You are probably here because of one of these sentences.

• Our customers love us. Strangers cannot find us.
• I asked ChatGPT who does what we do, and it named three competitors and not us.
• Every deal we win comes through one person, and that person is me.
• We have six services and nine kinds of buyer, and the website is trying to say all of it at once.
• We keep losing on price, and I do not actually believe it is price.
• We are better than the people beating us, and I cannot prove it to anybody who has not hired us yet.
• I am about to spend real money on marketing and I have no idea what to spend it on first.

Every one of those is a distribution problem. None of them is fixed by a rebrand, and most of them are cheaper to fix than you think. The work below is arranged from free to ongoing, and almost everybody starts at the top.

1. The Free Read — free, two pages, no call

The problem it solves. You have no idea what a stranger sees when they land on you cold. You are the worst possible judge of that, because you already know the answer to every question your website fails to answer.

Email me your web address. That is the whole intake. I run the same research process I run for paying clients and send back the two-page version: three things that are genuinely working, the specific places you are losing people, what I would fix first, and what I would stop doing. Two pages because two pages get read.

Roughly a third of the people who take this never contact me again. That is the correct outcome for a third of them. It is a real deliverable rather than a sales call with a document stapled to the front, and you keep it either way.

What it does not include is your numbers. Everything in the free read is built from what any stranger can see, which is exactly the point and also exactly the limit. The paid version is the same instinct with your data in it.

Email claude@1000startups.com. Your web address is enough to start.

2. The Fixed-Fee Audit — from $4,500, one to two weeks, likely sooner

The problem it solves. You already have twenty ideas. What you do not have is a defensible order, and the wrong order is how a year disappears.

One to two weeks, a fixed price agreed before I start, two written documents and a ninety-minute readout where you get to argue with me.

The audit itself

Ten to thirty pages, organized under eleven headings, with an approximate time estimate in parentheses on anything that takes real time:

• Marketing and website ideas. One hundred points, in subsections, drawn from every piece of research in the engagement.
• Hurdles that may be in your way.
• Things you could be doing right now.
• Things worth avoiding.
• How specialized venture capital would read your plans, whether or not you ever intend to raise a dollar. It is the fastest way to find out which of your assumptions a professional skeptic would refuse to grant you.
• Competitor analysis: what is working for them, what is not, and what each of those facts means for you specifically.
• Trends and direction for your industry.
• Where AI actually fits in your business, as opposed to where it is fashionable to claim it fits.
• Hiring: which roles, and in which order.
• Regulatory, supply chain and sentiment risk.
• The open questions worth exploring.

The ranked plan

Five pages that take every item in the audit and sort it, weighting three things equally at a third each: how long it takes, where less is better; how much business it generates, where more is better; and how hard it is, where easier is better. Everything sits in lettered and numbered buckets, so you can start at A.1 on Monday and work down rather than staring at a document and deciding where to begin.

Usually about a third of the highest-impact items are free and take an afternoon. That finding repeats often enough that I have stopped being surprised by it. The cheapest fixes survive for years because they are dull, unglamorous, and belong to nobody in particular, which means somebody has to go looking for them on purpose.

A fair number of firms take the ranked plan and run it themselves without ever hiring me again. That is a legitimate ending and it happens often enough that I plan for it.

3. The Strategy Engagement – scoped per client, four to eight weeks

The problem it solves. The audit was right, you did the cheap things, and now the remaining questions are the expensive ones: what to charge, who to actually worry about, what one customer is worth, and what to do in what order for the next ninety days.

Everything above, and then a document under fifty pages that goes where the audit ran out of room. It opens with a table of contents specific enough to find any single item without hunting, because a fifty-page document nobody can navigate is a forty-nine-page document.

Everything the audit left on the table

Forty or more items that got squeezed out by page limits, fit none of the eleven headings, or surfaced once in research and never got promoted to a finding. Each one recovered, categorized, and given a line on why it matters now. Things get dropped for ordinary reasons. None of those reasons make them wrong.

