Today is about confirming the business units we are building, how the company is set up behind them, and what each of us owns over the next 30, 60 and 90 days. The work already done — brand, site, 3 concepts, competitive read, GTM plan and financial model — is linked throughout.
Everything on the agenda feeds these.
The 6 business units named and ranked, with the MVP chosen and the rest sequenced behind it.
Entity, jurisdiction, cap table, roles, and where Innovative Group, StrataFusion and Naveen sit.
Named owners against dated commitments across 30, 60 and 90 days.
The 4 numbered blocks are the invite agenda, unchanged. Times and the questions beneath each are proposed.
Where things stand, what changed when the investor conversation ended, and agreement on the three outcomes above.
App, technology, strategy, 6 key business units
The financial model already carries 8 named product lines: the Score and founder profile, Deal Flow, Partner Pod License, Marketplace, Go, MyVoice, IdeaMaker and University — with the OS layer behind them. Andy has consistently described 6. Today we reconcile that, rank it, and rename the lines out of their Lynqo-era naming.
Fund, non-fund
Naveen's M&A lane and the StrataFusion relationship open an angle the original plan did not have. The original plan was built against a raise that is no longer in front of us.
Business growth, product MVP, acquiring users, funding our plan
We have a built GTM plan — wedge, test plan with decision rules, paid media architecture, growth model, revenue projection and 3 budget scenarios. It is summarised in the next section and lives in full in the portal. This block is about what we run, in what order, and what it costs.
Company set up (formation, equity, etc), roles & responsibilities, target dates within 30/60/90
Every decision and owner read back and circulated the same day.
Built in June across the partner portal: the wedge, a 30-day test block with decision rules, the paid media architecture, a 90-day post-funding plan, and a growth model with revenue projection and 3 budget scenarios. Summary below; full documents in the portal.
Meta video engagement and app install, LinkedIn sponsored content and lead gen, retargeting on both sides. Establishes baseline CPI and CPL before anything scales.
Meta app install to $18K, 1% lookalike audiences built, LinkedIn investor tiers 1 and 2, partner pod lead gen opens.
Full retargeting stack, lookalikes matured, UK and Canada reach, LinkedIn investor tiers 1–3 plus UK, Germany and Netherlands audiences.
Q1 validation at 1,000 founders / 100 investors / 5 pods, rising to 7,500 / 800 / 35 by Q4. Monetisation deliberately held back per Stefan's frame.
The expansion products launch and the advertising and enterprise data layers turn on. 8 revenue lines: IdeaMaker $2.4M, Go $1.4M, MyVoice $1.0M, Marketplace $1.0M, Pod License $0.6M, ESO advertising $0.6M, enterprise data $0.5M, University $0.5M.
Network base plus product maturity.
$8M is the conservative anchor with founder tiers parked. Soft activation of the paid founder tier late in Year 2 moves it to $12–15M.
Working back from a 5,000-founder goal — and ~625 investors, to hold the modelled 8:1 ratio. The blended cost per founder falls as the engine matures: $93 in the 30-day sprint, $70 at 90 days, $43 at 180 days once retargeting pools and lookalikes are working.
Scaling the 180-day scenario 1.7× holds the ratio and the efficiency. Cold-start inefficiency in the first 90 days pushes the realistic 12-month figure higher.
$12K of LinkedIn partner lead gen is modelled to produce 80–120 pod leads. At a 25% close and a 60-founder cohort that is 25 pods and ~1,500 founders. Close rate and cohort size are assumptions to test, not modelled figures.
Near-zero existing search demand in the category, so this builds an asset rather than harvesting one.
So: is the investment too small? For 5,000, yes — on paid alone. The $130K scale scenario lands at ~3,000 founders, roughly 60% of the goal, and closing the rest with media costs another $85–130K. The same gap closes for a fraction through the partner pods, which is the wedge the June analysis recommended and which has not been run. The budget is not the binding constraint. The pods are.
And is the pace too slow? The first 90 days deliver ~950 founders, about 19% of goal — nominally on pace, with no room for slippage and nothing started yet. Every week from here moves the 5,000 date out by a week. Reaching 5,000 inside 12 months needs the pod pipeline opening in parallel from month 1, not after a raise.
