For investors, accelerators, and portfolio managers
The product works. The selling does not. And your advice bounces off.
Get your founders unstuck on the commercial side, in a way they welcome.
The product works. The selling does not, and your advice bounces off. You can see the team is stuck on the commercial side, and you are the one carrying it. You cannot embed, you cannot tell if it is the positioning or the people, and every hour on one company is an hour off the rest. I help your founders build the system themselves, so they start selling and you stop carrying it alone.
From founders and operators I have worked with.
Does this sound familiar?
One of your companies, right now.
- The team talks constantly, events, webinars, pitches, but the message never lands.
- Two years in, real product, and still nothing that sells repeatably.
- They keep their options open instead of committing to who it is for.
- You ask the sharp question and it just does not land. They go quiet, or they defend.
- You suspect they are afraid to really sell, but from the outside you cannot tell if it is the positioning or the people.
- Every hour you spend unblocking one company is an hour off all the rest.
Recognize two or three? You are in the right place.
The real blocker
The moment it feels like an audit, the team goes quiet.
The gap is almost never the technology.
Strong team, real product, two years in. The product works. The commercial system to sell it was never built, and that is a different kind of work.
Advice does not build that system.
You ask the sharp question and it bounces off. Not because the founder will not listen, but because a system gets built by doing the work, not by receiving one more view.
Most oversight is a shovel. The founder needs a refrigerator.
A shovel is everything you already know, pushed down at them. A refrigerator is help they can reach for when the question is live. Send someone to inspect the team and it reads as a threat. They close up, and you learn even less.
I have been that founder, with corporate investors who ran an enterprise due-diligence playbook on a young startup. It did not just miss, it pushed us closer to the edge. The help a founder chooses and owns is the kind that sticks.
The test is not pressure versus patience. It is diagnosis versus reflex, and most boards never ask which they are doing. The longer argument →
The way in
The weight comes off your desk.
✓
They move on their own
Decisions get made, the messaging sharpens, the selling focuses. Real execution with the team, not another report that sits.
✓
It is theirs, so they do not resist it
The read, the decisions, the system, in their own repo. Nothing reported over their head, so nothing to close up against.
✓
The transparency you never had
The founder can share their scored read and their repo with you, because it is theirs to share. Access you are granted, not access you impose.
The softest way in: send a founder a free read of their homepage. Useful, theirs, and it opens the conversation with no top-down word.
One read, every company you back
See what is working and what is not, on every journey that makes a company sell.
The buyer's journey, the user's journey, the team's journey, and yours, in one picture. Which decisions got made and which never did. Which assets are in place and which do not work. The same way across every company, so you compare on the same terms. Not a scorecard that grades people. One table everyone looks at together.
See the full read
How they buyfind → signed
Targeting · Positioning · Proof · Sales pitch · Demo · First step · Pricing · Brand · Channels · Demand · Deal approval
How they growkeep & expand
Onboarding · Retention · Expansion · Referrals · Momentum
How they scalepast the founder
Rhythm · Who decides · Metrics · Team · Sales org
Each job marked holds, leaks, or unbuilt. The same map every company gets, so the read is consistent from one to the next.
The questions in your head
What you are probably wondering.
✓
The founder will not accept outside help.
They are not being inspected. It is their read, their repo, their system. You sponsor the way in, they own what happens.
✓
It is not my job to fix their go-to-market.
It is not. You give them a way to fix it themselves, the value-add you always wished you had to offer.
✓
I do not have time to manage another vendor.
That is the point. One place to send any company that gets stuck on selling, instead of unblocking each one yourself.
I shape it around your portfolio: warm introductions, sponsored engagements, a cohort read. No fixed package, because the right shape depends on your portfolio. That is what the first conversation is for.
Is this your portfolio?
Who this is for.
For you, if
- The companies you back have real demand, but the product story and the selling keep missing.
- You want the team to actually move, not receive another report.
- You would rather give founders help they welcome than push from above.
Not for you, if
- What you want is help dressing up an exit story.
- You want a surveillance report on the team, over their heads.
- You believe the gap is the technology, not the selling.
Why me
I have sat on every side of this table. The founder wrestling a board that saw only part of the picture, with advice six months out of date and no hand to help. The more experienced founder others came to for advice, running a corporate innovation portfolio. The cohort founder, in a European accelerator cohort, watching coaches arrive who did not understand the business. I know why the team goes quiet, and I know the help that lands.
I also built a marketplace for chemical materials that ran 1.5 billion euros in transactions, and I still did not know how to grow my own customers, repeatably. I build against exactly that gap.
So I do the opposite of what was done to me. No enterprise checklist run on a young company. Operator judgment, built for where the company actually is.
A recent pattern, anonymized: a B2B tech founder I backed, two years in, product working, sales stuck on unclear messaging and decision paralysis. The one you keep seeing.
Want the whole story, including the parts that did not work? Founder to founder →
Start a conversation
Tell me where your portfolio is stuck.
A short call, no pitch. I look at one or two companies with you, and we find the way in your founders will actually welcome. You have been carrying this alone. You do not have to.
Curious what a founder gets? The Audit maps it →