Software companies build products brilliantly and define categories by accident. Games companies build worlds and monetize them like software. Both are decisions — and both usually get made without evidence anyone can check. When the decision is wrong, it doesn't show up as a bad decision. It shows up as long sales cycles, deals lost to no one, and a price you can't defend. We bring enterprise brand and category rigor to the decisions that set what you're compared to, who you're for, and what you can charge.
It is free, it runs about thirty minutes, and there is no deck. By the end you will know whether this is a decision we can help with, what we would need to see to be useful, and roughly what the work would cost. If the answer is no, you get that in the same conversation.
You’re being outsold by products you would not ship.
When someone meets your product for the first time, they don't evaluate it on its merits. They put it in a box — this is one of those, so it should cost about that, and do about this. That box gets chosen in seconds, and once it's chosen every feature you have is judged against the wrong standard.
Most companies never choose the box. It gets inherited from whatever the product started as, or borrowed from whichever competitor markets hardest. Then the whole commercial machine gets built on top of it — the pricing, the hiring, the roadmap, the fundraise — and none of it can outperform the comparison underneath.
The instinct is to fix it further along: new site, new messaging, more pipeline, a rebrand. That raises spend without changing the comparison. What actually moves it is a smaller, harder set of decisions: what category you're in, who you're for, what the product means beyond what it does, and what that's worth.
Each is the right answer to a different question. The difference is whether you need someone to make the decision or someone to do the work that follows it. Three of the four assume the decision is already made.
Writes the narrative, the homepage, the sales language. The right fit when the decision is settled and the words are the gap.
Identity, site, campaigns, production. The right fit when you know the direction and need throughput to ship it.
A senior operator in the seat leading the function. The right fit when the constraint is leadership capacity, not clarity.
The most common choice, and often correct. If nothing is stalling and the price holds, the decision isn't live yet. Come back when it is.
The decision the other four inherit: what you're compared to, who you're for, and what that's worth. Advisory, not execution.
The hard part isn't making the decision — it's making it stick after the engagement ends. What we decide is written down with the evidence and the confidence level attached, so anyone on your team can check the reasoning rather than take it on faith. I'd rather leave you something you can audit than a reason to keep paying me.
I've made these decisions from the seat that owns them. Leading brand and go-to-market for $4B+ of General Mills brands, I decided what brands meant, who they were for, and what they were allowed to become — across a portfolio where being wrong was expensive and visible. Before that, inside Carat, Havas and Colle McVoy, I built and defended those arguments for other people's brands, and watched good work die because nobody could explain what it was for.
That's the same decision you're carrying. What differs is the object — a product instead of a package, a world instead of a shelf. The economics of getting the comparison wrong don't change with the category.
The honest limit: I have not run this inside a software or games company. What I bring is the decision, made repeatedly at scale, and a method you can check line by line. What I don't bring is a case study in your industry. If that's what would make this a yes, it isn't one yet — and I'd rather say so now than discover it in month two.
No deck and no pitch. Tell me the decision you're carrying that you haven't been able to close — and what it costs you to keep carrying it. I'll tell you plainly whether I can help, and if I can't, who can.
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