Product strategy for founders who can't hire a product team yet.

For you if: your app has at least 3 years of data and has had at least 10,000 paying users over those years. Downloads are fine. Renewals are not. This is retention, not acquisition: I don't do ads or growth hacks.

What I do: I work from your own data. Subscription and store exports, event logs, reviews, and interviews if you have them. I build the cohorts and segments, find the moments people leave and what they did in the weeks before, and then find the early signals that show whether a renewal will happen long before the renewal date. The strategy is built around moving those signals.

What you get: a findings report where every number says who is counted and when. The retention strategy itself: the audiences, the stage each one is at, the behaviours to move, and the experiments in the order to run them. Dashboards for the proxy metrics, built in your own analytics tool. One flow diagram per experiment.

Why the minimums: under 3 years or 10,000 paying users, the data is too thin to find a pattern you can trust. If you're under that line, new product strategy or a prototype is the better spend.

For you if: you have an idea, or know the problem you want to solve or the market you want to serve. You haven't hired a designer and you haven't written a line of code, or you have and you're no longer sure it's the right thing to build.

What I do: everything up to the document a designer starts from. I research the people you want to serve. I look at what already exists and where you fit against it. I work out what goes in the first version and what waits, and how the product makes money.

What you get: a package for you and your stakeholders explaining why this product exists and for whom. A PRD for your designer/engineer, which is what you're building, in enough detail that a designer or a developer can build it, without telling them how. The interview notes, the competitive review, the scope for version one and a longer term roadmap.

The same method as the course. If you'd rather learn it and do it yourself, Passion to Product teaches this exact process. This service is for the founder who doesn't have time to do it themselves or whose time is best spent on other things.

For you if: you have a product strategy built on real user research and you're a few months from launch. Or you have a product, a date, and no plan for the day it goes live.

What I do: the App Store gives a new app one bump at the start, and if the listing, the screenshots and the keyword research aren't ready, you miss it. So I plan backwards from launch day: the waitlist that goes up while you're still building, the listing, the beta, where your first users come from, and the first 30 days, when you're replying to every review the day it lands and watching every metric.

What you get: a launch plan with dates. Keyword research and the listing copy. A waitlist page plan and what a click without a sign-up is telling you. The analytics and crash reporting to put in before any user touches the app. A 30-day playbook for after. Does not include design or copywriting services such as screenshots or app store descriptions.

Two prices, one difference: the strategy this plan sits on has to come from real research. If yours does, it's 2 weeks. If it doesn't, I do the research first and it's 4.

What a prototype is: a way to show a concept to a person and hear what they say. It is not a first version of your app, and it isn't production software. It's better if it's plain, because once there's colour and polish, people talk about the button and the font instead of whether it solves their problem.

What a proof of concept is: the answer to one question: can this be done, or will people get it? It can be a set of static screens, a paper sketch, or a single flow that only works for one path. It might not work at all, and that's fine, because what you're testing is the idea.

Which one you need: that's the first thing we work out together. If the person seeing it is a user, you want the plainest version that still shows the idea. If it's an investor or a partner, you want something they can click through. I'll help you work out the experience, which features belong in it, and how much design it needs to get an honest reaction.

What you get: the prototype or proof of concept. A short guide for showing it to people without leading them. My notes on what the concept needs before anyone designs the real thing.

Some companies are betting that if you give AI to your product managers, you need fewer engineers. I think engineers who know what their PMs know are going to be the hardest ones to replace. So I teach your team what their PMs know: finding the real problem, talking to users, deciding what goes in version one, and launching it.

Three shapes: a 1-day workshop that goes through the most important product strategy concepts you need to learn, a 2-week short course with a session every day, or the full 6-week course, 2 sessions a week, with time to do the work between classes. Your team works on one of your real products throughout, or their own.

What the price covers: each price is where it starts, and that covers me teaching your team. If you also want me to collect the team's work and report back on the outcomes, I'm more involved and the price goes up from there. Everyone who takes part gets their own spot in the Up Coast Builders network and will continue to be supported through monthly group Q&As.