60-minute weekly
One scheduled session per week, video. Same time on the calendar every week — we treat it as a non-negotiable hour. Both founders attend when relevant; one if the topic has a clear owner. You set the agenda 24 hours in advance.
Founder Coaching · $4K/mo · 10 slots
Two operators in your week.
Two operators in your week.
Every week.
Senior coaching for consumer-brand founders. Strategy, fundraising, product, growth, hiring, ops — the operating decisions you'll face at $0 to $5M. AI fluency comes along because that's how we work; it's not the pitch.
This is general startup coaching. Not AI training. Not consultancy retainer. Senior operators in the room every week, on whatever you actually need to talk about.
We've built three businesses between us. Stix Golf — Series A and Series B, $100M+ in lifetime sales. Host Modern — $4.5M year one with a 10%+ profit margin. Influence Mobile — $200M+ lifetime revenue, third-largest mobile ad network in the world. Plus a venture studio's worth of innovation consulting at Prota Ventures (Exelon, ADP, Citi Bank). Plus Collin's coffee company. Plus a decade of creative-services work in Seattle before any of that.
The coaching pulls from all of it. When you've got a question about whether to take a term sheet, we've taken term sheets. When you're deciding between a CMO hire and a Head of Product, we've made those calls. When you're sizing whether a new product line is worth pursuing, we have a framework for it — six pillars, weighted scoring — that we use ourselves.
AI is woven in because every business we run uses AI as a leverage layer. If a question turns out to be "should I build a media-buyer skill for my growth team," we have an opinion. But most of the time, the question is more fundamental — and we treat it that way.
01 · What we cover
Whatever's load-bearing this week.
Whatever's load-bearing this week.
That's the agenda.
You set the agenda each week. We bring the operator perspective, the relevant frameworks, and the honest read. Some weeks are tactical. Some weeks are strategic. Most are both.
TOPIC · 01
Strategy
Positioning. Market timing. When to pivot, when to stay the course. Reading the competitive landscape. Choosing what not to do. The reframes that come from having watched several businesses navigate the same waters.
TOPIC · 02
Fundraising
Pitch deck honesty (we'll redline yours). Target investor list. Term-sheet trade-offs. Board management before, during, and after the round. Whether to raise at all. We've raised, declined to raise, and watched founders get destroyed by the wrong investor on the cap table.
TOPIC · 03
Product
What to build next. What to kill. When to validate before investing. The six-pillar concept-evaluation framework we built at Stix. The hardest call most founders face — "do I keep going on this?" — done with structure, not vibes.
TOPIC · 04
Growth
Channel strategy, agency vs in-house, when to push spend and when to defend efficiency. Attribution honesty (Triple Whale, Northbeam, the gap between platform-reported and actual). The 2x growth posture frame from Stix.
TOPIC · 05
Hiring & team
First five hires. Fractional vs full-time. How to interview operators (different from interviewing engineers). When to fire, how to fire. Comp structure for early stage. The team-design decisions that compound — for better or worse.
TOPIC · 06
Operations
Financial model sanity. Runway management. Supplier negotiations. Inventory planning. The boring infrastructure that decides whether the front-end can scale. Most founders avoid this until it bites; we'll help you avoid the bite.
TOPIC · 07
AI fluency
Where AI helps, where it isn't yet ready, how to think about which model for which job. Not the focus, but always available when relevant. If a question turns out to be "should I install a skill for this," we'll talk through whether it's worth doing now.
02 · What's included
Weekly working session.
Weekly working session.
Plus async access between.
Slack between
Shared Slack channel with both founders. Async questions answered same business day. The "I'm walking into a board meeting in two hours, gut-check this" message is exactly the use case.
Frameworks & templates
Decks, frameworks, and templates pulled from our businesses, customized to yours as questions come up. Pitch deck templates. Concept-validation framework. Compensation worksheets. Whatever fits the question this week.
Honest feedback
We'll tell you when the next product idea is wrong. When the hire isn't ready. When the round is too soon. When you're being unrealistic. Most founders have no one in their orbit who'll do this — that's the actual product.
Network access
When relevant: warm intros into our operator network — funded founders, agency partners, fractional executives, recruiters. We don't trade intros for promised reciprocity; if it'll help you, we'll send it.
Pause & resume
Coaching can pause for a month if you need to disappear into a launch or a fundraise. Resume when you surface. Sixty-day notice if you want to end entirely. Month-to-month, no annual lock-in.
03 · Pricing & capacity
$4K a month.
$4K a month.
10 slots. We won't expand past it.
Coaching
$4,000 /month
Weekly 60-minute session. Slack access. Month-to-month, sixty-day notice. No annual contract. Paused months don't bill.
The capacity cap is the product.
- Cap10 clients at a time. Both operators load your context before every weekly.
- WaitlistWhen the 10 slots fill, we open a list. We don't expand past it — split attention degrades the work.
- DurationMost run 6–12 months. Some shorter (around a fundraise). Some multi-year. All fine.
04 · Fit
Best for.
Best for.
And not for.
Best for
- Consumer-brand founders — DTC, omnichannel, retail-bound.
- Pre-seed through Series A. The $0 to $5M stage where every decision compounds.
- Operators who want a weekly check-in with people who've run the playbook.
- Solo or two-founder teams that need a third voice in the room.
- Founders in or near a fundraise — we've raised, declined, walked, and watched.
Where we'll say no
- Equity-only advisory arrangements.
- Co-CEO setups. We're booked running our own businesses.
- Companies above $10M revenue with installed-AI needs — take AI Implementation instead.
- Founders who specifically want AI training as the focus.
- B2B SaaS, deep-tech, healthcare, fintech — operator credibility doesn't transfer.
- A fifth slot. The cap is the product.
05 · How this is different
From advisors and fractional execs.
From advisors and fractional execs.
Worth being explicit.
vs · Equity advisor
Cash, cadence, outputs.
Advisors are part-time and their incentives diffuse. We show up on a schedule and earn the renewal each month.
vs · Fractional CMO / COO
Outside the execution layer.
A fractional is in your Slack daily, owning channels and KPIs. We coach the founder while the fractional runs the function. Often complementary.
vs · Group / accelerator coaching
1:1, no cohort, no homework.
Weekly. Wherever your business goes. No curriculum, no cohort, no asynchronous community.
vs · Executive coach
Coaching the business, not you.
Executive coaches focus on leadership patterns and personal growth. Useful work, different product. We sit inside the strategy and the model — operator-to-operator.