Customer Intelligence Sprint · Pre-seed and seed

You can't interview customers you don't have yet.

Five to ten days of synthetic buyer research for pre-PMF founders. Your hypotheses taken to a full buying committee, and the positioning — or the complete go-to-market motion — that comes out of it.

Timeline

5–10 days

Method

Synthetic

Evidence grade

Inferred

From

$0 / $3,500

Compare the tiers Read two published Sprints

What this actually is

Pre-research, not research.

Most research advice assumes you have customers. Before product–market fit you don't — or you have four, and they're friends. The honest options are to wait, to guess, or to build the argument now and test it against real buyers the moment you have some.

A Sprint is the third option. We take your hypotheses to synthetic buyers modeled on your buying committee, find where demand probably lives and what language it uses, and hand you positioning you can run founder-led — plus the instrument to validate it later.

What you're buying is a defensible point of view about who buys and why, built in a week instead of a quarter.

Evidence grade · Inferred

Every finding in a Sprint is inferred, and labeled that way on every page of the deliverable. Synthetic research produces population-level signal from behavioral archetypes — it does not produce evidence about your specific customers. It is the right instrument for directional decisions and the wrong one for final validation or compliance-sensitive sign-off. We say so in the report.

In their words · Narrio

A running start on product–market fit.

Synthetic user research doesn't replace the search for product–market fit — it jumpstarts it. For Narrio's founders, one ten-day Sprint moved two tracks at once: customer discovery — who the buyer really is and the language they use — and product discovery — what to build first, and what to leave for later.

"The biggest impact was bringing structure to complexity — it helped us simplify, prioritize, and make better decisions, faster."

Mircea Serediuc · Narrio

Co-Founder · Product & Growth

"The synthetic interviews gave us more context than people offer in a discovery call."

Alexandra Botezatu · Narrio

CEO & Co-Founder

Read the full Narrio study →

Three ways in

Positioning, or the whole motion.

The line between the paid tiers is go-to-market. Both produce a point of view you can sell with; only one builds the outbound and inbound to run it.

Founder Sprint

Application only · limited slots

For pre-funding founders who want to see the value firsthand, at zero financial risk.

Application & discovery call
5-day Sprint · single industry
3 synthetic buyer archetypes
Summary findings report
15-minute readout
Full interview transcripts
Supporting detailed analysis
GTM motion

Apply now

Most common

Customer Intelligence Sprint

$3,500

7-day Sprint

For founders who need to know who the buyer is and how to talk to them — deep clarity in a targeted segment.

Discovery call
7-day Sprint
Single or multiple industry focus
4–6 synthetic buyer archetypes
Full interview transcripts
Summary findings report
Supporting detailed analysis
Positioning, category frame & calibrated Asks
GTM motion build

Book a discovery call

Customer Intelligence Sprint + GTM Motion

$7,500

10-day Sprint

For founders who want full-scale clarity across industries and buyer roles — and the motion built to act on it.

Everything in the $3,500 Sprint
10-day Sprint
6–8 synthetic buyer archetypes
Per-persona positioning: value frame, pain hook, pilot offer, outcome promise
Outbound: founder DMs, emails, comment hooks
Inbound: content themes, taglines, urgency framing
Landing page copy

Book a discovery call

Price moves with archetype count, industries, geographies, and motion scope. A US and a DACH buyer are two research problems, not one persona in two languages — added geographies price as a multiplier.

In their words · erom.io

From six guesses to one clear door.

A compliance platform serving several industries had no way to choose between them. The Sprint took six founder hypotheses to a four-role buying committee and came back with the category to lead with, the roles that actually champion the product — not just the COO they'd been targeting, but the security and data-protection leaders who feel the pain daily — and calibrated Asks for each.

"John's superpower is untangling the noise — turning raw insights into sales-ready clarity."

"We stopped guessing who to sell to and started seeing how each buyer actually thinks."

