SoulMarketing — The Unified Vision
Version: 1.4 (hand-curated for public surface) · Last updated: May 14, 2026 · Status: Phase 1 build — infrastructure shipped, methodology integration in flight, Discovery Engine kickoff May 18
What this page is for
A reader leaves this page knowing what SoulMarketing is, why it must exist, and where it goes — Phase 1 ships marketing artifacts, Phase 2 measures lived authenticity, Phase 3 turns the soul into the company's ethics signal across every internal-external process. If you only have five minutes on the site, read this one.
One sentence
SoulMarketing is a platform that discovers who you truly are, then makes sure everything your business does reflects that authenticity.
Why this exists
(For readers asking "why are you building this?" — three observations that compounded into one product.)
Identity is the scarce resource now
AI made content infinite. Every business can produce unlimited marketing, and most do. The result: more noise, less authenticity. Whoever solves "who are you, really?" wins the relational moat.
Doug's framing landed it cleanly: a business is not measured by its conversion rates; it's measured by the relationships it builds. The best competitive moat isn't technology, price, or market position — it's relationship. And relationships require authenticity. Authenticity requires self-knowledge. Self-knowledge requires a process.
That process is SoulMarketing.
Surveys don't reach the soul
Demographic targeting and brand questionnaires produce generic brand guides. Real identity surfaces through conversation, dilemmas, and stories — never multiple-choice. The entire stack has to start from "who are you?" before "what do you want to sell?"
Mike Burkesmith's twenty-year methodology meets AI
Mike has done six thousand executive coaching sessions over twenty years under the Bob Shank life-purpose lineage, with C12 and E-Myth frameworks layered on top. That methodology — question banks, scoring rubrics, four-pathway routing, guardrails — has reached a few hundred people one at a time. AI as the leverage lets it reach every business owner who needs it, not just the ones Mike personally coached.
The outcome we're after
The goal is not better marketing. It is flourishing: more joy, satisfaction, fulfillment, effective leadership, and loving your neighbors better. When a founder does work aligned with who they actually are, burnout drops and meaning rises. Marketing is the byproduct. Self-knowledge is the real output.
The mission
(For readers asking "is this a product or a mission?" — it is both.)
Doug describes this as missional. He is a Christian man, and his "love your neighbors" frame is load-bearing for him. Mike comes from the same root — 13 years of Good Friday prayer breakfasts at the Portland Convention Center, the Missional AI All Believers conference circuit. The faith dimension is honest, not decorative.
It also doesn't define the product. The product is a leadership tool that produces communication artifacts. A founder who is not Christian gets the same SoulMarketing arc; they just bring a different "why" to step 1.
What the mission adds: a level of resolve that's hard to fake. Doug uses the word obligated — meaning he would feel he had failed in his responsibility if this thing capable of helping founders flourish did not get built. That word is the gas pedal behind a multi-year build.
Where this goes — three phases, one soul
(For readers asking "is this a brand-guide product or something bigger?" — bigger. Phase 1 ships the brand-guide; Phase 2 measures lived authenticity; Phase 3 makes the same soul a company-wide ethics signal.)
The product arc, dated honestly:
| Phase | What ships | What the soul produces | Anchored in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 — Soul Brand Guide (Aug 2026 MVP) | Discovery engine + Communications Guide | Marketing artifacts — voice, brand guide, sound bites, story content | This is the build today. Pilot Zero July 17. |
| Phase 2 — Intelligent Dashboard | Sentiment-everywhere + culture measurement + drift detection | Lived-authenticity feedback — are you walking the talk? When does the soul need renewal? | Doug's "CEO reality engine" framing; scope locked, build after Phase 1 onboards. |
| Phase 3 — Soul as company-wide ethics signal | Soul applied as a filter to every internal-external process | Ethics signal across the company — gray-area flags on hiring, vendor choice, partnership decisions, customer communications, internal comms, strategy calls | 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. |
Phase 3 is the endgame, not a detour. 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 that the company runs every consequential decision through — internal AND external. Hiring decisions filtered through the soul. Vendor choices filtered through the soul. Internal communications. Strategic pivots. The "discipline of no" Doug talks about becomes operationally real because the soul tells you when a yes diverges from who you actually are.
