Phase 1 Roadmap — Soul Brand Guide MVP

Version: 2.4 (curated for public surface) · Last updated: May 14, 2026

This is the public view of the Phase 1 roadmap. The full internal version with team capacity math and budget detail lives in the vault; this surface is the WHAT and WHY for everyone aligned on the work. Phase 2 + Phase 3 + 30-product endgame surfaces at the bottom of this page.

At a glance

Aspect Status
Phase 1 product Soul Brand Guide MVP — soul-based discovery → Communications Guide
Stage Build — infrastructure shipped (May 11); methodology integration landing this week; Discovery Engine kickoff May 18
MVP target August 2026
Pilot Zero July 17 — founder-led discovery walkthrough end-to-end
Site th.cone.red — every commit auto-renders the vault to the public web

Why now

Phase 1 turns three observations into one product:

  1. AI made content infinite, identity scarce. Every business can now produce unlimited marketing. The result: more noise, less authenticity. Whoever solves "who are you, really?" wins the relational moat.
  2. Surveys don't reach the soul. Demographic targeting and brand-questionnaires produce generic brand guides. Real identity surfaces through conversation, dilemmas, and stories — not multiple-choice.
  3. Mike Burkesmith's 20-year life-purpose methodology meets AI. Six thousand executive coaching sessions distilled into a question bank, a four-pathway taxonomy, and a scoring rubric — now wrapped in an AI surface so it can reach every business owner, not just the ones Mike personally coached.

This is the build window. Doug committed Phase 1 capital April 3. JV ratified April 15. Infrastructure live May 11. Methodology framework landing this week.

What we're building

The Soul Brand Guide is a leadership tool that produces marketing artifacts as outputs. The audience is founders building themselves; the brand follows.

The seven-step discovery arc (final-shape May 7):

  1. Soul search — initial intake, voice + writing
  2. Defining life moments — formative stories
  3. Internal discovery — values surfaced through dilemmas
  4. Clarifying stories — narratives that explain why values are held (added Mar 25)
  5. Mission statement — distilled purpose
  6. Competitive value proposition — what only this founder can say
  7. Brand / Communications Guide — the output the rest of the business runs on

Each step has conviction-scoring: the system flags when something "doesn't quite believe itself yet" and honors gray areas + dilemmas as valid (rather than forcing false certainty).

Timeline

Window Milestone Who's leading
Apr 25 → May 11 Phase 1 infrastructure — Postgres + pgvector + LLM gateway + cost ledger + audit log + Helicone (self-hosted) MG (infra), Illia (Soul Forge v1→v2 port)
May 11 → May 24 Methodology framework delivery — question bank, scoring rubric v1, four-pathway definitions, guardrails Mike + Dima
May 25 → Jun 14 Discovery Engine build — conversational UX wired to methodology, conviction scoring, dilemma flow Dima + Mike
Jun 15 → Jul 5 Soul synthesis end-to-end — discovery → Soul document → Communications Guide draft Dima
Jul 6 → Jul 17 Pilot Zero — founder-led discovery walkthrough; refinement based on real use All
Jul 18 → Aug 8 Iteration + accountability features — friction-fix pass, dashboard touchpoint integration Dima + Mike
Aug MVP — first cohort onboard All

Scope — what's in, what's out, what's later

MUST HAVE (Phase 1 MVP)

SHOULD HAVE (in if time permits)

COULD HAVE (Phase 2 candidates)

NOT IN PHASE 1

Demo cadence

Every two-week sprint produces at least one visible artifact:

Demos live at /demos. The th.cone.red site rebuilds on every commit, so the public surface is always current.

Technical foundation (May 11 state)

This is the substrate. The product sits on top of it.

Commercial defense — the "Communications Coach" framing

Doug's May 7 framing solves the commercial question elegantly: the system is a coach, not an author. Like Tesla autopilot — the human still polishes; the AI assists. This:

Adjacent revenue — channel partnerships

Beyond direct pilots, Phase 1 sets up two recurring revenue channels:

These are not Phase 1 deliverables, but the architecture and brand-voice work product is designed to support them when the pilot validates the core flow.

