For coaches, advisors and mentors
It won’t replace you in the room.
It makes sure the work got done before it.
You coach by asking the hard question. That was never the problem. The problem is that your question stops working the moment the session ends.
Start freeFree to start. No credit card. No demo call required.
The gap
Your best question has a half-life of about a week.
You ask the founder what evidence they actually have. They do not have any. You agree on what they will go and find out. They leave.
Then a fortnight of their life happens. You meet again, and the honest answer is that they built more instead.
Not because they ignored you. Because between sessions there is nobody asking. You are the only forcing function they have, and you are available for an hour a fortnight.
What it does
It asks your questions when you are not there.
LEANSpark runs one opinionated method: the same Lean Canvas, the same 7-dimension stress test, the same 90-day cycle you already teach. Between your sessions it holds the founder to it.
Not with reminders. By declining to move on until the assumption has actually been tested.
You arrive at the next session and either the work is done, or you can see exactly where it stopped and why. Either way you stop spending the first twenty minutes finding out.
The part coaches do not expect
It scores the interviewer, not just the interview.
“I’ve conducted hundreds of interviews building startups and evaluating innovations. LeanSpark evaluates the interviews but what is also cool (and very humbling) is LeanSpark evaluates the interviewer. Turns out I’ve got some work to improve my interview skills!”
The interview assessment reads the transcript and tells you where the question led the witness, where a pitch crept in instead of a question, and where the useful thread got dropped.
Most tools flatter the expert. This one will tell you that you talked too much.
Where most coaches start
Four in five run it on their own idea first.
297 of the 372 coaches on LEANSpark have their own business model in it. Not a demo model. Their own venture.
We would rather say that than pretend the first thing you do is roll it out to clients. Run your own thing through it. Find out whether the method holds up when it is your money and your certainty being challenged.
Then decide whether your clients belong in here. You will be a better judge of it than any demo would make you.
What it will not do
It is not a coach.
It will not run your session. It has no relationship with your client, no idea what is going on in their life, and no read on whether this is a week for pushing or a week for backing off. Knowing that is the actual job and it is still entirely yours.
It also will not:
- Teach a method other than this one. If you coach design thinking, or JTBD orthodoxy, or a framework of your own, very little here will fit and you should not force it.
- Soften a verdict to keep a client comfortable. It will tell them the desirability box is failing while they are still in love with the solution.
- Produce something you can hand over. There is no deck to forward. The founder has to do the work; that is the entire mechanism.
If you wanted the relationship automated, this is the wrong tool. It automates the homework.
Frequently asked
Honestly: is this going to make me redundant?
No, and the coaches already here are blunt about why. One of them arrived sceptical that it could replicate a decade of being trained by Ash, and concluded it cannot. What it does is reinforce the same mindsets and principles between the sessions where you do the actual work. The judgment call, the relationship and the timing stay with you. What goes away is chasing people about homework.
Do my clients need their own accounts?
Yes, and that is deliberate. The founder does the work in their own workspace, and you see the model, the evidence and the assessment scores. If they are not doing it themselves, the thing being measured stops being real.
I run a cohort, not one-to-one clients.
Then the practitioner account here is the wrong shape and you want the accelerator or university setup, which is provisioned by hand rather than self-serve. Start here anyway if you want to judge the method on your own venture before putting a cohort through it. Most people should.
What if my clients are not doing Lean?
Then this will fight them, and you, the whole way. It runs one method deliberately. That is a strength if it is your method and a genuine deal-breaker if it is not.
Your questions, still working on Thursday.
Start freeFree to start. Run it on your own venture first.