We help founders build the language their buyers actually respond to.
Most AI companies sound identical. "AI-powered." "Intelligent." "Smart."
In industries where buyers don’t fully trust new technology that generic language fails to land and frankly, signals the market to dismiss you.
The work we do is, at its core, a question of voice.
What does your company actually sound like when it's telling the truth about itself? What do your buyers say when they describe you to someone else and how is that different from what you wish they'd say? Most founders know their product. Very few have found the right words.
That's what we're here for.
What We Offer
We work with a small number of founders and brands each year. Mostly Series A or B. Mostly building AI for industries that don't want to be disrupted. Often crossing between the Global South and the North, or the other way.
If that sounds like you, there are six ways to work with us.
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What it is. A ninety-minute strategic session. No deliverable, no slides, no prep deck — just direct judgment on what's missing in your story and what you should do about it.
Sometimes we find the sentence in the room. More often, we find the question that, once you sit with it, reshapes how you describe yourself for the next two years.
Who it's for. Founders and marketing leads who aren't yet sure what level of help they need. Anyone who wants to stress-test a narrative before committing further.
How long. One ninety-minute session, scheduled within two weeks.
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What it is. The core of our work. A 30-days engagement to rebuild your commercial story from the ground up — messaging architecture, category positioning, homepage rewrite, and a launch-ready narrative your team can carry into sales calls, investor meetings, and press the next day.
We begin by listening. We interview your customers, read your competitors the way your buyers do, and map the gap between what your product actually does and what the market actually understands. Then we write, and rewrite, and rewrite again, until the language stops sounding like every other AI company and starts sounding like yours. The final sentence should feel obvious in retrospect. That's how you know it's right.
Who it's for. Founders whose product is strong but whose story isn't landing. Teams where marketing, sales, and product each describe the company slightly differently, and nobody's sure which version is true. Companies preparing for a launch, a raise, or a category shift.
How long. 30 days from kickoff to handoff. First 10 days for discovery, next 10 days for development, last 10 days for revision.
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What it is. An ongoing editorial relationship producing the content that carries your story forward — founder essays, short-form video, posts, thought leadership. A small number of distinctive pieces every month, made to travel.
Most content work fails because it's outsourced as commodity production and ends up sounding like nobody in particular. We work the other way: find the founder's real point of view, sharpen it, produce it in whatever format best lets it travel. The goal is not presence. The goal is that your company, one year from now, is associated with a specific idea only you could have claimed.
Who it's for. Founders and companies who know content matters but keep producing mediocre versions of it. Teams where marketing is drowning in execution and can't protect the editorial standard. Leaders who want a public voice but can't develop one alone.
How long. Three-month minimum, typically extending. Monthly cadence: one long-form piece, two to four short-form pieces, one produced video or podcast appearance.
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Here they are, tightened. Same shape as the others, just less padding.
The Launch
What it is. An eight-week engagement to launch a product, feature, or company into the world, narrative spine, landing page, press angle, founder essay, video, social sequence, and launch-week execution alongside you.
A launch is a story told across surfaces. If the landing page, the investor note, and the founder's LinkedIn post each tell a slightly different version, you've lost it before it began. Our work is to find the one sentence your team can stand behind, then make every surface a different room in the same house.
Who it's for. Companies launching a meaningful product, category-defining feature, rebrand, market expansion, or the company itself. Founders who have one chance to make a first impression.
How long. Eight weeks. Four of build, two of launch, two of post-launch analysis.
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What it is. A bespoke edition of The Labs, our invite-only Paris gatherings, hosted for a single client with a specific strategic outcome in mind. You tell us who needs to be in the room. We curate, we design the conversation, and we host.
The best commercial conversations still happen face-to-face, over a long dinner, in a room that was chosen for what it makes people feel rather than what it puts on an invitation.
We've been building those rooms in Paris for three years through The Labs. The conversations that result are the kind that end in a partnership, a hire, or a new market a year later, rarely in a contract signed at the table.
Who it's for. Brands entering a new market. Funds launching a new thesis. Corporates building relationships with founders, investors, or category leaders they haven't met yet. Anyone who knows that some conversations don't survive Zoom.
How long. Eight to ten weeks from first conversation to the evening itself.
How We Work
We take on a small number of engagements at a time.
Usually two or three sprint-sized projects in flight, one fractional engagement, occasionally a launch. We turn down work that doesn't fit, including work we could do well, because the quality of this kind of judgment compounds only when the caseload is small. If we say yes to you, it means we've said no to someone else that week.
We're operators, and we stay operators.
We don't take on any engagement we couldn't execute inside a company ourselves, because marketing strategy that only works in slide form isn't really strategy. Everything we recommend has to survive a Monday morning and can be used in a system from the get go.
We publish
Subject Matter Labs is how we think in public: two podcasts, a newsletter, a Paris gathering. You can read us for a year before you ever book a call. We'd prefer that. The clients we work best with tend to arrive already knowing how we think, which saves us all a lot of time.
We bring the Global South with us.
Most positioning firms treat cross-cultural work as a service line. For us, it's native. Our careers and our network span India, Europe, MENA, and increasingly Africa, which means when your buyers or your team sit across cultures, we're not translating from the outside. We've lived on both sides of the bridge.