What “priced against the metric we move” means

During the paid two-week discovery sprint we instrument your lead-to-cash pipeline, bench it against the operators in your vertical, and write down a single named KPI — the one number whose movement is worth paying for. Both the build fee and the monthly retainer are then pegged to that KPI, not to the hours we spent on tooling and not to the scope of what the stack touches.

Tooling hours are an input we control. The lift in your numbers is the thing you actually bought. Pinning the price to the lift lines our incentive with yours: the retainer is what you pay when the KPI is moving, and we do not lower the work when the move exceeds the target.

The 30-day performance warranty, end to end

At the 30-day mark the agreed KPI must be demonstrably above your pre-engagement baseline. If it isn’t, we keep working without billing until it is — or we keep working for free, your choice. The warranty is the formal end of the build phase and the gate on the retainer; it is not a goodwill gesture and it is not negotiable down to a credit.

The risk of an automation that does not move the number sits with Northrun, not with the operator who took the meeting. Methodology is closed by the warranty, not by an invoice.

Why discovery sprints are paid up front

You pay for a fixed discovery engagement. We instrument your lead-to-cash pipeline, bench it against peers, and return a documented automation roadmap with a fixed-scope build quote. The roadmap is yours to walk away with even if we cannot commit to a KPI — the sprint is paid and the document is delivered either way. If we cannot commit to a KPI, we tell you during the sprint and keep the engagement paid; you walk away with the roadmap either way.

The build quote that comes out of the sprint is itself fixed-scope — the same number whether the engagement turns out to be a single-channel automation or one that spans SMS, voice, and your PMS. The sprint is where discovery stops being a sales cycle and starts being a deliverable.

Background

[Founder Name — TBD] is the operator behind Northrun. Their background is rooted in [industry — TBD], with prior roles across [former roles — TBD]. That work surfaced the same pattern repeatedly: AI engagements sold on “hours of tooling” miss the metric the operator actually bought, because the vendor’s incentive is to bill more hours instead of moving the number.

The wedge

The concrete moment that motivated founding Northrun is the part that is still pending — fill it in with the operator’s own account of [the founding wedge — TBD]. The intended read is short and specific: a single prior engagement, a single KPI, and the moment it became clear that the consulting-vendor model was set up to miss that KPI no matter how many hours were billed against it.