Boutique consulting firms where client delivery involves significant human judgment — not pure execution. 3–50 employees. The core pain is recurring, high-effort delivery tasks that repeat across engagements. The buyer is whoever is personally doing the delivery work.
| Firm type | Boutique consulting firm where delivery involves human judgment (not pure execution) |
|---|---|
| Team size | 3–50 employees |
| Core job | Client delivery — recurring, high-effort tasks that repeat across engagements and bottleneck growth (e.g. proposal creation, stakeholder interviews, client reporting) |
| Buyer / interviewee | Whoever is personally doing the delivery work — functional delivery lead (Director of Client Success, Head of Research, Client or Account Director, senior delivery Consultant), or founder/partner if hands-on in delivery |
| Growth posture | Actively trying to scale; ~70% dissatisfied with current growth rate |
| Out of scope | Biz-dev tooling · content creation · execution-only consulting (no judgment component) · founders or partners not involved in delivery |
| Client vertical filter | Open. To be resolved in v1.4 after the 30-interview round. |
| Geography | Not restricted; practical focus is English-speaking North America |
v1.2 locked the vertical to strategy and management consulting with stakeholder interviews as the core pain. The April 27 team call loosened the vertical constraint, broadened the core pain, and added a founder exception to the buyer definition.
| Dimension | v1.2 | v1.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Firm type | Boutique strategy or management consulting firm | Boutique consulting firm where delivery involves human judgment |
| Core pain | Stakeholder interviews and data gathering | Recurring, high-effort delivery tasks (proposal creation, stakeholder interviews, reporting, etc.) |
| Buyer | Functional delivery lead only; limit partner or founder interviews | Functional delivery lead — or founder/partner if personally hands-on in delivery |
“Management and strategy consulting” proved too narrow to operationalize. Low pipeline density, hard to identify on LinkedIn (the category doesn't exist as a tag), and behaviorally the team kept having productive conversations outside that niche. The real discriminator isn't the vertical label — it's whether delivery work involves human judgment rather than rote execution.
The stakeholder interviews framing came from a single EY partner reference. The April 27 call surfaced proposal creation as an equally strong signal — one firm quantified it as an $18,000/month problem. Locking to one task type before completing the 30-interview round was premature. v1.3 stays hypothesis-driven without specifying which task until the data says so.
In firms of 3–15 employees, founders are often still the primary delivery resource. The rule isn't “no founders” — it's “only speak to whoever is actually doing the delivery work.” A founder who is hands-on in client delivery is the right interview target. A founder who has fully delegated delivery is not.
v1.1 was drafted on April 13 but never formalized. It called for growth-minded agencies with manual coordination pain and a buyer split between economic and functional users. The April 20 team call tightened every dimension.
| Dimension | v1.1 | v1.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Firm type | Boutique agencies, broadly | Boutique strategy or management consulting firms |
| Team size | 3–15 / 16–25 / 26–50 (tiered) | 3–50 (single band) |
| Core pain | Manual coordination | Stakeholder interviews and data gathering within client delivery |
| Buyer | Economic (founder) + functional referral | Functional delivery lead only; limit partner or founder interviews |
| Out of scope | (implicit) | Biz-dev, content creation, execution-heavy consulting |
Client vertical filter. Do we hypothesize that consultancies serving B2B SaaS, financial services, or healthcare behave differently? Recommended: leave open, let the 30-interview round surface the cut.
Core pain specificity. The primary research and task audit interviews (30 total, targeting end of May) should reveal a repeatable pattern in delivery task type. v1.4 will lock this down.
Geography. Left implicit. If outreach response rates vary by region, v1.4 will narrow.
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
v1.0 |
pre-2026-04-13 | Implicit. “Growth-minded agencies” with manual coordination pain. Never written. |
v1.1 |
2026-04-13 | Formalized team-size tiers, buyer split, growth-mindset requirement. Never written up. |
v1.2 |
2026-04-21 | Narrowed firm type to strategy / management consulting. Core pain is stakeholder interviews. Buyer is functional delivery lead. |
v1.3 |
2026-04-27 | Loosened firm type to judgment-heavy consulting broadly. Broadened core pain to recurring delivery tasks. Added founder-as-deliverer exception. |
Sourced from the 2026-04-27 Gia team meeting (Matt Cooper, Tukan Das, Bailey Darling, Sanjeevi Ramachandran).