I kept seeing businesses that refuse to change
I spent years working across small businesses, startups, digital products, design, eCommerce, marketing and automation.
I've built and launched products, worked on acquisition, designed digital experiences, and watched businesses go from “we need to grow” into a list of twenty things they could try.
A short-form product I worked on reached 10,000+ users in its first month.
I've also worked on growth assets that brought thousands of visitors into a product.
Those experiences taught me something that sounds obvious but becomes much harder when you're actually responsible for execution:
Getting something to work is not the same as knowing what to work on.
I've seen businesses increase traffic when the real problem was conversion.
I've seen teams automate a workflow before questioning whether the workflow should exist.
I've seen product teams build features because they were possible rather than because they solved the most important customer problem.
And I've seen the opposite too: a relatively simple change outperform a much larger project because it addressed the actual constraint.
Then AI changed the economics.
A small team can now test ideas, automate work, research markets and build software much faster.
That's probably one of the biggest advantages available to founders right now.
It creates a new challenges. Or I can say opportunities.
You can now make decisions faster. The bad and the good ones
So I started thinking less about “What tools should this business use?” and more about:
- What is actually happening?
- What is constraining growth?
- Which opportunities have evidence behind them?
- Which one can materially change the situation?
- What does it cost to implement and maintain?
- What are we giving up by doing it?
That thinking became Digital Growth & Automation Session.
The product is intentionally broader than AI.
A business problem might call for AI.
It might call for automation.
It might call for a better offer, funnel, website, process or customer experience.
The point is to figure that out before committing resources to the solution.
That has become one of my strongest beliefs about modern business:
As execution gets cheaper, judgment becomes more valuable.
That's the idea behind a consulting session I'm launching on Product Hunt in about 11 days.
What is the hardest part of growing your business right now: knowing what to focus on, finding customers, improving conversion, adopting AI, or automating your operations?
The judgment-before-execution positioning is interesting, but the commercial test seems to be whether founders will pay before they know the answer. Have you tested whether people actually buy the diagnosis/session when they could instead spend that money directly on execution?
This launch is testing the concept of paying for clarity instead of execution.
Founders can value identifying costly mistakes before making them. The experiment is whether founders will pay for clarity when they can execute.
If someone has a clear plan, their best course is to create action items for it. We come into play when someone lacks a plan.
Thank you for sparking the discussion.
That willingness-to-pay test is the key signal. If you’re open to it, what’s the best email to reach you on?
I appreciate your time. My email is jowly.flam-6q@icloud DOT com
replace the DOT with a . thank you
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
The binding constraint in this model is visible in the thread above: founders will pay for diagnosis only when they've been burned by execution. You're basically asking people to pay before they know if the answer is worth the cost.
The measurement signal that actually works is: diagnose, take payment only if they implement something measurable within 90 days and share the results. That shifts it from "did you like the advice" to "did the advice produce a specific business outcome."
Then you can track:
If those numbers are real, you've transformed judgment from an opinion product to an accountability product. People will pay for accountability because it's uncommon - most advisors disappear after the handoff.
Right now the PH launch is testing whether founders value clarity before execution. The harder test comes after: do they value it after they see the execution didn't work and they can trace it back to the diagnosis. That's when it gets expensive for you because now you're responsible for the outcome being real.
The hard part of selling judgment is that the people who most need it have not yet paid for the wrong execution, and the ones who have are exactly the ones who now distrust advice. What worked better for me was making the diagnosis falsifiable: a fixed-price teardown that ends with one measurable prediction and a date, not a list of twenty things to try. If the prediction is wrong, the money goes back. Have you tried attaching a number to the diagnosis rather than selling the session itself?