An industrial group’s vehicle recycling arm
They asked for more leads. Leads weren’t the problem.
They came for a lead generation website. Discovery found the demand was never the problem — and more leads would have amplified the cost, not the revenue.
70–80% first-pass UAT acceptance
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MyonPet — my own venture, in build
I ran this on my own company. It cost me a feature set and saved me most of a year.
The whole product sat on an assumption I had never tested: that owners would track their pet daily, unprompted. I checked. They wouldn’t.
80% of planned scope removed
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Blessart Digital — my own venture, failed
I spent months researching a market and never asked anyone for money.
Several owners asked to see a proposal. I read that as validation. Nobody had paid me anything, and I had built a company on it.
Zero clients landed
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And yes, you should be asking whether someone whose consulting business failed is the right person to advise you.
It’s a fair question. The difference is that this practice isn’t built on months of research and a positioning document. It’s built on thirteen years of delivered work, and the artifacts are open above for you to judge directly rather than take on trust. Blessart is why I don’t let anyone confuse interest with demand. I earned that one the expensive way.
An industrial group’s vehicle recycling arm
They asked for more leads. Leads weren’t the problem.
An established business with real revenue, no online presence, and a plan to fix that. They came to us for a lead generation website.
I ran the discovery. What surfaced wasn’t a demand problem. Their tracking and coordination happened offline and by hand, and it was costing them money and time on every single transaction. Sending more leads into that would have amplified the cost, not the revenue.
So the recommendation wasn’t the website they asked for. It was to move the operation itself online, mapping customer, inspector, warehouse, and operations touchpoints as one connected ecosystem, and let demand generation follow a process that could actually handle it.
Every major functional decision went through their CEO directly. It’s live and running.
The modules I specced hit 70–80% first-pass UAT acceptance.
The brief was reasonable and the client wasn’t wrong to ask. But the thing they wanted to buy wouldn’t have fixed the thing that was hurting them. Finding that out took discovery, and discovery is cheap compared to building the wrong thing well.
MyonPet — my own venture, in build
I ran this on my own company. It cost me a feature set and saved me most of a year.
I set out to build a pet habit tracker. The premise was the one everybody nods along to: owners log their pet’s daily routines, and with enough of that data we tell them something useful.
The assumption I hadn’t tested was whether owners would track at all. Not whether tracking is useful, but whether they’d do it, repeatedly, unprompted. The entire product sat on top of that and I’d never checked.
So I checked, with closed-group surveys and two small pilot programmes over a few weeks. The answer was clear. They liked the idea and they didn’t do it. The data layer the whole product depended on was never going to exist.
I cut the habit tracker, and I cut the AI features stacked on top of it. What survived was the part that was genuinely ours and needed no daily input from anyone: the nutrition analysis engine, built with a certified pet nutrition coach.
That removed roughly 80% of the planned scope and projected build cost, before any of it got written.
It’s in alpha, bootstrapped, and approaching its first year.
I could have built the original version. It would have been beautifully specified and dead on arrival. That’s the failure I’m hired to prevent, and I know its shape because I nearly walked into it with my own money.
Blessart Digital — my own venture, failed
I spent months researching a market and never asked anyone for money.
I started an independent consulting practice for SMEs. Months of research pointed me at well-run local businesses in the US and UK. I built a positioning, built a marketing plan, and warmed owners up over email and WhatsApp. Several asked to see a proposal.
I read that as validation. It wasn’t. Nobody had paid me anything. “Send me a proposal” is the cheapest thing a business owner can say, and I’d built a company on it.
What I did next was the actual failure. I pivoted toward healthcare because healthcare was the thing moving. I had no relationships there, no credibility there, and no reason to think I could win beyond the fact that it was busy. Then I held on for months, because it was mine and I’d built it.
I never landed a client.
What I’d tell myself now:
- Interest is not demand. Get someone to pay before you build a business around them.
- Moving toward whichever market is loudest isn’t a pivot. It’s a way of avoiding the question of whether your offer works.
- The hardest judgment in product isn’t what to build. It’s admitting the thing you’re attached to isn’t working, early enough for it to matter.
