This answers the open questions in the brief so you can sign off and we ramp. Each item is structured the same way: our recommendation, why, and what we need from you to lock it. Anything that needs your real numbers or a business call is marked Lars decides.
The brief is strong enough to launch on. The only things blocking a start are decisions, not strategy.
Recommendations below are ours; final calls tagged Lars decides are yours. Silence on a decision defaults to our recommendation, so a start is safe either way.
The brief advanced from v3.1 to v5.0, but the open decisions below are still deliberately unresolved. Section 16 of the brief states Lars wants to “work it through with the agency rather than hand down an answer,” so every recommendation here still stands.
One thing hardened in v5.0. Pricing is now a firm rule: no pricing, ever, in any public or outbound channel. No list prices, no ranges, no per-study cost, no cost-per-respondent. The $15/study figure has been removed from the brief. The pricing item in Part 2 is rewritten to match.
Get Qlaris in front of product leaders the week they’re about to build the wrong thing.
Qlaris wins when a product team feels the “we shipped the wrong thing” pain and learns there is a way to get real signal in minutes instead of a six-week research queue. Outbound’s job is to put that realization in front of them at the exact moment they are committing engineering to an unvalidated bet.
A public post, a discovery event, a launch. Plus firmographic layers: raises, hires.
Social listening, Luma and Product Hunt, product communities, funding and hiring data.
Filter: right title, right stage, real validation moment. If not, drop it.
One short note referencing the prospect’s situation. Qlaris introduced only as the fix.
Series A to C B2B / B2C SaaS, roughly 30 to 500 people, ship-fast culture. Thin or no dedicated research function, so Qlaris fills the gap. Persona split 60 / 20 / 20 recommended for phase 1.
Owns roadmap risk and the “hit rate” pain. Feels every failed launch personally. Buyer decision authority. Has a landing page today (Persona 1 is proven-page, majority-volume).
Validating before they spend engineering cycles. Lands here, expand up. Sub-page needs the intake-queue framing (reuse existing modules). Phase-2 ramp.
First-time research hires building the function and choosing tools. Founders / 0-to-1 teams for a faster, self-serve motion. Sub-page needs gated-pipeline framing.
Heavily-regulated enterprises that demand real-human panels, and pre-product idea-stage founders with no budget. We stay in the mid-market product-team lane where speed wins.
Most outbound hits the right title at a random time. We watch public data for the moment a specific company is about to make an unvalidated product bet, then reach out while the decision is open.
| Category | Signal | Why it fires now |
|---|---|---|
| Behavioral | A PM publicly wrestling with a build decision on LinkedIn or Twitter | Live indecision is the sharpest possible buying moment |
| Behavioral | Product leader hosting a discovery meetup or workshop | Positions them as receptive to structured discovery methods |
| Behavioral | A maker who just shipped, seeking early feedback | Post-launch validation gap is textbook Qlaris territory |
| Trigger window | Fresh funding round (Series A to C) | Budget and mandate to build. Roadmap gets ambitious in the first 90 days |
| Trigger window | New head of product / CPO hire in first 90 days | New leader wants a fast win. Discovery methodology is where new leaders differentiate |
| Trigger window | Product launch or major feature ship | Iteration cycle now depends on feedback speed. Old research queue no longer works |
| Evergreen | Right ICP, always-on | Fills the pipeline between signal spikes. Runs underneath the signal-led tracks |
The credibility wound in the category is “synthetic users are shallow.” We do not argue it. We use it. Qlaris is the discovery co-pilot for the first 80 percent: kill bad concepts and sharpen the question cheaply, before you commit real humans and real engineering.
Two channels running in parallel, each with a distinct job.
Channel 1
Direct sequences to product leaders and PMs in the ICP. Best for senior buyers and warm, credible first touches.
Channel 2
Dedicated mailboxes and domains, warmed and monitored. Carries the signal-led and evergreen tracks with data, personalization, and multiple angles tested.
