Case study · Natural capital · Seed

From strong science to a growth plan.

A seed-stage company, £1.7m raised, calculating natural capital for project developers and enterprise buyers of nature credits. The science was strong. What it needed was a clear view of who would pay, how big the opportunity really was, and what customers were telling them — turned into a plan the whole team could follow.

The situation

Nature markets are early, and early markets are noisy. The team was selling to two very different buyers — the developers creating projects and the enterprises buying credits — with one story for both. They needed a commercial growth plan: a defined ideal customer, a realistic market size, an honest look at the accounts they already had, and a product strategy pointed at the buyers most likely to pay.

What I did

1. 01Defined the ideal customer. Separated developers from enterprise buyers, and within each, who has the budget, the urgency and the authority to buy now.
2. 02Sized the market from the ground up. A TAM built from real buyers and real projects, rather than headline figures borrowed from market reports.
3. 03Reviewed every customer account. Who was paying, who was piloting, who had stalled — and why.
4. 04Captured the voice of the customer. Turned what customers were actually saying into clear themes that product, sales and leadership could act on.
5. 05Re-pointed the product strategy. Aligned the roadmap with the customers most likely to pay, so the next things built would be the things that sell.

What an outside view adds

Teams inside a fast-moving start-up stop seeing the assumptions they're built on. Coming in independent, with no history to protect, I could ask the questions that had quietly stopped being asked:

• Are we describing our product in our language, or the buyer's?
• Which customer are we really building for — and is that the one we're selling to?
• Which beliefs came from the fundraising deck, and have any of them been tested since?
• Where is effort going into accounts that will never convert?

What changed

A refined ideal customer and a sharper strategy. The team came away knowing who to sell to first, what to say to them, and what to build next — with a growth plan that holds up when an investor or a customer pushes on it.

Good science deserves a commercial plan that's just as rigorous.