Chris Kelly · Fractional CPO & CTO
Founder-led businesses only · Glasgow
Someone sent you here because something isn't working and they couldn't tell you exactly why. That's the brief. That's always the brief.
The frameworks that enterprise businesses spend millions getting wrong — built for founders, at the stage where they actually change everything.
Who
That moment — when you know something is wrong but can't name it precisely enough to act on it — is exactly where I start.
I don't want to see your pitch deck. I don't want to meet your happy customers. Show me the last high-value person who left without explanation. Show me the product decision everyone agreed on that quietly produced nothing. Show me what you stopped talking about in meetings.
That's not a list of problems. That's the absence of a framework that would have made those things visible before they became problems.
"You need to get yourself a Chris."
The introduction that keeps happeningI spent years inside Feelter — a SaaS business operating at enterprise scale across ecommerce and healthcare clients in Israel and Europe — building the evidence base from nothing, then building the proof that made it fundable. Then I co-founded Set-Up.digital, an agency that worked across Israel, Pan-Africa, and Pan-Europe, and learned what it means to own the outcome rather than advise on it. Now I operate alone — which means the thinking is undiluted and the accountability is total.
I can talk to your developer, your designer, your CFO, and the customer you've never properly defined — and translate between all of them without losing fidelity in any direction. But I always build from the customer backwards. Everything else follows from that.
I work with founders and early-stage businesses. The work requires someone with the authority to act on what the framework reveals. In a founder-led business that's the same person. In a large organisation it's six meetings, a steering committee, and a decision that arrives too late to matter.
I've seen both. I know which one changes things.
I'm not a steady state operator. I come in where nothing exists, build what needs to exist, and move on. That's not a limitation. It's a selection mechanism.
The Methodology
It's that no framework exists yet to measure the right ones.
You can't optimise your way out of a structural problem. You can't report your way to clarity when the instrument that would produce clarity doesn't exist yet.
Every answer that didn't stick, every solution that worked for a quarter and then quietly stopped — that's not bad execution. That's an organisation trying to answer questions with tools that were never built to answer them.
I build the instrument first. Then I point it at the problem. Sometimes that produces a framework that makes existing signals readable for the first time. Sometimes it reveals a market gap nobody had the analytical foundation to see.
The process is identical. The output varies depending on what the analysis reveals.
The starting point is always the same.
The moment before anyone can see clearly.
The Work
Israel · Healthcare & Ecommerce
7–8 figure USD client · Via Set-Up.digital
Why aren't people buying?
They were analysing only the data they had. Nobody had asked what data they needed. The gap in understanding wasn't in the numbers — it was in the silence around them. We built the tracking architecture that should have existed from the start.
Outcome: Full ROI visibility for the first time. Reduced ad spend waste. Identified underperformance by their ad agency — a paid supplier they had no instrument to evaluate.
FrameworkPan-Africa · Gaming & Gambling
Yellowdot Africa · $7.5m annual revenue · Via Set-Up.digital (co-founded)
Why isn't revenue growing as expected?
They had customer numbers. They had revenue. But "customer" was doing too much work — one word covering behaviours, values, and churn profiles that were completely different from each other. Aggregate numbers aren't an average when the underlying population is undefined. They're a blur. We defined the customer typology before any reporting could be meaningful.
Outcome: Adopted a Data Management Platform. For the first time, proper LTV quantified by segment and true cost of acquisition. Every decision before this was made blind.
FrameworkPan-Europe · Ecommerce & Lifestyle
AS Watson Group · $24bn annual revenue · Via Feelter (directing client analytics)
Why aren't our conversion rates improving?
Their measurement framework was internally consistent — which made it feel complete. It answered every question they were asking. The problem was the questions were built around their assumptions, not around what the business was actually doing. We rebuilt the framework to challenge the model rather than confirm it.
Outcome: New revenue streams unlocked. Product upsell revenue identified. Portfolio relationship grew from 2 businesses to 7 — the framework created commercial expansion, not just analytical clarity.
