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Discovery Sprint · Six weeks

A structured way to find out who you’re for, before you commit to anything bigger.

Six weeks. 16–20 customer interviews. A named beachhead segment. A strategic brief your board can read in twenty minutes. With a go/no-go gate before any retainer.

This is for you if

Three signals you're at the moment for this.

  • You raised between USD 1M and USD 8M and the next cheque depends on traction you don't yet have.
  • You've shipped product. The pipeline is noise. Every founder meeting ends with "let's revisit ICP next week."
  • You've considered hiring a full-time marketer but the brief would be written by a founder who's never managed marketing.

What you leave with

Concrete artefacts. Not a deck filed in a Drive.

  • A named beachhead segment

    Specific enough to act on. Validated against the people who actually buy.

  • 16–20 customer-interview transcripts

    Recruited, conducted, and analysed. Quotes mapped to themes, not vibes.

  • A 5–8 page strategic brief

    Your board can read it in twenty minutes. It says what to do next, and why.

The shape, week by week

Three phases. One gate. One way out.

The structure is the trust signal. Most fractional CMOs don't sell this way, the discipline is half the value.

  1. Phase 0 · Foundation

    Week 1

    • Compliance and readiness audit
    • Tech and ops stack check
    • Prerequisites checklist (data, access, people)
  2. Phase 1 · Discovery

    Weeks 2–4

    • 16–20 customer interviews, recruited, conducted, analysed
    • Beachhead segment definition
    • Strategic brief (5–8 pages) you can show your board
  3. Gate · Go / no-go

    End of week 4

    • Honest read on whether the work is landing
    • No retainer pressure, stop here if the answer is no-go
    • All deliverables to date are yours

Where it doesn't fit

Honest about the wrong-fit cases.

  • Pre-product or pre-funding. The Clarity Sprint is the right shape for that, half a day, smaller commitment.
  • You already know your beachhead and channel. Skip Discovery and go straight to a Fractional retainer or Advisory.
  • You want execution capacity, not strategy. An agency or a senior in-house marketer is a better fit than a fractional CMO.

Read first, decide later

The thinking behind this offer.

Long-form essays. No gate, no email capture. Read the argument before you book the call.

Six weeks. A gate. A real answer.

Tell me where you are. I'll tell you whether a Discovery Sprint is the right shape, and what we'd cover in a 30-minute call.