Overview

Sasha approached us with a deck describing "the world's first agentic outbound platform." After two cocktails at the Connaught she clarified: it was a call centre. After three, she clarified further: it was a call centre staffed by computer-science undergraduates from a Punjabi-language ad on Indeed who were being paid in "career exposure." Could we make it sound like a SaaS company?

We could. The brand we built leans heavily on words like "synthesis," "orchestration," and "human-in-the-loop." The marketing site features a 3D animation of a neural network that is, on close inspection, three sine waves and a particle system. It tested very well in the user research panel that we did not run.

For the demo videos, we filmed the warehouse on the one day a year it gets cleaned, lit it like a WeWork, and dubbed over the actual ambient sound (200 people shouting into headsets) with the score from an Apple keynote. The cinematographer's invoice came to £74,000. He is the brother-in-law of one of our partners.

How we ran the engagement

The kickoff dinner ran to £8,400 at Sketch. We brought four creative directors who did not work on the project, on the basis that they were "available." Sasha was charged for all of them, including the one who arrived late and ate only the bread.

Our most defensible deliverable is the careers page. It describes the £6.40-an-hour intern role as "frontier AI red team analyst" and lists "minimum viable suffering" as a core team value. We tested several variations against a control. The current version has a 4.2% conversion rate and twelve open Glassdoor reviews from people who say they were locked in over Easter.

Sasha invited the senior team to Glastonbury VIP under the budget line "user research panel." Our COO went. He has not filed an expense report. We have not asked him for one.

What we did