Turn your challenge into momentum

I coach:

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Start-up founders to overcome their scaling challenges as headcount grows

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Tech leaders and managers to reach a crucial goal by approaching it strategically

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CEO/Product teams to build the traction product they no longer know how to make

Stuck? Not anymore.

Feel stuck as a scaling start-up founder, a manager with an ambitious new role or a CEO who needs to re-boot product sales growth ?

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Evolve from a start-up founder « Doer » to a « Leader » who scales confidently.

How do I stop being the bottleneck that blocks decisions as we grow from 50 to over a 100 ? How do I set the course and goals ? Dare delegate and communicate while aligning teams? Adapt my mindset, skill-set and posture to scale?

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Turn your challenges as a leader into clarity, actionable steps and results.

How do I fulfill my mission in a new role, with ambitious goals, a team and boss I don’t know, in an ambiguity-rich context? How do I stretch my skill-set and posture to reach the level required to pull off my hardest mission yet?

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Create a high-growth product when an existing one wanes

When Product leaders base roadmaps on intuition or stakeholder pressure, new features or products often struggle to gain traction and retain users. As a product leader, how can I discover users’ pains and co-construct a solution they want with them?

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How coaching helps scaling

By helping founders redefine success, I enable them to transition from « Operator » to « Strategic leader. » The outcome ? Greater confidence deciding, communicating and delegating. Alignment, engagement and results reappear.

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How coaching enables growth

I help you identify what is really going on, understand yourself and your impact, set goals that align personal growth with organizational priorities while testing new approaches to develop your ability to lead with confidence.

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Traction Product coaching

When product teams think they know users’ needs, but they don’t, product traction is often the first victim. I work with people who want to make high-traction products using Customer Discovery like the minority of the best SaaS companies do (like Slack, Paypal and AirBnB).

Iain wallace

Proven Track Record

I am a former CMO and CRO of listed companies, and a scale-up CEO who exited after 7 years, 5 of which with VCs.

Realising most business problems are human rather than technical, I grew my people development skills by coaching and training scale-up founders, Excoms, managers and their teams. I balance human, technical and business cursers according to the needs of each coaching.

I do this in parallel to my work as Customer Discovery coach, helping start-ups and corporate product teams create products people badly need by building them with users. Current startup co-founder.

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> 1 850

Start-up founders, CEOs, leaders and managers coached.

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Success rate when you do the work

Start-up and tech leaders coached

%

Product proijects with clear user needs reach sustainable growth

Making YOU WANT TO STRETCH YOURSELF

1

See the problem

Clarify the situation

What’s holding me back & why ?
What are my strengths & levers?
What should I prioritize ?

2

Set goals

What does success look like ?

What are my priorities?
What are my first actions?
What KPIs do I choose?

3

Live your 1st wins

Where do I start to move?

My first quick wins
Grow my confidence
Shift my mindset and behavior

4

Anchor behavior

How do I embed new behavior?

Repeat what now works for me
Communicate changes clearly
Foster stakeholder engagement

Products & Services

When pressure rises, I coach tech founders, CEOs, Excoms and managers to rise above it.

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Start-up founder scaling

I coach you to fix the 20 % of problems that account for 80 % of the scaling difficulties holding back your start-up’s smooth growth.

Restoring product-market fit

I help you speak to users, validate the deep problems they encounter and address them with a product they love and keep using.

Ambitious management goal

I help you visualize what success looks like, choose your strategy and plan, find the 1st confidence-building steps and embed the momentum you need to execute it.

What my clients say

Don’t take my word for it – hear what my clients say

Finding the right market fit for a consulting offer is never easy. Sometimes the real challenge isn’t about the market itself, but about finding the confidence to face it, to dare putting yourself in front of it. When I started working with Iain, I was exactly there. I had always built SaaS products, hidden behind a screen, avoiding the idea of selling myself. The thought of stepping forward, of embodying my own offer, felt almost impossible. Iain immediately understood that. He didn’t just give me frameworks or theories. He took the time to truly listen, to help me dig deep, to identify what was holding me back, and to turn that resistance into clarity and action. It was one of the most powerful personal breakthroughs I’ve experienced in years. As a coach, he has this rare mix of empathy and precision. He challenges you at every step but always stays close enough to your comfort zone so that you can grow without breaking. Every conversation with him ends with clear, actionable objectives. He doesn’t let you stay stuck in your own thoughts, he moves you forward. Three weeks after our first session, I had officially launched my SEO and GEO consulting offer for marketing teams, and reached 3K MRR. 2 months in, I was at 8K MRR with 7 clients closed. Iain is a remarkable coach. Not just because of his years of experience, but because of his ability to see through people and guide them where they didn’t even know they could go. For the value he delivers, it’s simply a no-brainer. Read this testimonial Arnaud Mège Founder & CEO, BeyondRankingSEO

I asked Iain to get us to a place where we could build our new SaaS products and major releases in a completely new way. Our playbook had relied up to then on big client inputs and PM hunches, and excluded user research insights and product co-construction with users. He explained the benefits and the how of using Customer Discovery to our worldwide product team. And he coached us to get meaningful insights. Seeing it was completely foreign to our culture and recognizing he was getting almost no buy-in, he neither insisted nor gave up. He identified the one product manager who was "onboard" with keen to try the Customer Discovery approach, even though they had never done Discovery before and were still conducting their first customer discovery interviews. 18 months later that courageous Product Manager registered spectacular traction at launch on a completely new product, in our biggest bet on our biggest market. Now, we have first-hand evidence that, in the right hands, Customer Discovery works. Funnily, it's no longer seems that hard when you have used it successfully once. We are busy extending its use as our default playbook.

Christophe S
SVP Product, 500 € M ARR SaaS company

We are fortunate to have a product that sells well. But growth has sometimes seemed to us a curse, or at least a well disguised blessing, because of the headaches and internal paralysis scaling brings ! My CTO Co-founder and myself are engineers with little experience of business, which makes scaling even harder. Only our third co-founder has management experience as CMO. The biggest issue was that every decision seemed to go through us : HR (especially new hires), sales, product, finance, logistics, investors ... creating a massive bottleneck that started to freeze everything up. Our "freeze" phase lowered employee retention, motivation and productivity. The new external managers we hired to join and beef up our ExCom had to turn their thumbs as they awaited instructions from us that didn't come, loyal first generation employees sometimes resented the arrival of new hires as they lost the privileged direct line to us. We found it hard to find the time to articulate and communicate our strategy clearly, to set down written goals processes for sales, marketing, product, support and logistics. We demotivated some faithful and new employees, losing several as a result. That is why we turned to coaching and management training for ourselves and our ExCom. It is paying off handsomely ! Our next step will be to train the managers who report to ExCom members.

John M
CEO, Startup currently scaling

Bridging your ambitious goal with success

Helping you clearly see what separates you today from a goal that deeply matters to you and finding the keys to reaching it

About me

my mission

My Mission

Help you restore or initiate fast growth by:

Overcoming the negative impact of scaling on your growth
Reaching your next ambitious goal as a leader and manager
Working with users to know what need they need and build a product that delivers it