Octavian Brînzea · erom.io

Co-Founder & CEO

Read the full erom.io study →

Why the motion holds together

Every line traces to a force.

A stalled-deal push in the research becomes that persona's pain hook, becomes the email subject line, becomes the proof block on the landing page. You can follow the chain backward from any sentence to the evidence underneath it.

What the research produces

Demand map. Where the struggle concentrates, in the buyer's own language, across every role on the committee.
Ranked hypothesis set. Your assumptions as falsifiable claims, ordered by which would most change your decisions if wrong.
Screener and interview guide. Built on the six forces — including the barrier side most guides skip entirely.

What the motion produces

Positioning per persona. Value frame, pain hook, pilot offer, outcome promise — routable by who's in the room.
Outbound. Founder-led DMs and emails, plus the comment hooks that warm a prospect before you ever message them.
Inbound. Content themes, taglines, urgency framing, and landing page copy tied to specific triggers.

Founder-led means founder-led. No rep enablement, no sequence tooling, no handoff plan. At seed a DM from a founder outperforms a salesperson two to three times over, and the motion is built around that.

How it runs

Seven to ten days.

Day 1

Discovery call and research design

Your hypotheses, your buying committee, and the decision the research has to serve. We scope to one decision, not to a topic.

Days 2–4

Archetype construction

Four to eight behavioral archetypes built on your ICP, each carrying its own personality profile — so objections and priorities differ by role the way they do on a real committee.

Days 4–7

Synthetic interviews

Hypotheses taken to each archetype independently. Full transcripts, not summaries — you see the reasoning, including where archetypes contradict each other.

Days 7–10

Synthesis, positioning, and motion

Patterns across archetypes, the positioning that follows, and — on the $7,500 tier — the outbound and inbound built from it. Plus an explicit list of what the Sprint could not answer and what method would.

The fair question

Why not just prompt this yourself?

You could generate something that looks like this in an afternoon. The generation was never the hard part.

The hard part is the question set. Most founder-run discovery asks what people want and what they'd pay — both of which produce polite, useless answers. A Sprint runs on the six forces that actually move a buyer: pushes, pulls, desires, avoidances, habits, and anxieties. Three promote change and three resist it, and the resisting three are where the answer usually is.

Nobody prompts for the barrier side, because it's counterintuitive to ask why someone wouldn't buy the thing you're building. That's the half of the model that explains why a market with an obvious problem still won't move.

This objection gets stronger every quarter as models improve. We think that's fine — a Sprint is an entry point that leads somewhere, not a moat.

Founder Sprint · $0

A free slot each quarter, for founders who genuinely can't pay yet.

Pre-funding only. If you've raised a Series A, you have the budget — this isn't for you, and the application will say so.

What we ask for

Founder name
Business email
Company website
Stage of growth
Capital raised to date
Ideal customer profile
The problem you solve for them
The decision you're trying to make
How many customers you have today
The goal you want to achieve

The exchange

A Founder Sprint is free in exchange for three things. A professionally produced video testimonial within 30 days, yours to use anywhere. Publication of the complete findings report — your company name, your name and title, and the research itself. And a brief 90-day follow-up on what you ran and what happened. You get seven days to flag anything commercially sensitive before we publish.

Not selected? Most applicants aren't — slots are limited each quarter. The $3,500 Sprint covers the same ground with more depth and no waiting.

Apply for a free Sprint

Where it leads

The instrument outlives the Sprint.

A Sprint tells you where demand probably is. It cannot tell you that it's there — only real buyers can do that.

That's why the screener and guide are part of the deliverable. When you have customers, churned accounts, or lost deals worth interviewing, the instrument is already built and already sharpened against every archetype on your committee. Most teams run a Sprint at seed and a Customer Intelligence Study at Series A — same question, same guide, real buyers, and a motion you can defend in a board meeting rather than one you're still testing.

Compare all three methods →

Book a discovery call Not sure which method fits?