Case 01 Real estate · US · Pre revenue
Making a “not investable” vision feel possible again
After being told her $55M vision was not investable, we helped turn something that once felt 10 years away into a credible 12-month path towards a first pilot — making the bigger ambition feel possible again.
The vision
The founder had a deeply personal ambition: to build an intergenerational hospitality and community hub. It was the kind of idea that could become a substantial business, but it was also expensive, complex and difficult to imagine building from where she was today, doing community building through quarterly supper clubs.
She had already paid financial consultants thousands of dollars for help. The conclusion she walked away with was: the business was not investable.
But that answer treated outside investment as the decision. Her real question was bigger: how can I make this vision real?
What we changed
We started with the future she actually wanted to create and worked backwards. Instead of treating “is this investable?” as the decision, we broke the $55M ambition into smaller versions that could be costed, tested and compared.
We used scenario modelling to compare possible MVPs and the capital each would require, then modelled the supper club as a potential self-funding engine using revenue, costs, capacity, demand and event frequency. This created a way to test how quickly the existing business could realistically fund the first pilot.
We also designed low-cost experiments around customer acquisition and the booking journey so assumptions could be tested before more money was committed. Each test feeds a clear decision rule: EXECUTE when the evidence is strong enough, STOP when it weakens the case, or LEARN when an important uncertainty still needs to be resolved.
Decision Design in practice
- Define what the first credible version of the long-term vision could be.
- Cost multiple MVP routes rather than treating the final concept as the only option.
- Model supper-club revenue, costs, capacity, demand and event frequency.
- Work backwards from the capital required for a first pilot.
- Test customer acquisition cheaply across channels before committing more money.
- Use evidence from each test to decide whether to EXECUTE, STOP OR LEARN.
The outcome
The founder left with a concrete 12-month route towards a first pilot rather than a distant 10-year ambition with no obvious starting point.
More importantly, the plan changed how the vision felt. She printed the diagnostic and continues to return to it because it gives her a clear way to think about what comes next.
The goal was never to shrink the dream until it fitted a spreadsheet. It was to use the numbers to find a believable path towards it.