Questions

This answers the questions CEOs ask before committing a leadership team to a week. If something is not answered here, please reach out and ask.

01

Who the workshop is for

The workshop is built for crypto and blockchain companies at the two hardest transitions, zero to one and one to ten. You have built something that works, with real users, but you are not growing as fast as you need. Infrastructure and architecture, protocols and markets, trading, payments, institutional, consumer, and the crossover into DePIN, decentralised AI, identity and prediction markets.

Who is it not for?
  • A solo founder. The exercises work on the collision between what a group of people know. One person in a room has nothing to collide with.
  • Validation of a decision already made. We can pressure-test it, and if it does not hold tell you so. If that is valuable, please reach out to us.
  • A company already at scale, at least not the week described here. The modules assume pre-scale issues. The brief for a larger company differs materially and the mandate changes with it. Tell us your size and scale, and we will be straight about whether our work is for you.
  • A business whose market only exists in a speculative run. Memes, NFTs, launchpads, blockchain gaming, fan tokens and web3 social. The growth there is the cycle rather than the business, so there is no cap to find and nothing for the week to act on.
  • A self custody wallet. Nobody has found a revenue model that works, and that is not something a week can fix.
  • A foundation or a protocol DAO. Usually no chief executive in the ordinary sense, no leadership team that can be put in a room, and nobody who can sign.
How do we find out whether it is right for us?

Start with a conversation. Reach out directly to discuss what you are trying to solve. If the week is not right for you, I will let you know.

The next step is an hour with your leadership team, at no cost and under an NDA. It shows whether your team agrees with itself, whether your numbers match the story you tell, and which questions about your own business nobody in the room can answer. The gaps are the finding, and they help you decide whether you want to work with us.

Does sector experience matter?

Where my record is deepest: swap aggregators and cross chain routing, lending protocols, privacy infrastructure, non-custodial exchanges. What they have in common is the model rather than the sector. Each is a two-sided market, bringing two groups together who exchange value with each other, and the hard problem is getting both sides on and then having them interact. Most of crypto runs on the model, from L1s to DEXs to retail dApps, and it is what I have specialised in for the past twenty-three years.

What caps growth in a sound business is the gap between what your leadership team believes, what your systems say and what your users and your market do. That gap behaves the same way in a perps DEX, a lending protocol or a consumer dApp.

What matters more is that I do not tell you what to do. I bring the patterns that repeat across businesses, and a discovery process that finds the gap. You bring depth, the detailed understanding of your own market and your product that nobody else has. The path that drives growth gets built where those two meet in the workshop week.

Where does our token fit?

We do not sell tokenomics as a standalone service. The token alone is not what we fix.

A token price that does not reflect your traction is a symptom, and the common mistake we see is to treat it as the problem. Redesign the token and you move the symptom. The cause stays unchanged.

The week works the layer below. What the business differentiates on, who it is for, how it acquires and keeps users, and what the roadmap has to deliver. Tokenomics and utility get settled inside that, built to maximise whichever applies, alongside every other stream that has to carry the strategy.

Do you work with our competitors?

No. Not during your engagement and not for six months after it. The rule, and what it means in practice, is set out in full on the fees page.

02

The workshop week

What happens in the week?

Five days with your leadership team together, plus a sixth day held in reserve. We confront the business as it really is, get clear on its real differentiators, how that truly drives growth, lock down the strategy, then map it and the roadmap to make it happen. Every session runs on your business, your metrics and your decisions. Underneath all of it sits one question, whether you are giving your customers what they actually want and the best version of it you can build.

Days normally run from 10am to 6pm, with short breaks and a stop for lunch. Expect evenings to be included. Most nights there is something to finish for the following day.

By the time the week starts we will have spent weeks deep diving your data, your metrics and your team's own perspectives. We will know your product, we will know your customers, and we will know what they actually want and why. The week is then spent making high impact decisions you can execute on rather than establishing facts.

Is this training, or consulting?

Neither. The distinction matters. Training gives you knowledge and no decisions. Consulting gives you recommendations you did not make and will not defend a few months later.

Most of the week is your team working, not listening. Each session opens with the theory and discovery data it needs and then turns immediately into structured exercises run by the whole room, built on the methods the world's leading technology companies use. The exercises are the engine. They are designed to surface things about your business that none of you could reach individually and that no outsider could hand you. They do because the answers only exist in the collision between what each of you knows.

The decisions are your team's, which is why they hold. What you walk out with survives contact on Monday because everyone who has to execute it helped build it.

Who needs to be there?

