Optimal foraging for startups, distributed systems, privacy and cryptographic organisations
Technical and market work from one team. We read your architecture, pick the segment worth entering, and build the funnel that feeds it. You pay per milestone, not per hour.
3 at a time
At most three engagements run at once, so yours gets priority
Both halves
Solution architecture and go to market from one team
25+ years
Combined experience in privacy, cryptography and decentralized systems
No hype
No airdrops, no KOL buys, no engagement farming
01 / The principle
Nature has been solving this problem for a hundred million years, with a much faster feedback loop than yours. A model from behavioral ecology describes the go to market problem of a deep technology company better than any funnel diagram does.
Start with how reality works. An animal gains energy by finding food and spends energy searching for it and catching it. The animal that survives is not the one that finds the richest patch. It is the one that knows when a patch has stopped paying, and moves.
To maximize fitness, an animal adopts a foraging strategy that provides the most benefit for the lowest cost, maximizing the net energy gained. Optimal foraging theory
You have the same problem with a much worse feedback loop. A segment looks rich, the team settles in, and three years later the cryptography is excellent, the integrations are half finished, and nobody ever priced what entering that patch would cost. That is not bad luck. That is what happens when the cost of the search is never written down.
Charnov's marginal value theorem gives you the rule. Leave a patch when its rate of return falls to the average rate of the whole environment, including the cost of travelling to the next one. Read it in both directions, because the second direction is where good teams go wrong: the harder the next patch is to find, the longer it is rational to stay in this one. The chart is that rule, and the two ways people miss it.
Then look at the incentives, which is where these relationships are actually decided. An hourly agency is paid for residence time, so it has no reason to tell you a patch is empty. We price per milestone, so our incentive points where yours does: reach the decision point, take the decision, and move.
This is your last three years. Search cost is how long it takes to get a real conversation in a new segment.
Research, intros, credibility and dead ends before the next segment produces anything. When search is expensive, staying longer is the rational choice rather than the lazy one.
A shallow segment gives up its learnings immediately and then flattens. A deep one keeps paying for longer.
02 / The difference
Most agencies arrive with a playbook and fit your protocol into it. When the product is a mixnet, an encrypted transport or a proving system, the playbook is the problem. We write the strategy from your architecture, because we can read your architecture.
This is not squeamishness. These tactics measure beautifully and convert badly, and when your users chose you for trust, they cost you the thing you were selling.
Every milestone is written against something on this list, so acceptance is a fact instead of an argument about whether we did a good job.
03 / Services
Buy technical work and market work separately and they fail separately. The positioning has to survive the architecture, and the architecture has to be explainable to whoever signs. We do both, which is the only way to hold each one to the other.
Technical
For teams whose hardest constraints are cryptographic, distributed or regulatory
Market
For teams with real technology and no repeatable way to put it in front of a buyer
Flagship engagement
For teams three years in who still cannot name the buyer in one sentence
Patch survey
Interview candidate segments and rank them by cost of entry.
Entry test
One segment, one narrative, one funnel. Demand appears or it does not.
Scale or leave
Build the motion and hand it over, or test the next candidate.
04 / Selected work
Teams working on anonymity systems tend not to want a case study with their name on it, and we would rather keep that trust than win an argument with a logo. Names and references come on request, under NDA where it matters. The shape of the work is the part worth showing anyway.
We do not publish client names or the people on the bench. Once we are in a sales conversation or writing a scope, we name who would do the work and put you in front of a reference who has worked with them. Ask for it when you write. It is the part of the proof that does not belong on a public page.
Work runs under a written scope. If the product is regulated or there is a token involved, bring legal and compliance in early. You will want them anyway. We are not a law firm and we will not write communications that are securities promotions. We can introduce you to lawyers who do that work, and if the scope needs it we put a credible lawyer on the team under the same milestone terms.
Ask for a referenceConsistently delivered high quality work during our time spent working together on various projects, as well as when winning prizes in a multitude of hackathons during which the team's skillset was invaluable in securing all of our team's wins.
Just amazing, clear and great event.
05 / How engagements run
We agree what done looks like, cut it into pieces, and you pay against delivery. Hourly billing pays an agency to sit in a patch that stopped producing. We would rather be paid for the decision than for the residence time.
An initial 30 minute introduction, then a one week paid diagnostic that ends in an initial plan. You can stop after it and keep the plan.
Milestones with written acceptance criteria. Each one small enough that you can stop after it without stranding the work or the people doing it.
Scope and fee are agreed before anything starts. No hourly drift, no surprise invoice, and no reason on our side to make the work take longer.
You get artifacts your team can run without us. When the work needs a sharper specialist than we are, we say so and bring one in on the same terms.
Continue, re-scope, or leave the patch. Leaving is a legitimate outcome, and if the rate of return says so, we will be the ones to say it first.
Two partners set the scope, then pick the people. Everyone else comes from a bench of specialists we bring in when the work needs them. This is an example of a bench that sat on one client scope.
At most three engagements at a time. That is a promise of priority: the people on your work are not split across a dozen accounts, and when you need an answer, the partner who scoped it gives it.
Names come with references. We do not publish the partners or the bench on this page. Once we are in a sales conversation or writing a scope, we name who would sit on your work and put you in front of someone they have worked for.
Costs outside the work are scoped separately. Media, events and travel are priced on their own line. They are never hidden inside a strategy fee.
The first paid milestone
It starts after an initial 30 minute introduction, and only if that conversation shows a problem we can work on. The week produces an initial plan that identifies what is actually blocking you and sets out the milestones that get you past it. A plan built on the real problem costs far less than executing the wrong brief well.
Your team first, then the people whose decisions matter: users, integrators, partners or buyers, wherever the answer is most likely to be.
A read of everything you can share: architecture, docs, repo, data, past campaigns. Then the market around it, and what entering each segment would cost.
A written report: what is actually blocking you, the segments worth testing, and a first set of milestones with acceptance criteria and a price.
Price From EUR 1,500. The final fee reflects the technical complexity of your system and the depth of documentation and access you can provide.
Your exit You can stop after the week. The plan, report and analysis are yours to keep and use.
Outside it Media, events and travel are scoped and priced separately.
06 / Contact
Pick the closest thing below so the subject line is useful, then tell us what is actually going wrong. Be blunt about it. If we are the wrong people for the job, we will say so in the first reply and point you at someone better.
Fastest: Signal. Message us there and we will set up the initial 30 minute introduction. Prefer email? Pick the closest fit on the right and your email app opens with starter text you can edit. If it does not open, use Copy message text and paste it into your own client.
Message us on SignalNothing is submitted to us from this page. It only prepares a draft in your own email client.