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The Real Startup Book, 2nd Edition
Now with 60+ product-discovery methods, all updated and fit for the AI age. Published by Kromatic.
Download free PDFWeekly decision-making sessions for intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs.
Are you ready to reduce the noise and focus on what actually drives the business?
The problem
Who's running the sessions
After founding five companies, Andy shifted his focus to a career dedicated to helping other entrepreneurs succeed.
He has coached and mentored more than 200 startup teams, and is a contributing author of The Real Startup Book. Andy has also co-authored ISO 56002:2019, the world's first global standard and management system for innovation.
Beyond startups, Andy has worked with large corporations such as H&M, Essity, SMHI, and Tieto on innovation strategy, train-the-trainer programs, and intrapreneur coaching.
He currently serves as a jury member for the European Innovation Council, evaluating and allocating funding for deep tech startups, and is also a startup investor and board member.
He holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the European University Business School.
Now with 60+ product-discovery methods, all updated and fit for the AI age. Published by Kromatic.
Download free PDFTestimonials
From startups
After just a few hours digging into how we make decisions, Andy left us with a smorgasbord of promising new approaches to explore right away. He blends theory and practice rather than pushing one dogmatic method, and adapts to how each business is different.
Andy demonstrates an intimate understanding of early-phase challenges for startups. He gave us very valuable advice during our first months of operations.
Andy helped me out tremendously in the early stages of business development. A genuine and competent person with solid business knowledge who won't let you down!
Andy's contribution has been priceless: building and sustaining partnerships, measuring the right indicators, and turning assumptions into facts through real experiments. He's helped establish a genuinely data-driven culture, maximizing learning while minimizing the time and cost to get there.
Andy is a great strategist, but perhaps even more importantly, very strong in execution. His sharp intellect always challenges us to sharpen our strategic and tactical reasoning and test our assumptions.
Andy impressed me from day one: direct, analytical, and open-minded, with a real knack for turning ideas into large-scale business opportunities. After he invested in our company, he later joined the board, which I'm extremely grateful for.
From corporations
Andy helped us in our starting phase of Essity Ventures to establish and refine our strategic approach as well as our process of managing dealflow. His broad knowledge in the ventures field and extensive experience in evaluating and working with startups, brought a lot of insights and learning to the entire team.
Andy helped cover the blind spots in our innovation processes, offering valuable input on collecting and analyzing data and translating it into concrete action. Thorough, knowledgeable, and focused on delivering value rather than billing hours.
In the five months after Andy came in to help select and work with our teams, we changed our ways of working and increased our market share significantly.
Andy's drive, focus, and deep knowledge of startup methods were crucial to building a framework for innovation and a culture of experimentation. He doesn't just design strategy, he builds the capability to execute it.
Andy is an inexhaustible source of knowledge on lean startup methodology and design thinking, along with the tools and techniques to apply those methods in practice.
As our lean startup coach, Andy not only inspires us to reach further, but offers actionable tools and methods key to building more agile, customer-oriented organisations.
The process
This is the loop I run with every team, week after week.
Most teams lack clarity here. We need a clear starting point before implementing a learning loop.
Not every assumption matters equally. We isolate the one belief that, if wrong, breaks the business model.
Assumptions are messy. Hypothesis statements are unambiguous and measurable.
A test built to produce a real answer, not a comfortable one, scoped to your actual time and budget.
What does the data tell us? Are we on track, or way off?
Proceeding means doubling down on what's working. Pivoting means making a significant change to your strategy or business model, while keeping one foot grounded in your validated learnings.
Pivot examples
Taking one feature of an existing product and turning it into the whole product.
Discovering the product serves a completely different audience than intended.
Same core solution, different delivery mechanism.
Same audience, different problem solved for them.
Who will benefit
Teams that lack a data-driven, structured process for decision-making, and founders who suffer from biased decision-making and need an outside perspective.
Investors who need to revise their deal flow, investment criteria, and due diligence process, or who need a structured process to determine earlier if there's a credible path to profitability.
10 reasons to run weekly sessions with an experienced external coach
A weekly cadence forces evidence-based choices: pivot, proceed, or stop, backed by pattern recognition from hundreds of startups.
Experiments get completed, commitments get kept, and every meeting ends with clear owners and deadlines.
An independent coach challenges assumptions and separates opinion from evidence before costly mistakes happen.
Every week becomes a structured learning cycle, compounding knowledge while there's still runway left.
Startups fail from chasing too many ideas. A coach keeps the team on the highest-impact priorities. Everything else is noise.
Tough questions get asked sooner, and decisions get based on evidence rather than hierarchy.
Everyone leaves with the same understanding of what was learned, decided, and owned, which improves execution speed.
Startups with experienced coaches make better decisions, adapt faster, and raise more capital.
A credible third party provides the structure and confidence to move forward instead of staying stuck.
Time gets spent solving the right problems instead of debating the wrong ones.
FAQ
The initial consultation is complimentary, giving us a chance to discuss your goals and see if we're a good fit.
Every engagement is tailored to your needs and priced accordingly, whether that's hourly, project-based, a retainer, or a success-fee model.
Once we agree on the right setup, you'll receive a clear proposal with no surprises.
Research from entrepreneurship and organizational psychology strongly supports the core elements of weekly Pivot/Proceed sessions.
For example, Startup Genome's research consistently shows that structured, intentional mentoring is a key driver of startup success, not just a "nice-to-have." Their findings highlight the following:
See the Process section above. Every session follows the same six-step loop, from mapping strategy to deciding whether to pivot or proceed.
Andy works with founders and entrepreneurial teams from pre-seed to later stage, as well as intrapreneurship teams at public and family-owned corporations.
Here's a simplified breakdown of how structured Pivot/Proceed meetings with an experienced external business coach can impact each stage of a startup's journey:
Yes, teams can transition away at any time. Some prefer long-term collaboration; others use my guidance to learn the framework and run the process independently.
The first session is free to see if there's a fit.