When your founders make better decisions, your portfolio is worth more.
Most of the value in an early-stage cheque is built or lost in the product, pricing and ICP decisions a founder makes in the eighteen months after you wire the money. Pattern & Proof works directly with your founders on those decisions, so the bet you made on the team has the best possible chance of compounding.
We do behavioural research that has shaped product, pricing and positioning decisions for funded founders, including portfolio companies of family-office investors. Case studies below ↓
The eighteen months that decide whether the cheque was worth writing.
You back the founder. You back the wedge. After that, what determines whether the company hits the next round is a long sequence of small calls about what to build next, who to sell to, and which signals to trust. The pattern from the inside looks like this.
Decisions on instinct, with a clock running
Founders make ten material product and customer calls a month. Most are made on gut, because the founder does not have time to design a piece of research, and the budget for a real one is not there. Two or three of those calls a year turn out to have been wrong. By the time the data tells the founder which ones, the runway has moved.
Customer signals the founder cannot read
Founders read their own product through the lens of why they built it. The reasons customers actually use it, or stop using it, are often invisible from inside the team. Most founders sense this but do not have a way to fix it. The cost shows up later, in the next round, when the story stops matching the numbers.
ICPs that are actually three different segments
Early users come in for different reasons. Founders see the volume and call it a market. Twelve months in, churn looks fine on average and terrible inside two of the three sub-segments, and the team is rebuilding the funnel from scratch instead of selling.
The thing the founder will not bring to a board meeting
By the time a problem is big enough to surface in a board update, it has usually been live for two quarters. Founders are not hiding it. They are working on it, badly, alone, between everything else. A regular external read catches it earlier.
A perk that protects every cheque you have already written.
A behavioural research sprint, run directly with one of your founders, on the decision that matters most to them right now. You pay. They use it. Two weeks per sprint. Most founders use the work to lock in one of the calls they were about to make on gut, and quietly correct one they were already drifting into.
Three things make this different from anything else you could give them.
Run by someone who will tell them the truth.
Annabel is a behavioural psychologist. The work is methodologically rigorous, the conclusions are written for someone who has to make a decision on Monday, and she will tell a founder when the data says the thing they want to build is not worth building. That is the point of the work, and it is the part founders cannot get from agencies, tools, or each other.
It compounds across the portfolio.
Patterns surface across companies that no single founder can see from inside their own. A read on what is shifting in B2B SaaS buying behaviour, or what is breaking in onboarding flows post-AI, becomes a quiet edge across every founder you have backed. You can share what is portable and keep what is not.
The founder owns the relationship, not you.
You introduce, you pay, then you step back. The work happens between Annabel and the founder, and the deliverables go to the founder. You see the company perform. You do not get pulled into managing the engagement.
Most founder perks are signalling. This one shows up in the metrics.
The standard portfolio support stack is some combination of office hours, slack channels, recruiter introductions, accountant introductions, and a credit on a cloud platform. Useful, replaceable, not load-bearing.
The decisions a founder makes about what to build next, who to sell to, and what to charge are different. They show up in the next round narrative. A founder who walks into the next pitch with three good customer-decision sprints behind them is telling a different story than a founder who is winging it. You can see that difference from across the room.
There are paid alternatives, and they all have a problem.
What this is instead — a behavioural psychologist working alongside one of your founders for two weeks, on the specific decision in front of them, ending with real answers. Not a report. Not a tool. The actual calls, made well.
You introduce. We do the rest.
- 01
You pick the founder and the decision.
Most investors start with one founder they think will get the most out of it, often the one who is between rounds and has the densest set of calls in front of them. A short three-way intro call, fifteen minutes, where the founder describes the decision and Annabel confirms it is a fit for a sprint.
- 02
Annabel runs the two-week sprint with the founder.
Survey design, user interviews, analytics review, behavioural analysis. The output is a short written brief and a one-hour walkthrough with the founder. You can sit in on the walkthrough or skip it. Most investors skip it once they trust the process.
- 03
You hear the result through company performance.
Not through Annabel. The founder owns what they learned. You stay in your role, and the company shows up better at the next board update.
Decisions this work has shaped.
Behavioural validation of a funded ed-tech business.
A funded founder had strong sign-up numbers and a flatlining retention curve. Survey design, user interviews and behavioural analysis revealed that the thing pulling people into the product was also stopping them from believing it could work for them. The insight reshaped the product roadmap and the messaging strategy going into the next round.
UX research for a platform with over 1 million users.
A platform with detailed analytics had no explanation for why satisfaction was dipping. The data showed what users were doing. It could not show why. Thematic analysis surfaced three recurring friction patterns the numbers had buried, giving the team a clear prioritisation framework for the next product cycle.
Conversion funnel audit revealing where and why users dropped off.
An e-commerce brand had been losing conversions at the same point in their funnel for months. Combining behavioural data with user interviews showed the real issue was upstream. Their email campaigns were echoing surface-level desires instead of the actual psychology of why customers buy. A copy shift aligned with real purchase drivers fixed what a redesign could not.
Portfolio-level work for a family-office investor.
A family-office principal wanted to give two of their portfolio founders structured customer support, paid for by the office, on the specific decisions each founder was wrestling with. The sprints reshaped one founder's pricing model and gave the other a clean read on which of two ICPs to drop. Both founders are now in stronger positions for their next round.
Who you are working with.
Annabel Lovegrove
Behavioural psychologist. Founder of Pattern & Proof.
Ten years of research and product strategy work across ed-tech, e-commerce, energy, recruitment and early-stage startups. Paid validation sprints for funded founders and family-office investors. Translates academic methodology into commercial decisions for a living.
The point of putting Annabel in front of one of your founders is that she will tell them the truth about what their customers actually do, in time for the founder to do something about it. That is the difference between portfolio support that feels good and portfolio support that shows up in the cap table.
What it costs.
per founder, per sprint
- Two-week turnaround
- Fixed fee, invoiced to the investor
- No commitment beyond the first sprint
per founder, per sprint, from the third sprint
- Reflects the ongoing relationship
- Cross-portfolio pattern reads
- Priority scheduling
Most investors start with one founder, see what they get back, and grow it from there.
A customer-side read on a deal before you write the cheque.
The same method runs against a company you are evaluating rather than one you have already backed. Two weeks, IC-ready brief, behavioural read on the founder's customer story. Different conversation, different pricing, same person doing the work. Mention it on the intro call.
Want to give one of your founders the insights that can skyrocket their growth?
A 20-minute call costs nothing. We talk about one founder, one decision, and whether a sprint is the right shape for it. If it is, we line it up. If not, you have not lost anything.
Book a 20-minute call →