We write down everything you believe about your growth. Then we check.
Tell us the growth problem you think you have. We will tell you whether it is the right one, before you pay us anything.
Start a conversation →| Belief | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Users sign up because transfers are cheaper than the bank. | ✕Contradicted |
| Our most valuable users are small business owners. | ○Assumed |
| Churn is driven by pricing. | –Never tested |
| Users who invite a contact in week one stay longer. | ●Proven |
| Agents are a channel, not a support cost. | ○Assumed |
This is what every engagement produces. The example is made up; a real one has your beliefs in it.
Growth plans rest on beliefs
Every growth plan rests on things a team believes about its users, its market, and its product. Most of those beliefs have never been checked.
Width is how much of the plan rests on the belief. Fill is what evidence supports it. The three widest columns here are holding up most of the year, and none of them has been checked.
Checking a load-bearing belief is expensive, and the answer can undo a year of work. Checking a small one is cheap and safe. So teams check the small ones, and the beliefs carrying real weight stay untouched for years.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A team decides users are churning on price, so they discount. If people are really leaving because the product never became useful to them, the discount changes nothing. It just loses money more slowly. The work was done well. The belief underneath it was wrong.
That is the gap we work in.
Five positions, so you can argue with us
Every firm has beliefs about its own work. Most keep them vague enough to be safe. Here are ours.
Most growth failures are diagnosis failures
The tactic is rarely the problem. The belief underneath it usually is.
The heaviest beliefs get checked the least
Small questions are cheap to answer, so those are the ones that get answered.
Research should name a decision
If a study cannot change what you do next, we would rather not run it.
A claim you cannot check is not a claim
We write down a prediction and a date, then come back and score it.
Who you ask decides what you learn
A sample that was never going to disagree with you cannot teach you much.
And one we are unsure about
Whether a firm can stay this strict about evidence once it has payroll to meet. We think so. We have not tested it.
How an engagement runs
Six stages. Three to four weeks for the full version, shorter for the smaller pieces.
We talk to you and your team, separately
One at a time, never as a workshop. What we are listening for is where two people who work together answer the same question differently. That does not come out in a group.
We look at what sits behind each one
Analytics, cancellation reasons, support tickets, sales calls, reviews. Every belief gets a status. Most come back Assumed. A few turn out to be contradicted by data you already have.
We name the one thing holding growth back
The biggest leak is not always the constraint. Fixing acquisition while activation is broken pours more people into the same hole. We name one, and show you what we ruled out and why.
We speak to eight to twelve real users
Yours when the question is about behaviour you can already see. Ours when it is about people you cannot reach.
We design the fix and say what it should do
One intervention, the experiments that test it, and a written claim: this metric, this much, by this date. We also write down what we would believe instead if it fails. Your team ships it. We stay in the room while they do.
We come back and score the prediction
Six to eight weeks later. Right, partly right, or wrong. We record it either way.
Whatever comes out of stage six changes the beliefs at stage one. A diagnosis is only a hypothesis until something has been tried against it.
Services
Four separate pieces of work. Start with whichever one answers the question you actually have.
Belief Ledger Sprint
We interview you and your team, check what evidence sits behind each belief, and hand you the Ledger. The cheapest way to see the picture before committing to more.
Research Sprint
One question, answered properly. Will this segment pay for this? Why are these users leaving? Does this positioning land in this market?
Growth Audit
The full method, end to end: beliefs, evidence, the constraint, user research, a designed intervention, a written prediction, and a scheduled check.
Experiment Programme
We design the tests, your team runs them, and we review as results come in. It ends when the constraint lifts, or when the diagnosis is disproved.
We do not run campaigns, buy media, or manage marketing operations. We design experiments and review them. Your team ships them.
Start a conversation →We publish what we find
Original studies on how products grow, and research on growth as a field.
Alongside those: Belief Ledgers of companies we do not work for, and the outcome of every prediction we make, including the ones we get wrong.
First pieces shortly.
Every prediction, and whether it held
Each engagement ends with a written prediction. At six to eight weeks we score it, and the result goes here whether it flatters us or not.
This fills in from the first engagement onward.
Publishing these is uncomfortable. It is also the only way to show whether the method works.
We build products that help companies reach their growth goals
The first one exists because our own research needed something that was not there.
The participant pool
Research is only as good as who you talk to. Most founders interview their own community and their existing customers, then generalise from a sample that was never going to disagree with them.
We are building a profiled pool of participants in segments the existing panels handle badly. Real users in emerging markets, verified by what they have actually done rather than what they say.
Join the pool →More will follow. We will announce them when they exist.
First Principles
A growth strategy and research firm. Based in Abuja, working with seed to Series A companies globally.
The name is the method. We try not to inherit assumptions, including our clients'.
Who you would be working with
200 × 250
A real photograph.
Not a logo. Not an illustration.
Adeen
Founder & Principal
You would be working with me directly. Every interview, every ledger, and every prediction on this site is mine, and the firm is small enough that it will stay that way for a while.
Start a conversation
Tell us the growth problem you think you have. We will tell you whether it is the right one.
You can also email adeen@firstprinciples.works, or find us at @1stprinciples_ on X.