// start-up

Start-ups learn from our successes and mistakes.

We walk with you, guide, and sometimes pick you up, exactly when you need it.

We have self-funded, raised seed and venture rounds, built go-to-market from nothing, led product and engineering teams, and exited. So you get the decisions with the scar tissue attached: what worked, what we got wrong, and how to tell which one you're looking at.

Or start with the book, free, about an hour →

// where we have sat
01Self-funded, raised seed and VC, and know the score
02Built go-to-market functions from the first hire up
03Led product and engineering teams through the messy years
04Scaled, and exited
10yrs
coaching founders and CEOs
100+
organisations
Matt Roberts
You will be working with Matt & Team
Co-founder, two-time SaaS founder, one exit.
Who it's for
Entrepreneurs
and founders
Solo, or a founding team of a few.
How it runs
Weekly, then when it earns it
Coaching, not a deliverable factory.
What you leave with
Evidence,
not opinions
A tested niche, something real in market, a rhythm.
Where it starts
Thirty minutes,
free
If you don't need us, we say so.
// what we work on

Three fronts. In this order, for a reason.

Founders usually run all three at once and lose to the loudest. Demand before you build. Feedback before you add. Money and team held steady underneath the whole thing.

01

Validate the market

Before anything is built, the question is whether anyone else has your problem badly enough to pay to be rid of it.

Talk to customers
Interview the people you intend to serve to see whether they share the problem, and how they cope with it today.
Test demand
Run low-cost tests before you build anything, hire anyone or sign a lease. Cheap tests, real signals, no sunk cost to defend.
Define your niche
Find the exact group who needs what you do most. Narrow is faster, and it's the only way a small team gets heard.
02

Build and launch

Get the smallest honest version in front of paying customers, then let them tell you what to do next.

Make the smallest version
Product, service or something in between: the least you can offer that someone will pay for. Everything extra buys delay and something to maintain.
Gather feedback
Watch what early customers actually do, not what they say they will do. Watching beats asking, every time.
Iterate fast
Fix what breaks and improve what gets used, on real data rather than the loudest voice in the room.
03

Team and money

The founding team, the cash and the handful of numbers that tell you whether any of it's working.

Find talent
Recruit co-founders and early hires who fill your skill gaps, and agree how you will decide things before you need to.
Track cash
Watch your burn rate to keep the business alive. Runway is the only deadline that can't be moved.
Set goals
Focus on the few metrics that show real growth, and ignore the ones that only look good in a deck.
Architect your OS and culture
Decide deliberately how you will operate, while it's still five people and cheap to change.
// why us

Coaching from experience, and from empathy.

We have raised seed and venture rounds. We have built go-to-market functions and led product and engineering teams. We have scaled companies and exited one. We have also had the month where the pipeline was empty and the runway was short, which is the part that makes the advice useful.

We will tell you when the idea isn't working, early, while it's still cheap to hear.
We coach you to decide, rather than handing you our answer to defend later.
You get an operating rhythm from day one, sized for a team who can't afford ceremony.
When you grow into a real operating model, the same people are already there for it.

Past fifty people and it's the system that is creaking? That is Scale Ready →

// asked and answered

The questions founders actually ask.

How is this different from Scale Ready? +

Scale Ready is for companies of fifty to five hundred people who already run some kind of operating model, whether they designed it or not. Start-up is for founders still proving the thing works. Different problem, different pace, same people coaching you.

We haven't built anything yet. Too early? +

That is the cheapest moment to talk. Most of the expensive mistakes we see were made before anything was built, in the choice of customer and problem.

Will you help us raise? +

We have raised seed and venture rounds ourselves, so we will tell you honestly how your numbers and your narrative look from the other side of the table. We are coaches, not a placement agent, and we won't introduce you to people we wouldn't vouch for.

Do we need OKRs at this size? +

Not the machinery, no. You need two or three things that matter this quarter, a number against each, and a weekly half hour where you look at them honestly. That is the whole thing at five people. The rest can wait until there is a rest to run.

Who will we work with? +

Founders and operators who have done it, including a co-founder who has built two SaaS companies with one exit. Not a delivery team reading from a deck.

Thirty minutes, and a straight answer.

Bring the thing you're stuck on. You will leave with a view on what to test next, whether or not you work with us.

Talk it through with Matt → Or book with Collette
What you'll notice

What changes while we're working with you

More ideas arrive

And a lot of them come from people and teams you weren't expecting.

They get looked at properly and answered, so the next lot arrives too. Nobody's idea disappears into a drive.

Ideas become choices

Real decisions about what becomes a goal, and where the money and the people go.

Then each goal gets built for what it actually is. If the point is to find something out, it's set up to find something out, rather than to deliver a number somebody guessed at in a planning meeting.

The friction goes

The things that annoyed people and slowed you down are gone.

The things that speed you up have been added instead.

Nobody calls it a process

It stops being the goal-setting thing and becomes how the company works.

Which is also the point at which it stops needing us.

The sum of it

More ideas, better choices, quicker learning, and a lot more people who can see where they contributed.

That last one does more for how the place feels than everything else on the list put together.

Why not you

Three reasons this can't be you

Getting help here isn't weakness. It's arithmetic.

You're inside it

Everything in there looks normal, because it's just how things get done here.

You can't diagnose a system you're standing inside.

You have a stake

None of you can chair that conversation cleanly.

Which few things to actually do is a decision you and your SLT all have skin in. We have watched bias dilute the right answer more times than we can count.

Nobody trained you

There's no professional body for this one.

Lawyers have a body that trains them and holds them to a standard. Anyone designing how a company plans, measures, judges and rewards has a management qualification that skipped it, a book or two, and what they saw work somewhere else.

What we bring

Patterns, gotchas, slides, templates, agenda and hours, mostly. Duller than it sounds.

You have a day job that fills all of yours. This is ours, and it's what our success gets measured on. We've seen what works and what doesn't at scale, so we can match it to your context rather than hand you the average, and we know which versions hold when a quarter goes badly.

The diagnostics, the learning assets and the people to run a programme already exist, with a human in the loop at every point that matters.

The building blocks

These are what's missing almost everywhere. Each one is a piece of work with a name, in the order it tends to happen.

01 Take a look
02 Propose improvements
03 Manage change
04 Train teams
05 Facilitate workshops
06 Coach through fear and misunderstanding
07 Listen, learn and adapt

Then step seven loops back to the design, which is what stops it being a project with an end date.

Already running OKRs? Get an objective read on the implementation: the OKR Implementation Review, free, 45 minutes.

// the book and the install pack

Six things turn a company that trades into one that scales.

An hour to read, five working templates and the AI install pack. Ten years of strategy and operating-system work, tested in engagements where growth came from better use of the hours a company already had.

Get it for £100 →The only place the install pack is available.