01 · founder debrief
Ask the same question of every win.
Every closed client. Fixed questions. Recorded. Transcript interrogated for what contradicted the official acquisition story.
Substrate 03 · Markets
Buyers who
don’t tell you.
Hear the structure.
Translate the decision.
Markets act without being told. They show you what they need in the places where the official story stops explaining the evidence.
THE QUESTION Who else lives inside this problem from a different position, and what does it cost them there?
The market move · from signal to choice
01 · Hear
Take the unexpected call seriously. The signal is usually underneath the request.
02 · Map
Follow the problem across the value chain, even when the person in front of you cannot buy.
03 · Translate
Turn the same underlying problem into the financial language of the decision-maker.
04 · Choose
Fund the market, segment, and message that survive contact with the people living inside it.
Repath · sourced
~$2.5M
Pipeline sourced. Closed revenue is not claimed because Kai left before the outcomes were known.
Repath · response
15.7%
Reply rate across thousands of outreach messages, after the market language was translated.
Repath · channel
$16K / 7
Comped across seven events, with three award nominations from a channel the company had written off.
HOW I OBSERVE MARKETS · OPEN / POROUS
Hear the structure,
not the answer.
A market rarely announces its real shape. You have to hear what is being revealed by a request, a contradiction, or a conversation that is technically “off-ICP.”
02 · non-buyer call
Keep the conversation.
The PPA buyer was not the customer. He still described the investors, lenders, developer, buyer, and operator living inside the same problem.
03 · market language
Read for words, not inspiration.
Investor quotes in trade press said financial modeling when the company was saying climate assessment. That gap was the message.
04 · call gap
Use the hours between calls.
Call → research → hypothesis → validation → refinement. The market model got sharper one conversation at a time.
THE INSTRUMENT
TAM is not found in a spreadsheet. It is heard in the detail of how people describe the problem from where they stand.
The value chain
was the map.
The reusable instrument starts with the problem, not the customer. First show the narrow assumption. Then reveal who else lives inside it.
One problem.
Five financial languages.
The map came from a forty-minute conversation with a person who could not buy from us.
01 · capital
Investors
& lenders
Is projected revenue at risk, and what does that do to valuation, debt service, and covenants?
02 · build
Developers
Are we overestimating NPV or production before we build, refinance, or sell the project?
03 · contract
PPA buyers
Is the yield forecast behind this decade-long contract optimistic enough to become a liability?
04 · operate
Owners
& operators
Where does performance degradation land in the P&L, and where should resilience spending go?
05 · verify
Technical
advisors
Which assumptions can be defended in due diligence, and which are still being treated as standard?
THE BLANK VERSION Who else lives inside this problem from a different position—and what does it cost them there?
The first map
had one node.
It was plausible, precise, and too small to be useful.
PPA
buyersthe customer I thought I knew
buyersthe customer I thought I knew
the correction
The buyer was real.
The map was not.
The PPA conversation was not a dead end. It was a way into the capital structure. The market was bigger than the ICP.
THE OBSERVATION A non-buyer can describe the ecosystem of people who can buy—and the language each one needs.
The same move
in four markets.
Repath is the clearest value-chain case, not the only time I have used this method. Different companies surfaced different constraints. The work was always to hear the structure, translate the decision, and choose where to act.
applied to
01Hearthe signal underneath
02Mapthe structure around it
03Translatethe decision language
04Choosewhere to act and stop
Repathclimate risk · capital
signal
A market leader needed us as a subcontractor inside an institutional RFP.
structure
Investors, lenders, developers, PPA buyers, operators, and advisors shared one underlying risk.
language
Climate assessment became financial model correction: DCF, IRR, pricing, CapEx.
choice
Five segments, 20 buyer types, and approximately $2.5M sourced pipeline.
LulaFitwellness · B2C → B2B
signal
B2C had a ceiling. Corporate demand could diversify the revenue model.
structure
SWOT and Strategy Canvas made the differentiators and the target market visible.
language
The sales toolkit moved from offering experiences to articulating corporate value.
choice
Corporate became the target category, with approximately 100% month-on-month growth despite a long cycle.