If your team is twelve or fewer, we'd recommend it's everyone. Beyond that, every member of the leadership team, for every day. The week produces decisions that are owned. A decision made without the person who owns it is a decision that unravels the moment the week ends.

It is worth thinking past the org chart as well. The most useful person may not be on the leadership team. It could be the designer who watches users struggle, whoever runs user research, the engineer who knows where the product actually breaks, or the customer support lead who every day sees what your customers really think. The exercises work on what people know, not what their title is.

Can we do the week remotely?

Yes. Both are available, in person is what we recommend, and the choice is yours.

The case for coming to us is attention and alignment. The week depends on undivided attention, which is easier to hold when everyone is in one place with nowhere else to be. Having the team present also builds the agreement that makes the outcomes hold once they are back at their desks.

Remote runs properly rather than as a lesser version. The same discovery, the same modules, the same exercises, the same outputs. It runs in your own Miro board and on your own video tool, so the week's material stays inside your environment. The days are deliberately shaped to protect people's attention.

Where travel is what stands between you and the week, take the remote option. It is a better week than not having one.

Is it the same workshop for every client?

No, and this is an important part worth understanding.

The week runs as a series of modules, each one taking a body of practice that the best technology companies use, and putting your business through it. The modules are not a syllabus. Which ones run, how deep each one goes, and what the exercises inside them work on, are all built for your company off the back of discovery. Some weeks run eight to ten. Some run five, but deeply. No two weeks are ever the same.

What gets run in the week gets decided by discovery, not by a brochure. It is why discovery happens first and why it is as comprehensive as it is.

Where did the workshop come from?

It is not a framework assembled for a consulting practice. It came out of running the process on real companies. Josh has led technology businesses for 23 years and for more than a decade has put every one of them through a version of this every six months, refining what worked and cutting what did not across each one.

What survives is what kept producing high impact decisions that held, judged by the person who had to live with the outcome rather than by what presents well.

03

Discovery before the workshop

What is discovery, and why does it take weeks?

Discovery is how we arrive knowing more about your business than your team has ever put in one place, with the contradictions already mapped. Every fact established before Monday is an hour of the week spent on judgement instead of fact finding.

It runs in three layers, and the findings live in the gaps between them.

  • Layer one. What you tell us. A confidential written questionnaire for every attendee, a second one for your leadership team, a ninety minute session with the team together and likely some one-on-ones. With the questionnaires, individual answers are never seen by anyone in your company, and nothing is ever attributed to a person.
  • Layer two. What your systems say. Your analytics, internal documentation, tooling inventory, investor updates and any user research you have already run. The full list reaches you as a written request, with a reason stated against every item.
  • Layer three. What your customers and your market say. Interviews across four groups. Active users, power users, the ones who activated and churned, and the ones who signed up and never started. The last two are the hardest to reach and the ones worth the most. Plus recorded sessions of real people attempting your core task cold. We undertake comprehensive competitor research, both direct and indirect. There is almost always more, which gets determined as the work unfolds.

User research is a specialised craft and the method has to match the question being asked. Run the wrong one and you get a confident answer to a question you were not asking. Layers one and two decide the method and who we use to run it.

An example of what a gap looks like. Your project management tooling holds what you planned. Your deploy history holds what you shipped and when. Read together they give your real velocity, which is a different number from the one anybody quotes.

How is our data protected?

The strongest control is that we hold as little as possible, for as short a time as possible.

  • Where the work allows, we work inside your own systems. Your administrators can read anything held there, as they should be able to. It stops your material accumulating on our side, which is where it would be at risk.
  • Access is limited by name to the people running your engagement. Individual questionnaire responses are narrower still, and under our engagement letter they never reach anyone inside your own organisation.
  • Nothing of yours trains anything. We use AI extensively across the discovery synthesis and the systems and market analysis, and it is why we can process more about your business in weeks than a large consulting firm manages in months. It does not make the judgements and it is not in the workshop. Your material is never used to train a model and never enters our knowledge base.
  • Meeting recordings happen only with consent.
  • Deletion is scheduled, not a tidy-up. At engagement end everything you shared and everything we produced from it is compiled into a single encrypted archive, given to you, and deleted from our side permanently. You hold the archive, which is what lets you check it.

Our controls, and the providers relevant to your engagement, are set out in a security pack sent on request. If your security team wants a data processing agreement or a completed security questionnaire, send them to us.

Further information on how we handle your material is set out in our privacy notice.


Reach out directly.

Your growth is a solvable problem. It starts with a conversation.