Competitor analysis, all the way down

• A full profile of each of your top five: what they sell, to whom, how they position, apparent size, tenure, and what they are visibly good at.
• A side by side on the dimensions that actually decide deals in your category, chosen from the research rather than from a template.
• What each of them does better than you, stated plainly. This is the part clients pay for and the part most consultants soften.
• What you do better, with the evidence attached, so you can use it in a sales conversation without overclaiming.
• An advertising teardown pulled from the Facebook Ad Library, the Google Ads Transparency Center and LinkedIn’s ad library, for you and for them. Which offers are running, which hooks lead, how long each ad has been live, and how many variants exist. An ad that has been running for six months is an ad that works, so the old ones get studied hardest.
• Ten angles nobody in your category is using.
• A positioning map written in words rather than drawn as a graphic, showing where everybody sits and where the ground is open. Then the one competitor you should actually be worried about, and why it is that one and not the loud one.

How you look to AI

Twenty or more realistic buying-intent queries, the kind a customer genuinely types: category plus city, comparisons, is-this-company-any-good, who-should-I-hire-for-this, best-of, alternatives-to-a-named-competitor. Run through the major assistants and through Google’s AI Overviews.

• Exactly who gets named, in what order, and what gets said about each.
• You and five competitors scored on how often you appear and how favorably.
• Then the part that matters most: where each mention came from. A directory, an association, a review platform, a news mention, a Wikipedia entry, their own site. That traced source list is the real work product, because it stops being a diagnosis and starts being an address list of places to go get included.
• A ranked fix list with time estimates, covering structured data, entity signals, an About page a machine can parse, content written to be extracted and quoted, and third-party presence.
• A monitoring routine: what to check, how often, and what a good result looks like six months from now. Without that last part, everything above is a screenshot rather than a measurement.

Pricing and packaging

What you charge, what they charge, and whether you read as cheap, premium, or stuck in the middle where the buyer cannot tell which one you are. What your pricing says about you whether you meant it that way or not. Then ten moves: bundling, tiering, entry offers, retainers, guarantees, financing, and the case for simply charging more, which is more often correct than anybody wants it to be.

The math on one customer

What it costs to acquire one customer by channel, what they pay and over what period, repeat rate, gross margin after the real cost of delivering the work, months to payback, lifetime value, and the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost. Where you do not have a number, I label the assumption and show the arithmetic instead of hiding it, then show what happens when the three biggest assumptions are wrong by half. A model you cannot argue with is a model you should not trust.

The ninety-day sequence

The ranked plan says what matters. This says when. First thirty days, thirty-one to sixty, sixty-one to ninety, then quarters two through four, with dependencies marked so you know what cannot start until something else finishes. Flagged: what must come first, and what you could hand to somebody this afternoon.

And the rest

• How you sound. Your voice across the website, social, job postings and reviews, described the way you would describe a person you met at a party. The same for three competitors. Which tones are taken in your category and which one is sitting unclaimed. Then ten lines of copy in the voice you should be using.
• The scoreboard. Everything publicly measurable today, dated, for you and three competitors: review counts and ratings, followers and posting frequency, site size, whether you rank for your own category terms, ad presence, headcount and its direction, open postings, and the date of your most recent content. This is how you prove in six months that any of it worked.
• The same plan at three budgets. Zero dollars and only your time. A modest monthly figure, named, realistic for a company your size. Real funding. For each: what gets done, what gets skipped, and what to expect when.
• What breaks when you double. Which process that works today stops working at twice the volume, what the owner has to stop doing personally, what has to get written down before it can be handed off, and which hire is already six months late.
• Outside pressure. Regulatory exposure and who could send you a letter, a dependency map of the vendors and platforms you rely on but do not control with single points of failure named, and public sentiment from Reddit, reviews and forums. Then the top ten outside risks ranked, each with likelihood, severity, warning signs and the action to take.
• Who would buy this. Named potential acquirers rather than categories, comparable transactions and multiples, what would have to be true to reach the top of that range, the three things that would scare a buyer in diligence, and who you should be buying.
• The case against. One page arguing your premise is wrong. The market is smaller than everyone says, the moat is imaginary, the customer does not have this problem badly enough, the timing is off, or the thing that made you successful is now the thing trapping you. Best shots taken, then rebutted in a separate paragraph, with any that cannot be rebutted said plainly.
• Fifteen questions only you can answer, each with one line on how the answer would change the recommendation. That is what turns an outside analysis into an inside one.

