CASE NOTES

Writing on brands, signals and the method.

Short pieces on what markets reveal, how the method reads them, and what we get right and wrong.

A founder stands on two stacked books, The Mom Test and Jobs to Be Done, and places one new card on a dark green board labeled The Market Verdict METHOD Where The Market Verdict™ comes from The Market Verdict starts where The Mom Test and Jobs to Be Done leave off. What it took from them, what it adds, and where it is still thinner. The covers of the four Pilot Edition workbooks, Startup, Builder, Scale and Enterprise, fanned out on an ivory background PILOT Inside the workbooks What you actually get when your pilot place opens, page by page: one workbook, three steps and a one-page Brand Brief. NPS · THIS QUARTER+42How they feelWHAT THEY DO METHOD Use NPS to monitor. Use The Market Verdict to diagnose. NPS measures how likely customers say they are to recommend you. It can’t tell you why, or what role you play in their lives. A board shows the planned brand, a persona card; another shows the real brand, people working at tables with signal dots joined; a dashed arrow labeled the gap runs between them, and a person stands in the middle METHOD Why an independent outside read strengthens your findings Your own review can’t check itself. An independent outside read gives your findings something to be tested against. Agreement supports a claim; it doesn’t prove it. ICP: ATHLETESGym-goers · 25–35Post-workout recovery STARTUP The ICP on your wall is a hypothesis What Mesa Foods, the workbook’s fictional example, learned from its first 40 customers. FIVE LEADERS · FIVE ANSWERS“Never get blamed again.” ENTERPRISE Five leaders, five answers: what drift sounds like The fastest test of whether a company still knows what it is. PREDICTIONS How we’ll publish predictions, including our misses The rules for the record that opens March 20, 2027. SINGLE-ORIGIN“Doesn’t rush you.” BUILDER What a calm coffee shop teaches about real brands Trail Coffee Co. sold sourcing. Customers came back for something else. A balance scale: on the light side a speech bubble saying I would buy it; on the heavier side a shopping bag. Labels read what they say and what they do METHOD What counts as real evidence about your customers Four checks to run before you trust anything you’ve heard about your customers. A board titled the cost of waiting shows monthly bars rising from green to rust over 18 months, with markers at 6 months and 18 months; two people discuss it SCALE What brand drift costs, and how to work it out yourself Brand drift never shows up as a line item. Here is a simple way to put a number on it for your own business. Two boards: the business, with rising bar charts read by an analyst with a clipboard; and the brand, a store scene with customers and signal dots, read by a person with a magnifying glass INVESTORS What due diligence can't see Commercial due diligence covers a lot of ground. The Market Verdict adds one focused lens: the role customers give the brand, read from their behavior over time. Three steps joined by a dashed line: a person holding the workbook, a person holding a sealed envelope for the outside read, and a person waving beside a check mark for Crosscheck PILOT Join the pilot: The Market Verdict Pilot Edition We’re opening The Market Verdict to a small number of companies before launch, free, in exchange for honest feedback.