Who we work with.

For a pre-revenue company, traction can include a clearly defined customer, a repeated problem, willingness to pay, repeated product requirements, pilots, LOIs, or budget discussions. By the next raise, you should be able to show investors where demand is coming from, what customers value, and why more capital should go behind this market and product.

Sapienne helps improve the questions, separate feature requests from underlying needs, and compare what repeats across customers. The result is not another stack of interview notes. You leave knowing which market deserves focus, what belongs on the product roadmap, and what your team still needs to test.

Your team runs them. Tanya shapes the questions, coaches the first conversations, and helps interpret what comes back. That keeps the learning, customer relationships, and research skill inside your company, so the next time you enter a market or test a product direction, your team can do more of the work itself.

Yes. Discovery interviews can show which problems repeat, which requirements matter across customers, what they are willing to pay for, and which requests should stay custom. That gives your engineering team a clearer basis for what to prioritize, what to standardize, and what not to spend scarce runway building.

If you are choosing between markets, the 12-week Market Discovery Sprint is usually the starting point. If the market is chosen but demand, value, or buying conditions are still unclear, the four-month Commercial Validation Accelerator fits better. More complex product, market, and funding decisions may call for longer advisory support.

Sapienne goes deeper into how founders actually gather and use market information. Tanya helps them improve the questions, work through real interviews, and connect what they learn to market, product, and funding decisions. The work can sit alongside your existing curriculum or programs such as I-Corps rather than replacing them.

Track whether companies are getting more specific about who buys, what problem repeats, what it costs, which market deserves priority, and what still needs to be tested. By the end of the cohort, founders should be making clearer product and market decisions, not simply reporting that they completed more interviews.

Yes. Earlier companies may still be choosing a customer group or use case. More advanced teams may need stronger answers around value, price, buying conditions, repeatability, or product requirements. The companies do not need to be at the same stage; the work needs to match the decision each one is making.

Sapienne adds depth where your current program needs it rather than replacing what already works. Tanya can teach a focused session, work through company-specific problems, or support founders between workshops. The scope is built around your calendar, existing mentors, and the commercial milestones you want companies to reach.

Sapienne can support a focused workshop, a deeper cohort engagement with company-specific application, or longer support with more individual coaching. The right format depends on cohort size, company stages, your calendar, and what founders need to demonstrate by the end. After the intake call, we provide a fixed written scope and fee.

Your team may know the ecosystem better than anyone. Sapienne adds independent research when a board, funder, or partner needs input that is less shaped by internal relationships or institutional priorities. The goal is a clearer picture of what stakeholders actually need before major funding, program, or infrastructure decisions are made.

A survey works best when you already know what you need to measure. Structured interviews help when you are still trying to understand the problem itself: what stakeholders need, where they get stuck, what they have tried, and where priorities differ. That context is often what determines where funding should go.

The engagement can produce a prioritized view of ecosystem needs, strengths, gaps, collaboration opportunities, and strategic priorities. Sapienne also shows where stakeholder groups agree, where they differ, and which needs repeat strongly enough to act on, so leadership can decide what to fund, build, or coordinate next.

Any relevant relationship is disclosed before the work begins. If Tanya has an existing role or connection that could affect the research, it is discussed up front. The engagement can be structured around it, Tanya can recuse herself where needed, or the project can be declined if independence cannot be protected.

A typical Ecosystem Discovery & Roadmap runs 2–3 months. Sapienne conducts the research end to end. Your team helps define the decision, stakeholder groups, and constraints; Sapienne handles interviews, analysis, and synthesis. You leave with priorities leadership can use without asking your internal team to run the study.

Sapienne is most useful when several credible opportunities are competing for the same R&D budget, product resources, or executive attention. That can include choosing an adjacent market, deciding whether another technical milestone is justified, standardizing a requirement, or deciding whether a capability deserves its own product roadmap.

Your internal team knows your technology, constraints, and business better than an outsider. Sapienne adds independent market research around a specific decision. That helps your team test assumptions, compare opportunities, and bring outside customer input into roadmap or portfolio discussions without replacing the people who already own product, strategy, or R&D.

The work can be scoped around one decision that needs stronger market input before the review. Sapienne completes the research ahead of that meeting and turns it into a clear comparison leadership can use. For decisions that recur throughout the year, a longer advisory engagement may make more sense.

Both are possible. Sapienne can support one defined market or product decision over a 12–16 week workstream, or stay involved across a series of connected R&D, market, and product decisions. The right model depends on how often these decisions arise and how much outside research your team needs.

Confidentiality is handled before sensitive technical details are discussed. Where required, Sapienne can work under an NDA and keep client work private. The research is scoped around the market and product decision you need to make without requiring you to expose more technical information than the engagement actually needs.