A starting shortlist of events where product and research leaders gather. For each, we source the right attendees and run timed outreach before, during, and after.
| Event | When | Where | Who’s there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority · Europe (closest to home, highest fit) | |||
| Future Product Days | Sep 22–24, 2026 | Copenhagen | Product + UX + AI leaders |
| Product-Led Summit Berlin | Oct 21, 2026 | Berlin | Product leaders + PMs |
| Product-Led Summit London | Dec 2–3, 2026 | London | Product + growth leaders |
| ProductCon London | Feb 23, 2027 | London | Senior product leaders |
| Product-Led Summit Amsterdam | May 28–29, 2027 | Amsterdam | Product + growth leaders |
| #mtpcon London (Mind the Product) | June 2027 | London | 1,000+ PMs and product leaders |
| Near-term · Online / US | |||
| ProductCon: AI Builder Week | Aug 3–7, 2026 | Online | 15,000+ PMs. Biggest near-term online play |
| Lenny & Friends | Rolling | US | Senior product leaders |
| ProductCon SF | Rolling | San Francisco | Product leaders |
| Mind the Product Chicago | Rolling | Chicago | Product community |
| Product Hunt (monthly) | Continuous | Online | Makers + early adopters |
Six kickoff questions from the brief. Our recommendation, why, and what we need from you to lock it.
Meeting-first now. Defer free-signup.
Your own data settles it. Every revenue win came through a founder meeting, the free account under-delivers without MCP, and the CTAs currently land on a demo form, not real signup. So there is no proven signup-to-revenue path to run yet. Run Option A (meeting) as the revenue path and Option B (question-first) as the soft top-of-funnel. Hold Option C until the post-signup MCP onboarding ships (see Q5).
On the flip point: self-serve signup only out-converts sales-led once two things are true at the same time: (1) a cold, unassisted user reaches a real “wow” without a human, and (2) the deal is small enough that a founder meeting is not worth the ACV. As a heuristic, self-serve wins below roughly a mid-four-figure ACV and sales-led wins above it, but that line moves entirely on your actual numbers.
Your current average deal size / ACV and whether a low-price self-serve tier is even planned. Without that we cannot place the flip line, and neither should you.
Yes, it works, if it is specific, hedged, and gated so it does not drown you in founder time.
“Show, do not tell” is the strongest asset a product like this has, and it removes all buyer risk. Two failure modes to design around:
Too-good-to-be-true: a stranger promising free work reads as a scam unless credibility lands first. Fix with specificity and a limitation in the same breath. Example ask: “Send me one product question. I will run it through our synthetic population and send the output in 48 hours, including where our confidence is low.” The hedge is what makes it believable, and it matches your “honest by design” tone.
Founder-time sink: it does not scale past a certain volume. Fix by keeping volume deliberately low (your own “200 good emails a week”), templating the intake, and having the founder review and send the output rather than run each from scratch.
Where it goes in the sequence: own touch 1 as the soft ask, and do not repeat it while the meeting ask is live (see Q4).
Direct calendar link to the founder, with one or two optional context fields. No qualifying form, no agency call.
The brief already says no agency-side qualification in phase one and volume is intentionally low with tight ICP targeting. At that volume the list is the qualifier. A multi-field form or a qualifying step only adds drop-off. Capture at most “company” and “your one product question” so Lars walks in prepared, and make both optional so they never block the booking.
One ask per touch. The soft ask owns the open, the meeting ask owns the middle, the breakup owns the close.
| Touch | Channel | Job | The one ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | Hook (ship rate vs hit rate) + prove you are real | Soft: send me one product question | |
| T2 | LinkedIn connect | Credibility, trigger reference, founders’ background | None |
| T3 | Proof / pricing case (from touch 3 per claim rules) | Meeting (primary) | |
| T4 | Objection pre-empt (published limitations) | Meeting (restated) | |
| T5 | One-line breakup, door open | Soft fallback only |
The rule that prevents cannibalization: the two asks never appear in the same message. The soft ask captures the not-ready-to-meet in T1 and returns only as a low-pressure fallback in T5. The meeting ask has T3 and T4 to itself. Each email asks for exactly one thing.
