You took an idea and made it real. That’s the hard part, and we don’t take it lightly. We’re a startup marketing consultant for pre-seed, seed, and bootstrapped founders, somewhere between your first dollar and about $2M in revenue. We start with positioning and 1 channel that repeats, then stay on as your fractional CMO if it’s working. We’re in Indianapolis, and we work with founders anywhere in the country.
You spent a year getting the thing right. You launched, posted about it, told everyone you know. And then the signups came in at a trickle, or not at all. Plenty of founders launch to zero paying customers and decide, months later, that distribution was the real problem all along. It usually is.
That’s the first gap. The second one shows up later, and it’s sneakier.
Building felt like progress because it was. But getting the first 100 customers is a different skill, and nobody on the team owns it. So marketing turns into random acts: a launch post here, an ad test that ran for 9 days. Nothing compounds because nothing repeats.
You close most deals yourself, and honestly, you’re good at it. SaaStr puts the breaking point at the moment you personally close 70–80% of new business. The company only grows when you get on the call. And none of it is written down, so you can’t hand it to a hire yet.
Maybe you tried an agency to fix it. You got a dashboard and a monthly deck. What you couldn’t get was 1 customer you could point to. That isn’t bad luck. Cervin Ventures describes the agency setup for early-stage startups as “structurally set up to produce the wrong outcomes,” because agencies get paid for what’s easy to measure. Some agency contracts lock in ad spend before anyone knows which channel works.
Here at CPC, we aren’t afraid of a hot take: most growth problems are positioning problems. When the messaging is fuzzy, sales guesses, and nobody on the team agrees on who the product is for. More spend just makes that louder.
Positioning problems love to dress up as growth problems.
You know the mood. If you’ve pitched at a gBETA Indiana night, sat in a High Alpha office, or read TechPoint’s Indiana Venture Report, you’ve heard the word careful a lot. Investors here want to see efficient growth. We aren’t affiliated with any of those groups. We just work down the road from them, and we price for founders who are watching every dollar. Not in Indiana? No problem. Founder calls happen over video anyway.
3 pieces, taken in order. You can stop after the first one and still walk away with a plan you can run on your own.
$3,000, one time
Breaking this down, that looks like: who the product is actually for, said in 1 sentence. Positioning your sales calls can repeat. A sharp offer, and the first channel worth repeating. You leave with a 90-day plan you could run without us.
What’s in the strategy engagement$1,200, $2,400, or $4,800 a month
If the plan holds, we stay on and run it with you. Somebody to lean on, who owns the result: customers and pipeline, not a list of deliverables. If you start with the strategy engagement, half of that fee ($1,500) is credited toward the retainer.
How the fractional CMO work runsThe same team writes the plan and wires it up. Lead qualification and outreach automation. Onboarding emails that catch the people who sign up and disappear. AI chat for after-hours questions, and GA4 set up so you can see what’s working. It’s the ops work that stops you from being the bottleneck.
Hot take: don’t hire your first marketer before the playbook exists. The most common way that hire goes sideways is simple. The founder never wrote down what works, so the new person guesses. Build the playbook first, then hire against it. A full-time marketer at your stage costs more than any of our tiers and still needs someone to set direction.
The retainer has a 3-month minimum, then it’s month to month. We take 8 clients in total, so you get people who know your product, not a rotating account team. Your ad accounts, analytics, and CRM stay in your name from day one. If you leave, nothing gets switched off. You can read every tier on the pricing page.
You’ll want someone who’s done this at your stage, and you should. So here’s the straight answer. Our client work so far has been with local businesses and nonprofits, and that’s the work behind the method page. We haven’t published a startup case study, and we won’t make one up.
What carries over is the method. Every engagement runs on the same 5 steps. For a founder they translate like this: why this product, said clearly. Who it’s actually for. Positioning and the first channel that repeats. Onboarding that keeps the people you worked to get. Then referrals from customers who’d tell a friend. The method page walks through each one.
And you can judge us fast. Early in the 3-week strategy engagement you’ll see a one-sentence answer to who it’s for, the positioning draft, and the channel we’d bet on, with our reasons. If that work doesn’t make sense to you, stop there. No hard feelings.
Don’t get us wrong, we’d love to work with you. But we’d rather lose the sale than sell you a retainer you can’t use yet. Ads are for scaling something that already works. Spending on them before that is the most expensive mistake in early-stage marketing.
If that’s you, book the call anyway. We’ll tell you it’s early, walk you through the homework in more detail, and tell you what signal to come back with. It costs you 30 minutes. The 90-Day Plan Starter is a good place to put the answers.
Straight answers, so the call can be about your product.
Ours runs $1,200, $2,400, or $4,800 a month, with a 3-month minimum and then month to month. Honestly, we’d point most founders to the $3,000 strategy engagement first, so the retainer has a plan to run. For comparison, 2026 pricing guides from MarketerHire and GoFractional put fractional CMO retainers at $3,000 to $15,000 monthly. And if you run ads, the ad spend goes on your own card.
Maybe. If you don’t have paying customers who stay yet, you’re probably pre-product-market fit, and a retainer would burn your runway. Book the call anyway. We’ll tell you straight and send you off with homework: customer interviews, a few hand-sold deals, and 1 sentence on who it’s for. Then come back when people pay and stick around. We’ll be here.
Eventually, yes. Right now a full-time hire costs more than any of our tiers and still needs somebody to set direction. The first marketing hire usually struggles because nothing was written down before they showed up. So we write the playbook with you, run it until it works, and hand it to your hire when you make one.
We get it, and we’re sorry that happened. An agency gets paid for deliverables: posts, ads, a monthly deck. We’re measured on customers and pipeline, and the monthly report says how many came from where. We cap the whole consultancy at 8 clients, so the people on your call actually know your product. Your accounts stay in your name, and after 3 months you can stop any month.
Yes. We’re based in Indianapolis, and the strategy, fractional CMO, and technical work all run over video, so founders anywhere in the U.S. work with us the same way. If you’re local, we’d love to grab coffee in person too.
Both run in your browser and give you an answer on the spot. We built them the same way we build things for clients.
Pick one goal, one audience, the offer, and two channels you’ll actually keep up with. It turns your answers into a dated, printable plan. Think of it as a lighter version of what the strategy engagement produces.
Start the plan →10 quick questions on the 5 steps, from Conviction to Word of mouth. It scores you and names the 1 step quietly dragging the rest down.
Take the check-up →That’s the first question on the call. 30 minutes, free, over video from wherever you are. You’ll leave knowing whether you need the strategy engagement, a retainer, or just homework for now. Either way, you’ll have somebody in your corner.
