HITMˣE® for Startups
Humans In The Machine is for any person, leader, or organisation wanting to become enthusiastic about the future, wanting to change but lacking the clarity, creativity and conviction to do so with courage.
Founder
From startup to mission-driven upstart.
Build something customers love and investors grasp.
You have a early-stage business or are an investor. You’re building fast in a complex world. We help you sharpen your thinking, advisory and diagnose what’s blocking progress, turning a venture into a Minimum Lovable Product with a clear path to market.
Problem: Startups don’t stay up. Founders are too often fixated on selling up to realise the market's lasting value. A 90% growth in acquisitions instead of going public means a less healthy, less competitive marketplace. (Yale)
Consulting fails founders by treating startups like small corporates. HITMˣE® cuts through that: clear-eyed diagnosis, targeted problem‑solving, systems thinking and story telling.
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These are the things we hear from founders seeking support, expressing pain and distress and where we can help:
"Everyone loves the concept, but nobody is actually paying for it or using it."
"We’re burning cash way faster than expected, and we don’t know why."
"We poured money into marketing and hiring, but our users leak out the back door."
"My co-founder and I can’t agree on decisions anymore, and the team is picking sides."
"A major competitor just launched our core feature for free, and our pipeline froze."
"We built an incredible product, but we have no repeatable way to get in front of buyers."
"Users keep complaining, but shifting our product roadmap feels like giving up on our vision."
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Pain narrows focus. It clouds our judgement, boosts stress levels and forces us into the quickest of fixes.
1) “Reveal & Release” session
A focused conversation to understand where you are at, your goals, surface the pain points, and get a feel for which of the 10 common startup pains are slowing you down.
2) Diagnosis
Our proprietary process equates business systems to human systems to make your real blockers more tangible and relatable. You get a clear picture of what’s working, what isn’t, and what to fix first to relieve growing pain.
3) Targeted workstreams
Problem-based assignments are designed to solve the specific issues uncovered in diagnosis — not generic or paint-by-numbers consulting. We don’t avoid the problem and we don’t move on until it is sufficiently relieved.
4) Strategy Advisory
Helping organisations make clearer decisions, set sharper priorities, and build practical strategies that align people, resources, and momentum.
5) Narrative development
Translating setup work into a living, evolving story that makes sense, so customers, partners and investors immediately understand your value whether that is product-market fit or external communications.
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Minimum Lovable Product
We shape your venture into the smallest version customers will genuinely care about, meaning the core problem you solve, who it’s for, why it matters and the mission behind it.
Business Health, Operating System & Maturity Model DecisioningWe offer a structured advisory process that helps early‑stage brands move from scattered effort to predictable, commercially grounded growth. It replaces overwhelm, guesswork, and reactivity with clear, actionable understanding of business health and maturity.
Business Model Canvas
Expanding on the concept to map out the customer segments, value proposition, revenue streams, distribution channels, key relationships, activities, resources, partners, and commercial model.
Digital Brand Design
Helping founders build a distinctive, usable brand system: taglines, palettes, logos, and the digital artefacts that give their business a clear, confident presence.
Go To Market strategy
A detailed plan of how your startup will reach and convert early customers effectively through right channels.
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In a nutshell, faster decision-making with fewer wrong turns, a clearer narrative for customers and investors and reduced cognitive load for you. All of which is linked to outcome-based metrics.
Realism: You’ll gain a clearer understanding of the specific issues hindering your progress.
Resilience: Solutions address root problems not symptoms, improving effectivity.
Divergence: A living business idea that means creativity, design, culture and comms from day one.
Coherence: Competitive strategies that build equity and ensure long-term sustainable growth.
Every startup hits a point where execution slows down. Schedule a free “Reveal & Release” consultation to identify where your current execution is stalling and begin the process of fixing it.
What if we imagined tech’s role in a new consensus?
“Cross-functional collaboration yields worse revenue outcomes” (Gartner)
Systems:
Don’t just collaborate, systemise cooperation.
Don’t measure impact in isolation, recognize intangible and personal impacts through integrated accountability.
Don’t ignore, adopt proven systems for human-centred design and innovation making use of common languages.
“Brands need to move on from effectiveness and solve for influence” (McKinsey)
Stories:
Don’t stifle difference, embrace independence.
Don’t burden BAU processes, find inflection points to bring teams together and formulate outcomes-based models.
Don’t re-org, re-design to reflect a more nuanced view of contribution and set-out the right degrees of freedom.
A new tech consensus built on cultures of enthusiasm.
Stories
Systems
Don’t stifle difference, embrace independence.
Don’t just collaborate, systemise cooperation.