And the ad spreadsheet

Forty-plus campaign concepts across LinkedIn, Google, Facebook and X, one tab per platform, with audience, message, budget and the thing you would actually measure attached to each. This is what a media plan looks like before it goes to production, and it exists so that “run ads” stops being a sentence and becomes a list somebody can execute.

4. Ongoing Advisory — monthly, scoped per client

The problem it solves. The plan exists. What you want now is somebody honest in the room while you run it, and somebody to go find out things when a new question shows up.

Regular working sessions, standing availability by email, and a quarterly re-baseline so the plan does not quietly go stale while everybody is busy.

This is also where the one-off studies live. A single competitor taken apart in detail. A new market sized before you enter it. A pricing change modeled. An acquisition target read cold. A channel evaluated before you commit a quarter to it. Those runs are less standardized than everything above, on purpose, because by that point the questions are yours rather than mine.

The three big panel studies

Three of those runs are large enough to name. All three use a five-hundred-person version of the panel described on the How I Work page: a hundred rooms, five to a room, each room working the problem separately. Heavier on capital than the standard panel, or on the agencies in the regulatory study, and heavier on outsiders, whose job is to ask the obvious question a specialist would be embarrassed to ask.

The pivot study. Thirty pages at most, opening cold on the rankings. Every option the company could take, weighted fifty-fifty on revenue against cost, and every one of them discussed in prose: dollars out, dollars in over a stated horizon, market size, who to approach, what has to be true, what kills it. Licensing, acquisition, acqui-hire, partnership and shutdown sit on that list beside the growth plays and get the same arithmetic. When an option is bad the document says so and explains why it still placed where it placed.

The regulatory study. Thirty pages at most on what you are cleared to sell today and what the next line would require, since the second product is usually the one that trips a filing the first one avoided. Rules named specifically rather than by subject area, split by federal, state and foreign jurisdiction, with the statutory timeline and the observed one shown separately. Then four paths ranked, up to a model change that puts you out of scope entirely, each with time to first revenue, cost, odds and how it fails.

The capital study. Five pages, ranked and numbered, on how this company gets money and when. Which funds, which angels, which strategics, which customers could prepay, which lenders, and which non-dilutive sources the category forgets exist. What each path costs in dilution, control and calendar time. Short because it is built to be worked down.

What you need to have before any of this is worth doing

A real product or service, and clients who stay once they find you. That is the whole list.

You do not need a marketing team, a budget, a brand book, a content calendar, or a plan. Firms that arrive with all five usually have the same problems as firms that arrive with none of them, and occasionally worse ones, because the plan is doing a very good job of hiding where the actual leak is.

Who this is for

B2B service firms, insurance and staffing companies, professional practices, family-held businesses, two-sided marketplaces, associations and membership organizations, and increasingly software and early-stage AI startups. Typically somewhere between one person and two hundred, with a real reputation and no reliable pipeline.

I spent eleven years building a two-sided recruitment marketplace, so those mechanics are familiar rather than theoretical. If your résumés outclass your website and revenue arrives by phone from people who already like you, that is the good version of this problem, and it is the one I am best at.

Who this is not for

I am probably not right for you if you need somebody to run ads day to day, or if you sell direct to consumers. Defense and government contracting run on capture management and past performance, which is a different trade than mine. Nonprofits: the work would help, but my fee structure rarely fits a grant cycle, and I would rather say that now than discover it in month two.

I am also not the right call if what you want is validation. The first meeting usually contains something you did not want to hear. That is the part clients end up quoting back to me a year later, but it is not comfortable on the day.

Referring someone instead of hiring me

If you run a design firm, an agency or a consulting practice and you are sending a client my way rather than becoming one yourself, the Referral and Partner Program covers how that works and what is in it for you.

What happens next

1. Email claude@1000startups.com. A web address is enough. If you want the free read, say so and that is all that has to happen.
2. Thirty minutes, no deck, and I tell you plainly whether I think I can help. Sometimes the answer is no, and it arrives fast.
3. If yes, a two-page proposal inside twenty-four hours: what I heard, what I would do, what you get, the timeline, the price, and what I need from you.

claude@1000startups.com · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Or look me up first on LinkedIn. Prefer a one-page overview? Download the brochure.