On our 24 June call, Dhruv raised three questions that go a level deeper than the FAQ: less “what's covered” and more how I actually run the engagement, and where I'm trying to be excellent. My answers are below, with the original FAQ underneath.
Both. I think and I get it done. The honest answer isn't one or the other: I do the strategic thinking and then I do the work, or get it done. I write the content, run the interviews, design the UX, ship the non-core code through agents, and run the experiments. My own people cover research, content and design, so you're not left chasing vendors.
What separates me from an agency is that I operate as if I'm part of your team, while staying as independent as I can in how I operate and think. You get someone in the trenches with you who still brings an outside, unattached point of view.
On the defined assets (the website, the pitch deck, the design system, the product-design screens), I own them end to end. You come in at the start to set direction, then at review checkpoints. The heavy lifting is mine.
On growth and GTM (the retainer track), each initiative becomes an implementation plan where every line is tagged: I execute it, your team does, or we bring in a third party. Where a third party is needed, I source the options, negotiate the rates and manage the work; you just sign off on the spend.
On founder bandwidth: you'll still do things. This is a partnership, not a hand-off. The difference is that my team and I take the heavy lifting and find support for whatever doesn't genuinely need a founder. If a GTM plan calls for LinkedIn outbound, say, a founder might keep a warm conversation going, but they're not running the machine behind it. Founder time concentrates on direction and decisions, not the 100%-of-the-time execution.
I'm not ad-led, so we don't gate the app behind a big ad budget. To be clear, I do run ads, but only when a company genuinely needs them, has the budget, and it fits the objective. For reviving a B2C app at your stage, leading with paid acquisition is the trap; not depending on it is what forces the growth tactics that actually compound. The cost you flagged was customer acquisition, not infrastructure, and that's exactly what this approach attacks.
Organic and in-product viral loops over paid acquisition. At smallcase (a funded company) I had a ₹1–2 Cr brand budget I wasn't allowed to spend on acquisition, so we built an in-product loop instead: creators made shareable stock baskets, paid on performance per signup and first transaction rather than flat fees. It worked, and others copied it. The same instinct applies here, with events as a growth engine: power the networking layer at a conference, put scanners across the venue, attach a sharp giveaway, prove the loop at one event, then templatize it across every event.
On timing, your instinct is right that the scaled push is funding-dependent, but it may not have to wait for a raise. If the infrastructure costs are bearable and ad spend was the only real concern, we can revive it earlier, provided discovery tells us to and we have a very clear plan for how it fits the overall strategy. Either way we decide on evidence: whether the app comes back as a data-and-growth flywheel, and how it pays for itself without the ad spend that killed it last time.
AI is the engine, not the product. I use it to run ten parallel research streams, but the value is in the depth and the framing, which a generic report never reaches. A research teammate used to take two weeks to produce this by hand; AI compresses that, but only because I give the agent the structure and know what to ask.
What “deep” looks like: structured feature teardowns scored for maturity, not a surface-level “who raised what”; voice-of-customer mining across G2 and similar to understand why customers actually pay, often for governance, where SOC 2 Type 2 is table stakes above ~500 employees; a library of competitors' real product screens pulled from demos and demo videos; and reverse-engineering what actually drove their growth (what they did on social, how they cracked events, how one of them reached 100K LinkedIn followers) and what's borrowable.
Some of it needs manual digging AI can't fully do, like which events Popl partnered with, given their whole positioning is “the app for in-person events.” An AI report tells you where you sit on a grid. This tells you what worked for the people ahead of you, what didn't, and what we should steal.
A few things came up when we talked through the proposal. I'm capturing the answers here so they're on record and easy to take to the board.
The whole thing. I design it, rewrite the content, build it, and take it live. I'd move you off the current Webflow template to a fast, search-friendly stack, Next.js with a lightweight headless CMS so your team can make edits later, and deploy it end to end. The current site loads slowly and scores poorly on page-speed, and that's part of what we fix.
No. Your engineering team owns that codebase. For product work I deliver the screens and the interaction design in Figma, and your team builds them in, since they know the system inside out. The marketing website and the growth experiments are the only surfaces I build and ship myself.
No large one, and I wouldn't recommend it. For an enterprise product at your stage, ads don't move the needle, and most B2B companies don't run them for their first several hundred customers. The approach is product-led growth, SEO, events as a contact-capture motion, and your founders' network for enterprise sales. If a paid channel ever earns its place, we decide that on evidence from Phase 0, not by assuming it now. There is no expectation that you fund a monthly ad budget.
The diagnostic decides that. Part of Phase 0 is working out which channels could actually unlock acquisition for you. Whatever the evidence supports falls under the ongoing Traction and Growth work, and the design system we build means the templates and collateral already exist, so producing for a channel isn't a separate lift.
I execute. Where it's my surface, the website and the experiments, I do it end to end. Where it's your codebase, I hand over finished design and direction for your team to build. This is not a strategy deck you're left to implement alone.
The build is agentic and human-audited. I use coding agents to move fast, and I and a small set of trusted people across design, content and tech review everything that ships. The samples you saw were quick passes done in a few hours. On the real work we spend the time on a proper design system and on stripping out the tells that make AI output look like AI output. Most AI work reads as generic because nobody spends that time. We do.
Different levers for different people. For end users and junior staff, a small incentive, a gift voucher for thirty minutes, gets you willing participants. For senior people it's usually offering to solve a specific problem they have in exchange for the time and some usage data. And we route through the champion who already bought, since that's who gets things to happen inside an account. There's no single trick, but this is a well-worn path.
The fees are all-inclusive of my team, the research, the content and the design. The only things I'd ask you to buy directly are paid stock imagery or premium font licenses, if we choose to use them, and I'll usually recommend strong free alternatives first. Depending on the activities for ongoing growth, we may require subscriptions to SEO tools or other products. We'd ask you to purchase those subscriptions. Once again, we'll always look to free tools before we recommend paid options. Everything else is covered.