FrameworkNorth America · Dental Technology
DDS Founders Fund · Pair Dental · NetworkDental.us · Catapult Crown · Solo contractor
How do we commercialise what we have?
Four founder-led businesses. Each one needed something that didn't exist yet — a community platform, a valuation marketplace, a broker pathway, an investor framework. None of these products existed before the analytical foundation was laid.
Outcome: Each converted lead: $30–60k USD. Community platform now active and monetised. Valuation marketplace live with full broker pathway. Products built from zero to commercial reality.
Product · 0 to 1I come in where no instrument exists. I leave when you can finally see clearly. What you do with that clarity is yours.
The same starting point applied beyond client work looks like this.
The music project required building a framework for what greatness actually means before a single act could be scored — the same move as every client engagement. Define the instrument first. Then see what it shows you.
The Lab
Industry intelligence built for commercial application. Each project is a standalone framework — scoreable, deployable, and built to sit inside the processes of organisations that should already know what their data is telling them.
The 198 is where this started. What's coming is sector-specific, forensic, and built for the organisations that should already know what their presence is saying about them before a competitor does.
↗Corporate Failure
Why do successful companies fail?
198 companies. All dead. All preventable. The signals were there for months — sometimes years — before the end. Every one of these businesses had evidence it was misreading its own situation. Nobody was listening to what the failure was trying to say.
Ten death zones. 28 scored dimensions each. A forensic record of how companies die — and the lead indicators visible 18 to 24 months before collapse.
Access is free. What comes next isn't. → Talk to us about integration.
Dental Technology · North America
Every DSO and dental technology business in North America has a digital presence. Most don't know what it's saying about them before a competitor does. A forensic scoring framework applied to an entire sector — identifying the gaps, ranking the presence, and surfacing the organisations that should already know they have a problem.
Built for commercial integration, lead generation, and sector intelligence. Organisations that appear in the audit will be invited to see how they score.
In development · Talk to us about early access.
The Sandbox
No brief. No client. No softening. The same methodology running free across questions with nothing commercial at stake. The music project didn't just rank 400 acts — it required building a framework for what greatness actually means before a single act could be scored. The framework didn't exist. We built it. Then we pointed it at seventy years of British music and let it run without editorial interference. That's the move every time. Define the instrument first. Then see what it shows you.
Music · Culture
Who is the greatest British band?
Music canon is built entirely on the acts that succeeded. The question nobody asked was what the neglected ones were telling us about how badly we'd been measuring greatness in the first place. 400 acts. 70 years. No nostalgia.
Free · Culture ↗Cinema · Culture
What is the greatest film ever made?
Vertigo was dismissed on release. It took sixty years for the failure of that verdict to be heard. The gap between what succeeded in its moment and what history corrected is where the truth lives. 1,188 films. Every score arguable.
Free · Culture ↗Wrestling · Culture
Who was WWE's greatest ever talent?
The push decisions are the successes WWE built on. The buried careers are the failures nobody was reading. The site is entirely about what those failures were trying to say — and whether anyone was listening. 300 wrestlers. 40 years.
Free · Culture ↗Music · Culture
What does Eurovision actually reward?
The contest has a voting problem nobody wants to name. Neighbourly blocs, political allegiances, and diaspora patterns have been distorting results for decades. Strip out the noise and the picture that's left is not the one the scoreboard tells you.
Free · CultureThe right question was always there. It just went unanswered.
Let's Talk
If you've read this far, you already know whether this is the conversation you need to have.
You're either the founder who knows something is wrong but can't name it precisely enough to fix it. Or you're not — and that's fine. This work isn't for everyone. It's for the people who are already asking the question.
The frameworks that change things get built before anyone can see clearly. If you're at that moment — that's where I start.
Fractional CPO and CTO. Dental technology, SaaS, publishing, games, financial services. Glasgow-based. Working everywhere. Founder-led businesses only.