The Startup Assessment
Dive into the opportunities and risks to growth for your organisation, before it costs you your time, budget and momentum.
The Startup Assessment is created and produced by experienced startup consultants and long-term startup operators. Your assessment is custom to your business, market and category, giving you a thorough, independent read on your business’ most interesting opportunities, biggest risks and challenges, and key areas of growth potential.
There is no fee to request your assessment.
A member of our team will be in touch within one working day to discuss the process.
What is DB Consulting’s Startup Assessment?
The Assessment is produced from a structured intake submission and any supporting materials you choose to provide. A senior consultant reads it and develops your report. We read what your business signals to someone who works in, and has studied markets, categories and trends for a living.
We dive deep to uncover the story you may not see, highlighting what the evidence underneath it shows. We assess it against the bar for the stage of development, team and product where you are actually at, not against generic best practice. The best and most valuable thing we can deliver is a set of opportunities — and risks — you may not even be aware of.
What’s in your report
What your business signals from the outside, and where that differs from how you describe it.
Opportunities already present in what you submit that you have not named or activated.
The specific risks you are carrying, each with the threshold at which it becomes material.
Independent advice on what to address first. Advice, not a route into anything we sell.
The number of findings, levers, and risks varies. The report reflects what is actually there rather than filling a fixed structure.
Check out a sample of the Startup Assessment
These samples are a complete Startup Assessment produced for an illustrative business. The structure, the language, and the level of analysis are exactly what you will receive. Any relation to an actual business is purely coincidental.
Note that The Startup Assessment is not a full DB Consulting engagement. It does not include The DBD (our proprietary deep dive diagnostic), the custom working programme, or the co-led execution that comes with one. It is not a score, a grade, or a benchmark, and it is not financial modelling, scenario planning, or a valuation.
Your Startup Assessment is first a professional read that surfaces insights, market validation and risk potentials.
Strategic insights, now available for earlier-stage companies
Large organisations and scale ups have had this form of consulting access at their fingertips for a long time. DB Consulting is now bringing that grade of knowledge and expertise to earlier stage environments — startups, SMEs and early scaling companies.
Read by people who have built, grown, and scaled startups across markets. The judgment comes from operators, not from a framework.
We have no financial stake in the outcome and no incentive to agree or disagree with you.
The 360 view — your market and competitive position, and how you can use that to your advantage to ignite your growth levers.
From your information submission to receiving your report. A four-week turnaround on a company that might have changed in four weeks is not useful.
Who The Startup Assessment is made for.
Founders, co-founders, and senior leaders at startups, SMEs, and early scaling organisations. If you have a product or a service and some form of market activity — customers, pilots, users, or active conversations — we can create your custom Assessment.
If you are at the pre-revenue, concept or first validation stage, we recommend starting with our Business Idea Validator. DB Consulting is here to help, not unnecessarily take your money. If the product or service is not a fit for you, we always tell you up front.
An added bonus.
If you go on to work with us, the Assessment costs you nothing.
The full cost of your Assessment is credited toward a DB Consulting engagement — FR360 or Path to Product-Market Fit — if you proceed within 90 days of receiving your report.
We credit the fee towards a more in-depth engagement, so you can decide based on your Assessment’s findings.
Worth checking in regularly.
The Assessment is not a one-off. Every six to twelve months is a good place to take a measurement of your business, highlighting the progress, changes or issues that have cropped up.
What you share stays with us.
Your submission is covered by DB Consulting’s privacy policy and confidentiality terms, which you accept before you complete it. It is held in a private, EU-hosted system with access limited to the team preparing your report. We do not share or distribute it. We delete your submission and your uploaded materials 90 days after your report is delivered.
We may use anonymised, aggregated observations across submissions to inform our market research and our wider written work. Nothing identifying you or your company is used or published without your separate written agreement.
We do not ask for financial statements, cap table data, board information, or anything you would consider legally sensitive. The level of detail we ask for is no different from what you would share with a potential advisor, in conversation at a startup event, or in an early investor discussion.
Request your Assessment.
Please fill in the below and we will come back to you within one working day with everything you need to proceed.
Questions? Reach us at hello@doyle-blackfriars.com