Business consulting
Business consulting answers the question of whether to do it at all and, if so, in what order. We review processes, the product and the figures, work out where you are losing money, and say what will make a difference and what will merely add cost.
Most often people come to us with a technical question while the root turns out not to be technical. On Battle of the Bees we were asked why investors would not put money into the game when its click protection was the best on the market. The question itself was answered in a single conversation, and right behind it came the next one: and what now. What had to be worked through was the market, the economics and retention, because the money was there rather than in the technology.
Silent Notary was similar. We were called in to finish a service that had stalled, and instead we studied the market, talked to a business audience, reframed the task and defended the new framing in front of the owners. The product was then rewritten from scratch, and that turned out cheaper than finishing the old one.
Another telling case is SignItNow. We ran the technical side of an advertising campaign together with the client marketing director and talked to entrepreneurs. From those conversations it turned out that notarising a document and signing a document are different needs, and nobody on the market was covering the second. The product grew from there rather than from the original hypothesis.
Let us state the boundaries straight away. We are a technical team that can work out the product and money side and understands processes well. We will not replace a management consultant, but we can take your processes apart. Whether to restructure the sales department is yours to decide: that is your call and your experience. Our part is to look at the situation from the outside, assess the technical, process and product sides and give you a picture from angles that are usually invisible from within.
A negative answer here is as much a result as a positive one. That automating this process is not worth it and leaving it as it is would be cheaper, or that this hypothesis need not be tested and here is why, we say plainly. Such a conclusion costs you one consultation and saves half a year, a year or more of development.
If the question is already about technologies and contractors, that is IT consulting, and if you need to understand the state of what is running, an audit. From there the decisions turn into business process automation, corporate systems, AI integration and analytics, while prototyping and an MVP help test a hypothesis before development.
What the service covers
Any combination of the items below can be taken on its own.
What actually hurts rather than how it was phrased at the start. We talk to the people who work inside the process every day.
A list of processes with figures: what each costs today, what the rollout and ownership will cost, and over what period it pays back.
What people actually use, what they pay for, what holds them, where your product loses them. Needed wherever the decision cannot be made from internal figures alone.
Pricing, free quotas, monetisation, reasons to come back. We work through the options and hand them over as a document.
How to test demand cheaply: conversations with clients, a prototype, an MVP. What exactly to test and by which signs to consider the answer received.
The order of steps for the coming months with priorities and estimates, so the budget follows returns rather than whoever inside the company asks loudest.
How we work
What the task is, where it came from, which decisions have already been made and why.
Conversations with people, collecting the data if it exists and reconstructing the picture if it does not.
Two or three paths with estimates of cost, payback period and risk.
Written conclusions and a meeting where the substance can be argued out.
Cases for this service
Frequently asked questions
IT consulting answers the question of how to build: stack, architecture, contractors. Business consulting answers the question of whether to do it at all and in what order. They often run together, but starting with the second is the more logical order.
Because over the years we have watched products fail to take off with perfectly sound code. We work out the part where business meets technology, and we say plainly where our competence ends.
Then we will write that. It is an unpleasant answer and the cheapest one available.
Yes, if the question is whether you need one, which one and what it will change. We cost the options, including off-the-shelf systems, and say whether it pays off at your volumes.
It depends on the scope of the review and the number of processes. We name the price after a short introduction to the task, before the work starts.
We sign an NDA before we start. The document goes to you only.
Related services
Shall we discuss your task?
Tell us what needs to be done and we will come back with an estimate, the team composition and a plan for the first two weeks.