim.
Pricing is a product decision
What you charge determines who buys, what they expect, and how much support each customer costs you. It's not a number to settle at the end — it shapes what gets built.
We work it out from willingness to pay and cost to serve, then write it down as a hypothesis with a way to check it. If the first price is wrong, and it often is, you find out from data rather than from a slow quarter.
Two or three channels, tested properly
Trying eight acquisition channels badly teaches you nothing. We pick two or three that fit how your buyers actually decide, give each a real budget and a fixed window, and record what happened.
The output is an experiment log you keep: what was tried, what it cost, what it returned. That's the asset — the next twelve months of marketing decisions get made against evidence instead of instinct.
What's included
- Positioning
- Who it's for, and the sentence that makes them recognise themselves.
- Pricing
- Set from willingness to pay and cost to serve, then tested.
- Launch sequencing
- What ships to whom, in what order, and what has to be true first.
- Acquisition channels
- Two or three, each with a budget and a window.
- Instrumentation
- Events and funnels, so the numbers exist before you need them.
- Revenue reporting
- A weekly number that means the same thing every week.
Where we've done this
Questions we get asked
No. We don't run retainers for ad management or produce content calendars for their own sake. This is the work of finding a repeatable way to get customers, which we hand over once it's working — usually to whoever you hire next.
During the build, not after it. Positioning and pricing change what gets built — a product sold to procurement needs different things from one sold to an individual with a card. Leaving it until launch week means discovering that too late to act on it.
By working backwards from how your buyers already solve the problem. If they search for it, that's a search channel. If they ask peers, it's community and referral. If they don't know the problem has a name, it's outbound or content. Most products have two plausible channels, not eight.
That's the normal starting point. It means the early channels will be ones that don't depend on distribution you don't have — direct outreach, partnerships, and being genuinely useful in places your buyers already are. Audience is an outcome of the first year, not a prerequisite.