Test your go-to-market hypothesis in six weeks, in market, against real buyers. You walk away knowing which ICP responds, which message lands, and which channel works, with warm pipeline already moving and the playbook that proves it. Your first sales hire inherits a validated segment instead of learning which buyer pays on your runway.
For Seed to Series A founders, new product lines, and PE portcos post-close.
Prove the ICP, message, and channel with real replies. Produces the playbook.
Run that proven playbook every week, in your stack. Produces the pipeline.
Validate first. Graduate into the Engine with its setup fee credited 50 percent.
Most teams don't actually know their real ICP, the message that lands, or the channel that reaches buyers. So they hire to go find out, expensively.
The instinct is to hire a VP Sales and let them figure it out. But a failed VP Sales hire runs roughly $300K fully loaded, plus about $100K in pipeline that never got built, and the average VP Sales lasts 19 months, hired to discover the very things you should know first. You're paying a senior salary to answer questions a few weeks of evidence could answer first. The Sprint inverts the order: prove what works, then hire or operate against a motion you already trust.
You can name a target market, but not the segment that actually replies, or the trigger that makes them reply now.
You have a pitch, but no evidence on which message beats which, or whether email, LinkedIn, or calls reach the buyer.
A senior VP Sales hired to discover all of that is a research project with a title, and the meter starts the day they sign.
Not a slide deck of recommendations. The validated asset your team, or the Outbound Engine, can run from day one.
The segment that actually responds, defined and segmented with evidence from the market, not a persona deck built from assumptions.
A clear scoring of the ICP, message, and channel combinations actually run in market, so you know what worked and what to stop doing.
The live conversations the Sprint generated, handed directly to you to close, with recommended next moves on each.
The repeatable motion documented end to end, ready for your team to run or for the Engine to operate every week.
4 qualified institutional introductions for a B2B startup-ecosystem client, with the founder staying the closer on every one, 2 of them converted into live opportunities.
DocsHound used the same validate-then-operate system to land its first 100 booked demos and its first paying customers, and a customer introduction from that pipeline brought investors into the next round.
A fixed-scope sprint with a clear start and a clear handoff. The Validation tier compresses this into 3 to 4 weeks; Extended scopes run 10 to 12.
We set the GTM hypotheses together and run ground-truth buyer interviews, so we test real assumptions instead of guesses.
Sending infrastructure, target lists, and tooling stood up and verified, so every test runs clean and measurable.
Live tests scoring real combinations of ICP, message, and channel against real replies, iterated across two waves.
Findings synthesized into the playbook, the report delivered, and warm pipeline transferred to you.
A GTM engineer runs infrastructure. They're very good at executing the playbook you give them. The problem is the playbook itself.
If the playbook is wrong, they'll execute the wrong playbook at impressive scale.
The same goes for an outbound agency: volume against an unvalidated ICP is just faster guessing.
Validation isn't an execution problem, it's a learning problem. The Sprint answers what to build pipeline against before a single dollar of scaled effort goes behind it.
It's built for founders who need conviction on their motion before they scale spend or headcount behind it.
Pick the breadth you need to test. Every tier ends with the same four deliverables.
Prove the core motion fast, on a single persona.
The full validation across two personas. The recommended starting scope for most motions.
The broadest test, for multi-persona or multi-segment motions.
Larger TAMs and multi-segment or portfolio scopes.
And if the market says no? That is the Sprint doing its job. A dead thesis found in week three costs you a five-figure test, not the roughly $300K a mis-hired VP Sales costs fully loaded. You keep every finding, every list, and every live conversation either way.
Compare any tier to getting the first sales hire wrong: roughly $300K fully loaded plus about $100K of pipeline lost while you find out, across an average VP Sales tenure of 19 months. You find out what works before the hire, not after.
The Sprint validates the motion and hands you the playbook. When you're ready to run it every week without it landing back on your plate, the Outbound Engine operates that exact playbook, and Sprint graduates convert with the Engine setup fee credited 50 percent.
The Sprint is designed and run end to end by Michael McAtavey: ex enterprise sales leader, ex PE and VC, MBA in corporate finance from UNC. The person who designs your test is the person who runs it. No pods, no juniors: the person you book is the person who writes every email.
More about MichaelBring the hypothesis you're not yet sure of: the segment you think buys, the message you think lands, the channel you think reaches them. In six weeks you'll know which parts were right, with warm pipeline to show for it. If a Sprint isn't the right call, I'll tell you straight.
Book a 20-minute fit callIf it's not a fit, I'll tell you in the first ten minutes.
Not ready for a call? Get a free GTM teardown of your motion instead.