Vol. I · The Experiments

Work in public.

Each project here is a live test of the framework — not a portfolio of finished things. Decisions and hypotheses are visible. The results are observed and reported, however they land.

A framework that can't be tested is decoration. The work is the test. Each experiment below is framed as a single, falsifiable claim about how organizations or products actually behave. The job of the project is to run the test honestly and report what happened.

Simple Product Feeds

Structured product data for independent makers, published so the open web — and the agents that read it — can find them without going through a marketplace.

The hypothesis being tested

"Independent retailers don't need better marketplaces. They need their inventory to be legible to systems that don't belong to a marketplace. Structured data, owned by the seller, will route more honest demand than algorithmic surfacing inside a closed marketplace."

SPF is the working test of a claim that pre-dates the larger framework here, but fits inside it cleanly. The marketplaces are closed legibility systems that reduce a seller's catalog into a schema the platform controls, then surface that catalog through ranking the seller does not control. The structural alternative is to make a seller's data publicly legible at the source — owned by the seller, parseable by every reader, free of marketplace rent. Eight months into the test, with 62 independent makers.

Read the experiment in full Visit simpleproductfeeds.com For makers · how to join

Business Topologies Blueprints

An architectural document for a single business — every system visible, every relationship named, every dependency mapped. The applied form of the framework.

The hypothesis being tested

"A working business can be made legible to its operator in a single document, in fewer than ten weeks, without losing what makes that business distinct. The act of mapping it changes how it is run."

A Blueprint is the applied output of the framework. It maps a single business across seven structural dimensions — value creation, demand architecture, conversion, financial architecture, delivery and capacity, organizational topology, and cognitive load — and binds them into one navigable document the operator returns to. The test here is two-part: whether the document can be produced at all, and whether having it changes the decisions the operator subsequently makes. A live sample is open below.

Read the experiment in full For operators · how this works Engagement waitlist

Direct Sourcing

The same structural game Phil Knight played in 1962 — go to the factory, cut out the intermediary, bring the product to market — run by a single person with a laptop, a 3PL account, and a Canton Fair badge.

The hypothesis being tested

"The infrastructure layer that once separated factory-floor pricing from end-consumer pricing has thinned to the point where the minimum viable operation is now a solo founder. If the arbitrage is real and the infrastructure is genuinely accessible, a single operator should be able to run a margin-positive DTC physical goods business from factory to customer — without a trading company, without a warehouse team, without institutional capital."

Shoe Dog documents what factory-direct sourcing looked like in 1962: Phil Knight goes to Japan, finds a manufacturer making better running shoes than anything in the American market, and builds the first iteration of Nike on the structural arbitrage between factory cost and retail price. The trading company stood between him and the factory; the importer stood between him and the shelf. Both extracted rent. Both were also — for a long time — necessary. What has changed is not the structural game. The jobs to be done are identical: find excess manufacturing capacity, secure a margin-viable price, move the product to a market that wants it. What has changed is the infrastructure underneath those jobs. Third-party logistics providers now connect directly to Shopify. The Canton Fair is accessible to buyers with no import history. Private-label samples arrive in three days. The question this experiment tests is whether the minimum viable capital and team required to run the same structural play has genuinely fallen below the threshold of a single informed operator — and what that implies for how physical goods businesses are formed.

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The Simple Shoe

Phil Knight's 1962 play — go to the factory, cut out the intermediary, build a brand on the margin — run as a solo experiment by one person with a laptop and a Canton Fair badge.

The hypothesis being tested

"The factory-direct DTC footwear model that required a trading company and institutional capital in 1962 can now be run by a single operator. If the Direct Sourcing infrastructure hypothesis holds in a real product category, a solo founder should be able to source, import, and sell a margin-positive line of shoes without a trading company, warehouse team, or institutional backing."

The Simple Shoe is the first live execution of the Direct Sourcing experiment — the structural claim that factory-direct DTC physical goods can be run below the threshold of institutional capital by a single operator. Footwear is the test category: a market with a long history of factory-direct arbitrage, documented by Phil Knight's own account, now being re-run with modern infrastructure replacing the trading company. This is not a fashion play. It is a structural one.

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Bekiyot

The knowledge layer of the Business Topologies framework — a structured curriculum for the kind of breadth-first mastery that precedes genuine analytical depth.

The hypothesis being tested

"[BRAD TO COMPLETE — the specific falsifiable claim. What does Bekiyot test? Is it that breadth-first exposure to a curated corpus produces better organizational thinkers than conventional MBA-style education? Or something more specific?]"

Bekiyot (בְּקִיאוּת) is the Hebrew term for the kind of breadth-first mastery that comes from extensive exposure — reading widely, absorbing a field, building the map before drilling into the territory. It is distinct from iyun: the deep, analytical study of a single text. The Business Topologies framework draws on both, but most practitioners arrive with neither. Bekiyot is the structured response to that gap.

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Audience First

Build the audience before the product. Trust precedes transaction. Business Topologies is the live test case.

The hypothesis being tested

"A business built by cultivating genuine trust with a defined audience before launching products will outperform a business that builds the product first and then seeks the audience. If the hypothesis holds, Business Topologies — the Searcher's Log, the essays, the reading notes — will convert into Blueprint and Bekiyot customers at a rate that validates the model."

Audience First inverts the conventional product-first model: build the audience before the product, establish trust before asking for a transaction. Business Topologies is the live experiment. The Searcher's Log, the essays, the reading notes — these are not marketing for a product that already exists. They are the trust-building layer that makes future products viable. The experiment tests whether that sequence produces better outcomes than the alternative.

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To grow a locksmith platform

A field-service growth model for testing whether a trusted local locksmith engine can become a higher-AOV, higher-LTV commercial security platform.

The hypothesis being tested

"A local locksmith business with real response density and trust proof can use the urgent-response engine as the wedge into commercial account relationships — but only if it stops treating low-AOV transaction optimization as the whole growth thesis."

This work starts with a concrete operator question: how does a trusted, multi-location local locksmith business become a materially larger platform without simply multiplying low-AOV emergency transactions? The first model stress-tests $100M, $200M, and $1B ambitions across transactional response, metro density, commercial accounts, access-control expansion, acquisition, and franchising.

Read the experiment in full Protected strategy room