From a $2M Plateau to a Named Front Door
See how The Paragraph Project turned a broad, hard-to-categorize offering into one clear position and a repeatable motion with the Haus Advisors Bottleneck Sprint.
The Overview
The Paragraph Project is a research and strategy firm with proof most firms would kill for, work for brands like T-Mobile, Red Hat, and Dropbox, and the best economics in its book locked inside recurring brand trackers. But the front door didn't match the business. Revenue had held near $2M for three years while the founder spent most of his time in delivery. The bottleneck wasn't the work. It was that the firm's best pattern had never been named, priced, or aimed at.
The Challenge
Paragraph's best economics lived in enterprise trackers it could no longer sell into. Those buyers have in-house insights teams and locked-in vendors. Meanwhile, the clients the team most enjoyed, growing restaurant and fast-casual chains, had only ever bought one-off positioning projects, and never converted into the recurring tracker that produces the firm's best margins.
The offering was broad enough that the founder named the problem himself: being able to explain, succinctly, what the firm does. A stale set of "key verticals" meant the firm's own scorecard was rating its best-fit clients as poor fits. And growth ran almost entirely on the founder's relationships and reputation, which speaks well of the work, but doesn't compound.
Dan wanted to:
- Explain a broad, varied offering in one clear sentence
- Turn the firm's most profitable pattern into something named and repeatable
- Point new outbound at the clients the team most enjoys and serves best
- Grow beyond what his personal relationships could carry on their own
The Process & Solution
The Bottleneck Sprint didn't invent a strategy. It formalized the one already hiding in Paragraph's own data. We ingested the intake, the kickoff, a 41-client roster scored across seven criteria (roughly 110 projects with the P&L behind them), and a full pass through the site and its case studies. The signal was hard to miss: the work the team loved most, at margins rivaling the best business in the book, had never once converted into the recurring product that is the best business.
From there, a small set of decisions, each anchored to a number or a line the client had said out loud:
- Scored the full client book to find where proof, margin, and team energy overlap
- Kept the positioning broad, "own the inflection point," so it holds the firm's full range
- Pointed outbound at one beachhead first: funded restaurant and fast-casual chains
- Built a two-product offer ladder, a strategy sprint as the front door and a tracker as the recurring relationship
- Named the anti-ICP so the front door stops re-recruiting budget-capped startups
The strategy wasn't ours to invent. Paragraph had been living it with their best accounts for years. Our job was to name it, price it, and point a motion at it.
The Results
By the end of the sprint, The Paragraph Project had a full decision portal, not a slide deck:
- A one-sentence position that finally makes a broad firm easy to explain
- A named beachhead segment, chosen from their own scorecard rather than a guess
- A two-product offer ladder that turns one-off projects into recurring relationships
- A named anti-ICP to keep the wrong clients out of the front door
- A relationship-based go-to-market motion the founder can actually run
- Ready-to-ship assets: positioning brief, ICP and anti-ICP profiles, content POV, LinkedIn and homepage rewrites, sales-pitch framework, credentials-deck outline, and proposal architecture
Most importantly, Dan walked away with his own strategy made operational: not a direction imposed from outside, but the pattern his best accounts had already proven, finally named, priced, and aimed.