Business & Strategy Skill
Brand Strategy Framework
Audit and build a brand's identity with five academic frameworks (Brand Onion, Trust Equation and JTBD) producing a scored assessment instead of guesswork.
$15
Team Composition Analysis
Design the right team structure, hiring plan, compensation and equity, mapped role-by-role to revenue milestones.
Design the right team structure, hiring plan, compensation and equity allocation for an early-stage startup, from pre-seed through Series A. It maps role-by-role hiring to revenue milestones, applies Two-Pizza Teams, Conway's Law and span-of-control limits, and models every hire at fully-loaded cost so budgets hold no surprises. Headcount decisions get grounded in a skills matrix instead of 'let me hire one more person like me.'
$15 one-time
Add to a kit → Prices include 20% VAT. · Forged on real agency work · one-time, no lock-in
- Type Skill
- Category Business & Strategy
- Delivery Email · instant
- License One-time
Inside the run · no black box
See the actual work before you buy it.
The engineer you need in July must be sourced in January. Org design here runs on stage anchors, a skills-gap matrix that blocks clone hiring, structural team-size limits, and fully-loaded costs rolled into a real headcount budget.
- Anchors the plan to stage first: pre-seed runs 2-5 people with founders coding and selling, seed runs 5-15 with first leads per function, Series A runs 15-50 with department ratios (roughly 40 percent engineering, 30 percent sales and marketing, the rest split across success, product and G&A).
- Draws the skills matrix (people as rows, competencies as columns) and prioritizes hires by the largest gap, explicitly blocking the manager instinct of hiring another copy of themselves.
- Sizes teams against the structural limits: two-pizza teams of 5-8 engineers, 4-8 direct reports per first-line manager, and the Dunbar thresholds at 15, 50 and 150 people where management layers and formal processes must be added before the crisis, not during it.
- Prices every role at fully-loaded cost: base salary times 1.3 to 1.4 for taxes, benefits and equipment, adjusted by geography, plus equity sized by role and stage from a properly reserved option pool.
- Plans hiring velocity with real timelines: 6-8 weeks to fill a junior role and up to 24 for an executive, plus months of ramp before productivity, which means the engineer needed in July is sourced in January.
- Decides full-time versus contract per role (core product and revenue roles in-house, specialized or variable workloads contracted) and rolls everything into a headcount budget: role count times fully-loaded cost times the fraction of the year worked.
One power source. 6 lines out.
team-composition-analysis · core
core active · 6 lines
- ✓ planning team structure
Planning team structure for a specific funding stage
- ✓ deciding which roles to
Deciding which roles to hire next on the critical path
- ✓ designing an org chart and
Designing an org chart and reporting structure with sane span of control
- ✓ calculating fully-loaded…
Calculating fully-loaded compensation and headcount budget
- ✓ allocating equity fairly
Allocating equity fairly across founders, early employees and Series A hires
- ✓ sizing an option pool and
Sizing an option pool and modeling pre-funding dilution
Yours to keep.
Drag time forward. Watch what stays.
Forever
That's what owning means.
The rented stack
ai writing tool: subscription
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expired · access lostdesign platform: subscription
expired · access lost(nothing left)
Your forge
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Hire the right role at the right time aligned to revenue milestones
license: perpetual -
Avoid budget surprises by modeling true fully-loaded cost, not base salary
license: perpetual -
Prevent manager bottlenecks with span-of-control ratios per level
license: perpetual -
Allocate equity that stays fair and preserves the option pool
license: perpetual
subscriptions expire · deeds don't
Everything in the box.
Pick a piece up. Watch it work.
Team structure, size and focus for pre-seed, seed and Series A stages
6 parts · one working system · ships instantly by email
This wasn't forged for everyone.
- Not for you if you'd rather rent a tool than own one.
- Not for you if you want someone else to run your stack.
- Not for you if you're happy guessing.
Founders and operators of early-stage startups planning headcount, compensation and equity from pre-seed through Series A.
then this was forged for you.Works with
Universal by design: these run in any AI. Delivered in the open Agent Skills + MCP format (native in Claude); ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor and Copilot adapt the same files their own way.
- Claude Native format
- ChatGPT Adapts via open standards
- Gemini Adapts via open standards
- Cursor Adapts via open standards
- Copilot Adapts via open standards
Catch what's on your mind.
the air is clear. nothing between you and the forge.
catch a spark: the forge will answer
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We are four people at pre-seed. Is org design premature at this size?
The stage tables start exactly at pre-seed, where the question is not an org chart but which one or two critical-path hires come next and how founder equity is split before mistakes get expensive. Span-of-control ratios and reporting diagrams become relevant later; the early-stage sections are about sequencing and equity.
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How does it decide which role to hire next, beyond gut feeling?
Three mechanisms: role-by-role hiring is mapped to revenue milestones rather than calendar optimism, gaps are grounded in a skills matrix instead of 'one more person like me,' and every candidate hire is modeled at fully-loaded cost, not base salary, so the budget tells you what is actually affordable.
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Does it source candidates or run my recruiting process?
No. It is the planning layer: team structure per stage, compensation benchmarks with geographic adjustments, equity-by-role tables, and option-pool sizing with dilution math. Sourcing, interviewing, and recruiting tools are entirely outside its scope.
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How is it delivered?
By email right after purchase: ready to run, downloaded instantly, no setup wait.
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One-time or subscription?
A one-time purchase; no subscription or hidden fees. VAT (20%) is included.
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Can I get a refund?
As a digital product, it can’t be refunded once downloaded. That’s why we show exactly what’s inside and who it’s for, right here.