Do not point cold traffic at signup until an unassisted user can go signup to first defensible answer in under ten minutes, and that activation rate is measured on warm traffic first.
Concretely, the gating build is:
Set a bar before opening cold traffic: measure signup-to-first-successful-query on warm/known traffic and clear something like 40 percent activation before spending cold volume on it. Sending cold traffic to an unfinished signup burns leads you cannot re-approach.
Tag by ask, measure per persona, and decide on meetings-held per 100 contacts, not on reply rate.
Net conversion-path recommendation: run A + B now (question-first as the soft T1 ask, founder meeting as the primary ask via direct calendar), instrument both, and hold C until Q5’s bar is met.
Do not block launch. Launch Persona 1 first (it has a page and is 60 percent of volume), then bring up minimal researcher and innovation sub-pages before ramping P2 and P3.
Reuse existing modules: intake-queue framing for researchers, gated-pipeline framing for innovation. This de-risks the start (P1 is proven-page, majority-volume) and buys time to stand up the two sub-pages without holding the whole engine.
Get a written yes or no per logo, per market, before any name appears in outbound. Default to the anonymized framing until then.
At least one or two nameable marquee logos in the marketplace vertical would materially lift credibility with Tier 1 targets. This is high-value and low-effort on your side.
The per-logo, in-writing list.
v5.0 made this a hard rule and we align fully. Section 6: no pricing, ever, in any public or outbound channel. The $15/study figure has been removed from the brief. This is now decided, so it is no longer an open item for us. What it changes on our side:
Only confirm who states price in the founder meeting. Nothing about pricing reaches outbound.
DACH is a priority ICP geography and also your home market, where unsolicited commercial email is legally constrained (UWG) and complaints are costly. This is not a footnote, it changes channel weighting.
Soft question-ask carried over LinkedIn. Email used conservatively, if at all, on documented legitimate interest.
Corporate B2B email with clear sender ID, one-click opt-out, and a documented legitimate-interest assessment. Concentrate email volume here.
Sender identification, physical address, immediate suppression on negative reply, data source recorded per contact. Lawful basis confirmed in writing before first send.
Practical consequence: the email-heavy 5-touch runs cleanest in UK/NL/Nordics, and DACH runs as a LinkedIn-led variant of the same sequence. We will build it that way unless you direct otherwise.
A short checklist. Our recommended default is in brackets so silence still gives us a safe starting point, but these are yours to set.
Confirm or override.
Only open piece: who states price in the founder meeting.
Need your list.
It is too heavy to lead with cold.
Treat B2B as a phase-2 expansion once B2C proof is in.
Every positive reply still routed to you same day.
Three phases across the first 90 days once the open items in Part 4 are locked.
Stand up sending infrastructure, finalize the ICP, wire the public signal sources (starting with funding + leadership-change), build the first target lists, load the first message angles.
Open LinkedIn + email on the highest-intent signals (fresh raise, new product-leader hire), with the evergreen layer underneath. Measure reply and meeting lift per signal type.
Scale the winning signals and segments. Refine the angle on real reply data. Feed proven copy back into the evergreen track.
Enrich to your fields, apply suppression, map every target to its most recent trigger event with a date.
Email-led in UK/NL/Nordics, LinkedIn-led in DACH, one ask per touch, claims gated to your approved list.
Every positive reply routed to you same day. Weekly review for six weeks.
After first 500 per persona, pick the opener with the higher meetings-held per 100 contacts.
With pricing now settled in v5.0, the single biggest unlock on your side is Part 4 items 3 and 6: the nameable-logo list and the phase-1 volume, geography split, and budget. Give us those and we can start the list build immediately.