Mike calls the endgame the Universal Business Consultant — a subscription cheaper than a fractional CXO, but covering every function (brand, ethics, hiring, strategy, ops) because every function rests on the same soul. That's the 30+ products vision Mike has been carrying; this is the structural reason the JV is a multi-year build rather than a single-product engagement.
The product you see in Phase 1 — Soul Brand Guide — is the first node of a graph. Phase 2 is the second. Phase 3 plus the 30+ product surface is the graph filling out.
The two halves of Phase 1+2
(For readers asking "what does it do right now?" — Phase 1 ships Soul Forge; Phase 2 is the Dashboard. Phase 3 lives in the section above.)
Part 1 — Soul Forge: who are you?
Soul Forge discovers the authentic identity of a business through its founder. A seven-step discovery arc (see Journey for the full walk):
- Soul search — who you are, before the company existed
- Defining moments — the stories that shaped you
- Internal discovery — values surfaced from those moments (not declared, derived)
- Clarifying stories — the narrative that explains why each value matters to you
- Mission statement — what you're here to do
- Competitive value proposition — your "blue ocean" — why you, not someone else
- Communication guide — the artifact that captures it all and runs everything downstream
Each step has conviction scoring: the system flags when a surfaced value "doesn't quite believe itself yet" — honoring gray areas rather than forcing false certainty.
The experience runs on three layers: document ingestion (writing, LinkedIn, voice samples) → conversational discovery (dilemmas, story prompts, follow-up questions) → NLP analysis (speech patterns, emotional register, conviction signal). Mike calls the result a Communications Coach, not a Communications Author — like Tesla autopilot, the human still polishes.
Part 2 — Intelligent Dashboard: are you living it?
The Dashboard ensures the identity Soul Forge created is actually lived, measured, and evolved.
- Unifies marketing data across paid, organic, social, SEO, CRM, customer voice
- Layers sentiment everywhere — not a panel, an architectural principle
- Predicts trends at executive altitude — pattern recognition before mainstream sees it
- Strategy analyzer prevents drift; surfaces when stated values diverge from observed behavior
- Culture measurement via "touch types" — customer service calls, tech visits, NPS, meeting quality — does the company walk what it says it talks?
- Advisory board avatars — what would Drucker / Jobs / a domain expert say about this data?
The Dashboard's defining principle: everything it outputs gets filtered through the Communication Guide from Soul Forge. No insight gets actioned in a voice that isn't yours.
How the two link
Soul Forge → Communication Guide → Dashboard insights → actioned in your voice
↑ │
└──────── drift detection / soul renewal trigger ────────────┘
Soul Forge tells the Dashboard what to value. The Dashboard tells Soul Forge whether the values are showing up in reality. Together they form a single soul-based marketing authenticity system.
Who is this for
(For readers asking "is this for me?" — four audiences, ordered by Phase 1 priority.)
| Audience | Phase 1 access | Phase 2+ |
|---|---|---|
| Founder-led SMBs where the founder's personality is the brand | Pilot Zero (July 17) onward | Primary customer base |
| Marketing agencies who serve those SMBs (TargetHeart's clients) | After Pilot Zero learnings | Channel partnership |
| Executive coaches + leadership development programs (Mike's network) | Methodology white-label | Long-term distribution |
| VC founder evaluation — soul-based due diligence | Phase 3 | Strategic option |
Pilot Zero is Doug himself. The most defensible first-customer is the founder of TargetHeart walking through his own Soul Brand Guide. If it doesn't work for him, it doesn't ship.