Purple Patchsubscription · retention
signal
Coach consults correlated with approximately six extra months of subscription.
structure
Athletes were offboarding around the end of a season. The timing, not only the offer, was the constraint.
language
The consult became an intervention before the seasonal cliff, not a generic retention push.
choice
Move the consult offer ahead of the cliff. Churn went down while short- and long-term profit increased.
Equinoxfitness · upstream demand
signal
Penetration and sessions-per-unit were above benchmark, but the club was below capacity.
structure
The binding constraint sat upstream of the department. More coaching pressure would not create more members.
language
Corporate wellness became the bridge: Gatorade, small-group training, and a shared member problem.
choice
Built the corporate wellness program from 35 participants to 70 the next year. The value was the small-group training revenue carried into the department’s P&L—far beyond what individual memberships alone would have produced.
THE THREAD Different company. Different market. Same move: find the constraint beneath the stated problem, then choose the narrowest useful intervention.
What earned the right
to become a rule.
A signal only becomes market strategy after it recurs, survives a test, and can be explained in the language of the person making the decision.
01
signal
A market leader needed us as a subcontractor.
what recurred
The capability gap was not a partnership detail. It was evidence that the market had already assigned us a role we had not claimed.
promoted
The market moved from TSOs and DSOs toward institutional investors, infrastructure funds, and the capital behind the asset.
02
signal
Events had historically produced the best relationships.
what recurred
The founder debrief surfaced multiple fast-moving clients from conferences, while infrastructure investors moved through referrals.
promoted
Comet monitored the channel: $16K comped across seven events, three award nominations, and 60% connection acceptance.
03
signal
The market said financial model. We said climate assessment.
what recurred
Investor language repeatedly connected climate exposure to deal pricing, IRR, DCF, CapEx, and financing decisions.
promoted
Five segments, four sub-segments, five personas each: 20 buyer types with a translated message for the decision in front of them.
04
signal
A single translated line opened the door.
what recurred
“Integrating climate risk into DCF and IRR models” landed where generic product language did not.
promoted
A senior person at a major global infrastructure fund asked for a demo. The message became a calibration point, not a slogan.
HOW I CONTROL MARKETS · CLOSED / NARROW
Where to play.
When to quit.
Markets do not get funded because the story is elegant. They get funded when fit is proven, the entry mode is clear, and the operator knows what to stop doing.
Nothing is funded
before fit.
The operator owns the choice. The market owns the verdict.
market-entry stack · provenance
A repeatable sequence for deciding where to play, what to test, and which bottleneck to own.
Strategy CanvasEntrepreneurial Strategy CanvasBuyer Utility MapInnovation PortfolioVRIODesign Thinking / Story MappingPrototype → TestLaunch → Scale
Collaborate in the value chain
License the IP
Niche disruption
Create a new value chain and control the bottlenecks
THE QUIT STORY · LULAFIT
The first offer underperformed.
Small-group training sat between group fitness and personal training. Rental buildings turned over; turnover killed group commitment. The offer was narrowed to condos, where the condition was different, and stayed there.
diagnose the failure
not “push harder”
change the market
not the method
The tighter the claim,
the cleaner the proof.
The strongest market story is not the one with the biggest number. It is the one that knows exactly what the number proves—and what it cannot.
Observe
Keep the non-buyer conversation when it reveals the structure. Keep the failed first offer when it diagnoses the market.
Test
Run the message against the people living inside the decision. Promote financial model correction because the language survived contact.
Fund
Claim ~$2.5M sourced pipeline. Do not claim closed revenue that was not held after departure. The denominator stays visible.
THUNDERBIRD SCHOOL OF GLOBAL MANAGEMENT · MASTER OF GLOBAL MANAGEMENT → WHERE TO PLAY
QUANTIC SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY · EXECUTIVE MBA → WHEN TO QUIT
The manual loop
came first.
Markets changed how the machines were built: validate the use case manually, then build the system around the thing that already works.
Markets · then
Call. Research. Hypothesis.
Every conversation became a question. Every question was researched in context. Every hypothesis came back to a person living inside the problem. No agents. No automation. Just a loop that could be tested.
Machines · after
Systematize the proven use case.
The event monitor, context OS, segmentation logic, and research agents came after the manual work had made the output legible. The infrastructure followed the method.