Where this goes after Phase 1

(For readers asking "why is this a multi-year JV and not a one-off product?" — three phases beyond Phase 1, all anchored in what's already been said in the room.)

Phase 1 ships the Soul Brand Guide. The methodology, the architecture, and the JV structure are designed for what comes after.

Phase 2 — Intelligent Dashboard (CEO reality engine)

Soul Forge produces the identity. The Dashboard ensures the identity is lived, measured, and evolved. Sentiment everywhere as an architectural principle. Culture-execution measurement via "touch types" — specific interaction moments (customer calls, tech visits, NPS, meeting quality) analyzed for whether the company is walking the talk. Strategic-drift detection. Soul-renewal triggering.

The Dashboard build kicks off after Phase 1 MVP onboards. Scope is locked; timing depends on Phase 1 traction. Full vision lives on the dashboard vision page.

Phase 3 — Soul as company-wide ethics signal

Once a company has surfaced its soul (Phase 1) and learned to measure whether it's living it (Phase 2), the same surfaced identity becomes the filter the company runs every consequential decision through — internal AND external. This is Doug's May 7 framing: the soul allows for the gray areas of your ethics to be signaled to you. Not a black-and-white rulebook. An alignment signal.

Concrete surfaces where Phase 3 lives:

Surface What the soul filter does
Hiring decisions Surfaces alignment / divergence between a candidate's values and the surfaced soul; flags gray areas before the offer
Vendor / partner choice Filters who you do business with through the same identity that filters your marketing
Internal communications Helps internal docs sound like the company; flags drift when the language stops matching the soul
Strategic decisions "Discipline of no" — operationally signals when a yes diverges from who the company actually is
Customer service operations Treats unfair-treatment situations (Doug's framer-and-general-contractor example) as gray-area signals rather than black-and-white rule violations

The architecture is the same as Phase 1: discovery surfaces the soul, the soul filters output. What changes is the surface — instead of filtering marketing copy, the soul filters every consequential decision the company makes.

This is why the JV is multi-year, not a one-off product engagement. Mike's methodology, Cone Red's architecture, and Doug's vision are all designed for the Phase 3 surface area — the brand guide is the first node, not the whole product.

Endgame — Mike's Universal Business Consultant (30+ products)

Mike's long-arc framing, named in the Apr 10 working session: a subscription product that costs less than a fractional CXO but delivers what feels like having every CXO at once. Brand. Ethics. Hiring. Strategy. Operations. Customer success. Each function rests on the same soul, which is why one company can support 30+ products without the methodology fragmenting — the unifying spine is the soul-extraction methodology that Phase 1 productizes.

Mike has described it as the chief fractional everything officer concept. From Mike's twenty years of personal coaching reaching ~6,000 founders, the AI-scaled version reaches every business owner who needs it.

What this means for Phase 1 today

Phase 1 ships the foundational layer everything else rests on. The Discovery Engine, the conviction scoring, the four-pathway routing, the guardrails — these aren't marketing-tool features. They're the soul-extraction substrate that Phase 2 and Phase 3 both depend on. Getting Phase 1 right is what unlocks the full arc.

If Phase 1 ships clean — Doug as Pilot Zero validates the founder experience, the methodology integrates cleanly with the conversational UX, the conviction scoring honors gray areas rather than forcing certainty — Phase 2 build starts immediately. If Phase 1 needs iteration, Phase 2 waits. The arc is sequenced, not parallel.

What's different from v1

The v1 roadmap was "brand guide engine + dashboard, sequenced." The v2.3 roadmap (current) is:

Source: active/product/PRODUCT_ROADMAP.md  · Last updated: 2026-07-18  ·  Build: 9d9c655  · view repo