What makes this hard to copy
(For readers asking "isn't this just a fancier brand survey?" — seven things that aren't easily replicated.)
| Hard-to-copy thing | Why competitors can't fast-follow |
|---|---|
| Mike's methodology lineage | 20 years, 6,000 sessions, Bob Shank descent. You can't buy this. |
| Identity-first architecture | Every other tool starts with "what do you want to sell?" Inverting the stack is a re-platform, not a feature. |
| Conviction scoring + gray-area honoring | Most discovery tools force certainty. This one rewards intellectual honesty about doubt. |
| Soul renewal as a first-class operation | The soul changes — generational handoff, life events, ownership shifts. Most "brand guide" tools treat output as frozen. |
| Ego prevention by design | Neighbor feedback, listening checks, humility prompts. The system actively prevents soul-as-ego-mirror. |
| Communications Coach commercial frame | Coach, not author. Sidesteps liability + opens recurring service line. Hard to bolt on to a "we write your copy" product. |
| The Phase 3 endgame — soul as company-wide ethics signal | The single biggest moat. A competitor can rebuild the brand guide. They can't rebuild it as one node in a graph that fans out across hiring, vendor choice, internal comms, strategy — because they don't have the soul-extraction methodology underneath. The Phase 3 surface is what makes this a JV, not a vendor product. |
Where we are right now
(For readers asking "is this real, or is this slides?" — current state, dated honestly.)
- Infrastructure shipped May 11 — Postgres + pgvector + LLM gateway + cost ledger + audit log + self-hosted Helicone all live on Cone Red shared VPS. See /roadmap §Technical foundation.
- Methodology integration in flight — Mike returns from his conference circuit May 11; first 1:1 with Dima this week; question bank + scoring rubric + four-pathway definitions land by end of week. The methodology page hosts the agenda.
- Discovery Engine build kicks off May 18 — methodology wired to conversational UX, conviction scoring, dilemma flow.
- Pilot Zero target: July 17 — Doug walks his own Soul Brand Guide end-to-end. If it doesn't work for him, we don't ship.
- MVP target: August 2026 — first cohort onboard.
The current sprint is on the home page. Mid-sprint update posted; Day 10 of 14.
Risks worth naming
(For readers asking "what could go wrong?" — three things, named honestly.)
| Risk | What it actually means today | Mitigation in flight |
|---|---|---|
| Methodology framework delivery is in flight | Discovery Engine build May 18 depends on Mike's question bank + rubric arriving on time | Mike-Dima 1:1 this week; framework target end-of-week; the methodology page holds the agenda transparently |
| Soul-discovery UX is novel | Conversational discovery at this depth has not been productized before; user experience will need iteration after Pilot Zero | Pilot Zero is the founder himself (July 17) — fastest feedback loop possible before public release |
| The Communications Coach frame depends on disclaimers landing well | "Coach, not author" is the commercial defense; it requires the product UX to make the human-in-the-loop role obvious | Liability-language pass before pilot; Tesla-autopilot analogy already in product copy |
Notably not in this list anymore: budget uncertainty, scope ambiguity, partnership structure. Those were April-3 concerns; the JV is ratified, infrastructure is live, methodology integration is scheduled. The risks that remain are execution risks, not foundation risks.
What to do with this page
(For readers asking "now what?")
- If you're Doug or Mike: confirm anything here mis-states the vision. We update; the site rebuilds in ~30s.
- If you're an engineer who joined recently: read /journey next to see the 7-step arc you're building toward, then /roadmap for the build plan.
- If you're a cold visitor we briefed: the most recent state lives on the home page. Refresh weekly; the site is the status report.
- If you're considering Pilot Zero participation: Doug is the first. Pilot Two slot opens after the founder walkthrough validates the flow (target late July).
Mike + Dima jointly own this vision document. Mike's methodology lineage is the spine; Dima's product engineering is the body; Doug's missional framing is the heart. Every revision lands here; every revision is logged in decisions.