Free resources for early-stage founders
Assessments, question banks, and writing on customer evidence — built for founders at pre-seed to Series A who are deciding what's actually worth building.
Everything here is free and ungated. No email required for any of it.
Start with the problem you have
Two assessments that give you a score and a diagnosis in about ten minutes each.
You're not sure anyone actually wants this.
The Kill Decision
Ten questions on whether your evidence supports the direction you're heading. Interactive, or download the PDF.
Take the assessment →People want it, but your messaging isn't landing.
The Early-Stage Messaging Audit
Ten questions on the gap between what your product does and how it reads.
Take the audit →Guides and question banks
Longer reference material for the work itself — the conversations, the pricing, the profile.
Your interviews keep going well and nothing changes afterwards.
The Customer Interview Question Bank
Thirty questions that surface behaviour instead of opinion, plus the eight that quietly produce false positives.
Read the question bank →Everyone says they'd pay, and nobody has.
The Willingness-to-Pay Conversation
How to test whether money exists behind the problem, using budget history and commitment rather than hypothetical price questions.
Read the guide →Your ICP is a sentence with the word 'teams' in it.
The ICP One-Pager
Nine prompts that turn a vague audience description into a definition someone else could go and find customers with.
Build your one-pager →Notes
Essays on evidence, interview design, and the language customers use.
Validation · 6 min read
The difference between evidence and a strong feeling
Most founders can't tell their evidence from their conviction, because both feel the same from the inside. A practical test for separating them.
Research · 5 min read
Why everyone says yes and nobody buys
The social mechanics that turn customer interviews into false positives, and how to design questions that survive them.
Messaging · 6 min read
Your homepage is written in your language, not theirs
What psycholinguistics says about the gap between how founders describe a product and how buyers search for one.
Case studies
Longer-form accounts of customer evidence work inside product organisations.
How enterprise customers become strategic partners in product growth
Enterprise B2B software team inside a multinational technology company
How we turned customer feedback into real adoption and growth
Software product team inside a multinational technology company
Driving growth with a unified voice of customer programme
Fast-growing technology company
Signal & Sense
A biweekly newsletter on cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and user research. Short, practical, and aimed at people making product decisions with incomplete information.
Subscribe →Why these exist
I work with funded early-stage teams on validation — the three-week kind that ends in a build, pivot, or kill decision.
But most founders who find this site aren't ready for that, and telling them otherwise would be dishonest. These are the parts of that work you can do without me. They're genuinely useful on their own, and a fair number of people use them and never get in touch. That's fine.
If you get through one and want an outside read on your answers, the fit call is twenty minutes and free.