Cat Agostinho built Imagen Insights on a bet that most brands get wrong: real, unedited feedback from real people beats any dashboard, survey, or assumption a company makes about its own audience. Tomorrow Group agreed enough to acquire it in March 2026, at six times EBITDA.

Cat explains why the feedback most founders trust often tells them nothing, why the loudest agreement in the room can be the least useful signal, and why the businesses getting this right are asking a very different question before they build anything at all. Stop guessing what your customers want, and start finding out what they're actually hiding from you.

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Every founder hits this point eventually, and almost nobody says it out loud. A listener wrote in with a question a lot of Series A founders are quietly asking themselves: what do you do when you've built something that works and you just stop caring.

James Johnson and Freddie Birley get into recommitting versus changing, why the servant-leadership instinct quietly burns founders out, and why the business you're in right now might not be where your success actually lives. This isn't about motivation. It's about figuring out which problem you're actually solving.

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Jeevs Mahil decides which coaches get put in front of Octopus Ventures' portfolio founders, and after years of those introductions she has a clear, slightly uncomfortable view on why so many founders pick the wrong one.

James and Jeevs get into why "ex-founder" tells you almost nothing useful about whether someone can actually coach you, the one question to ask before your first session that most founders skip entirely, and the real ROI behind getting this call right versus wrong. Get this one wrong and it costs a lot more than the coaching fee.

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A founder writes in feeling off track and wants to know if the problem is his plan or his execution. James Johnson and Freddie Birley don't let him off with "it's both."

They walk through how to tell which one is actually broken, why most "plans" fail the moment someone asks how often you're checking against them, and why the instinct that got you through Seed can be the exact thing working against you at Series A. Stick around for the rocks-and-sand analogy, which might explain more about your last quarter than you'd like.

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Three exits in, Alex Fenton knows exactly what buyers look for, and it's not what most founders think. James and Alex talk through keeping every door open, why a three year plan beats a five year one, and the blunt piece of feedback from a manager that changed how Alex leads. Including the real difference between planting seeds and planting saplings when you're building a team built to last.

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James and Freddie tackle a question most founders won't say out loud: feeling insecure or competitive with your co-founder. They get into what's actually driving it, the conversation that fixes it faster than any amount of self-reflection, and the point where the answer isn't a better conversation, it's a different partnership. Including the feedback ratio behind every high performing team and relationship that lasts.

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Antoine Pouppez co-founded neuroClues six years ago. Today it's raised over £25M and employs 40+ people across Belgium and France, building MedTech that treats neurological disorders through eye tracking.

His approach from day one: if it's core to the product, you build it yourself, no matter how much longer or more expensive that is. James and Antoine get into why that decision holds up outside MedTech too, how he kept investors on side through a year long delay, and the one question that decides what's worth doing properly versus what can wait.

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A founder writes in asking why their team won't move faster. James Johnson and Freddie Birley take the question apart, and the real answer has almost nothing to do with the team.

They get into what actually causes execution to stall at Series A, the trap of being responsive instead of intentional, and why giving up control feels comforting right up until it costs you your business. Practical, direct, and probably not the answer you were expecting.

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