At ~$22K a month of media, video-first. The constraint is creative volume: Meta needs roughly 8–12 new variants a month at this spend to stay ahead of fatigue, and the founder films are a product surface as well as an ad unit.
Build, optimise and scale both funnels; owns CPI and CPL against the decision rules.
The largest single load. 8–12 variants a month, plus the founder film format itself.
The pod pipeline. On the math above, the highest-return seat on the team.
10 pillar pieces, then cadence. A Year-2 asset being built in Year 1.
GA4, CRM and UTM governance first, then nurture sequences on both sides.
Reads the tests against their decision rules so scale calls are evidence-based.
Roughly $300–400K a year loaded as standalone hires, or an Innovative Group pod against one of the 3 June structures — which is the same unresolved engagement question from agenda item 4.
Full documents. Growth model, revenue projection and budget scenarios in the post-kickoff update; complete paid media architecture in the paid GTM playbook; separate documents for the 30-day test plan, the 90-day post-funding plan and the competitive landscape — 22 competitors across 5 tiers plus 6 EU macro forces. All at innovativegroup.io/partners/vantage. Figures carry Lynqo-era product names and need re-basing to Tailwinds.
From the June kickoff, the July 27 brand session and Stefan's written notes — so we build on what is decided rather than relitigating it.
Owns the business plan and the financial model. Most of what is settled commercially came from him in writing.
partially free, advice on improving your score is not free, film and deck work is at cost, investors scan free but pay for hot deals and the scoring explanation, and partners pay an ad fee plus a fee on every deal they close.
Be the funding platform for startups.Users, investors and partner pods first; revenue layers in later.
what we make more efficient is not the whole round. Its the pitching process.Applied.
Not public. Gated.Applied.
knots (stay with the wind topic), with TW Knots, Lift index, Takeoff score and Tailwind index as alternates. Still open.
Owns product and brand conviction. The clearest articulation of what Tailwinds becomes is his.
the best single source, to get funding and to advance your startup— and a verb, the way eBay is a verb for auctions.
You don't really get the feel of a company.The edge is seeing founders as they built it.
90% of their interaction is going to be inside the app.6 business units, each with hundreds of experiences underneath.
We need something in the market as fast as we can.Ship at 60%, polish later. The standing weekly item is delivery and speed — resources, MVP plan, GTM plan.
the actual experience of a customer with a company. Wants it pushed into icons, treatments, illustration and use of space inside the app.
not italic, though. Icon softer and rounder.
Fix the list, pick the MVP, sequence the rest.
And whether the PE and M&A wedge is the thesis or an adjacent revenue line.
Decides whether the paid tiers are inside the MVP.
If yes: who builds it and with what money.
$14K sprint, $56K ramp or $130K scale — and whether the Year 1 model gets re-based to it.
Paid alone reaches ~3,000 at $130K. The remainder comes from the pods at roughly a fifth of the cost, or from another $85–130K of media.
Who fills the seats, and whether it runs through an IG pod or standalone hires.
Formation, founders, split, vesting, cliff, and how work already delivered is treated.
Product, commercial, delivery, capital. Hours a week. Who breaks ties.
What is in the bank, monthly burn, and the date it ends.
Which of the 3 June structures applies, and what IG holds going forward.
Revenue split, who owns the client, what happens when a chair converts to a permanent hire.
The shape when a diagnostic converts into chairs rather than a deal.
Knots is the strongest of the shortlist: a real unit of measurement, short enough to become a verb, and it reads as a reading rather than a verdict.
A draft to react to. It will change once the unit ranking and the funding shape are settled.
Not a decision for a particular moment in the day, but the numbers sit behind agenda items 2 and 3, so they are here when we need them. The difference is what the money is for: in the first, it buys a team to build ahead of revenue; in the second, it bridges the gap between invoicing and getting paid.
Either way, StrataFusion is the dependency. 5 more chairs named and commercial terms on paper. Today it is 2 of 7 seats and a handshake.
Pre-reads. gettailwinds.com is the public page. gettailwinds.com/internal holds the concepts, type work and decision log, passphrase lynqo. The GTM plan, test plan, paid playbook and competitive read are at innovativegroup.io/partners/vantage.