About Session
This session gives indie founders a practical framework for finding the cracks in their company’s foundation before a publisher, investor, or the market finds them first.
Drawing on 22 years of experience as a fractional COO, angel investor, and advisor to indie studios, the speaker walks through seven categories of studio health that publishers and investors use to evaluate teams. The talk introduces a simple information-quality lens, Signal, Proxy, and Placeholder, to help attendees honestly assess whether their answers to hard questions hold up, or just fill the space where an answer should be.
The session introduces seven categories: founder fit and role clarity, product and market alignment, production and operational readiness, go-to-market traction, business model realism, narrative consistency, and legal and platform risk. For selected categories, we’ll look at the difference between a weak answer and a strong one, and concrete red flags that signal work is needed.
This is not a theory talk. It is a 20-minute practical guide to what goes wrong in otherwise promising studios, why it was usually visible in advance, and what you can do about it before your next pitch meeting, publishing conversation, or game launch.
