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Seed

The Seed to Sequoia Workbook

You've read the books. Done a course or two, but somehow, you’re idea just isn’t landing.

You know brand matters. You just don't have agency money, so you've gone the DIY route: an article here, a book there, an evening in Canva pulling a logo and some colours together.

But, it's just not you, and it’s not attracting the right clients or investors.

We built this because we've been there. Richard had an idea on a ski slope; a material that stayed soft until the moment of impact, then hardened instantly to absorb it. The science was sound. Ninety-seven investor pitches later, it still didn't matter, because nobody understood the potential.

What changed? We shifted from proof to belief.

When you’re building something new, you can’t prove it yet. You’ve got to drag people into your vision of the future. You have to make them believe. This is what this workbook is rooted in. Taking you through customer and market research, brand DNA, positioning, getting noticed and remembered and building your tribe along the way.

Seed to Sequoia Workbook
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Seed to Sequoia Workbook
£49.00

148 pages of real, physical workbook that takes you through the 5 stages of building your brand. we use with our clients :

Understand your ecosystem > build belief > find your place > be seen > build your ecosystem

Packed full of exercises in each stage to help you answer the questions:

  • Why do you exist beyond making money?

  • What are you here to change?

  • What do people need and how can you, and only you, help them?

  • What is your brand’s Purpose, Vision, Mission, Promise, Only-ness

  • What is your personality?

  • How do you build an ecosystem around you to help you grow?

Comes with 6 x A1 frameworks and sticky notes that you use with the workbooks to help you figure out the answers to these big questions.

  1. Ikigai Canvas

  2. Brand Canvas

  3. Ecosystem Members Canvas

  4. Attributes Map

  5. Brand Personality Canvas

  6. Ecosystem Map

You’ll walk away with clarity about why your brand exists, who it’s for, why they will care and how to grow.

Slow down to speed up

A founder’s world is far from quiet. No matter what stage you’re at life seems to travel at 200mph constantly. There’s too much doing, and not enough time for thinking.

The whirlwind keeps on spinning, your list gets longer and your focus gets diluted. And in the process you can lose direction, never finishing anything that matters, just ticking off to-dos.

Our working life has been optimised and streamlined by tech, but it’s left us disconnected, without the space of attention to think in the way we used to. This is why we have made this a real book, not another digital template that you never actually get round to using (been there).

Quality paper, six large format poster that you stick to the wall and add sticky notes to - so you can look at them over your cup of tea, mull them over and add the brainwaves you’ve had overnight.

Five stages of slow thinking that help you leap ahead.

Each stage has been defined as a result of our experience running our own startup and helping founders grow theirs.

Seed to Sequoia Workbook
£49.00

148 pages of real, physical workbook that takes you through the 5 stages of building your brand. we use with our clients :

Understand your ecosystem > build belief > find your place > be seen > build your ecosystem

Packed full of exercises in each stage to help you answer the questions:

  • Why do you exist beyond making money?

  • What are you here to change?

  • What do people need and how can you, and only you, help them?

  • What is your brand’s Purpose, Vision, Mission, Promise, Only-ness

  • What is your personality?

  • How do you build an ecosystem around you to help you grow?

Comes with 6 x A1 frameworks and sticky notes that you use with the workbooks to help you figure out the answers to these big questions.

  1. Ikigai Canvas

  2. Brand Canvas

  3. Ecosystem Members Canvas

  4. Attributes Map

  5. Brand Personality Canvas

  6. Ecosystem Map

You’ll walk away with clarity about why your brand exists, who it’s for, why they will care and how to grow.

The Campfire Community (coming soon)

Working through the workbook alone might be fine for you. But if you’re the kind of person who needs accountability and a little extra support, the Campfire Community could be exactly what you need.

How it works

A community space for you to connect, videos explaining each stage and the exercises within it, and a monthly group check-in call, or campfire chat as we like to call it with Richard & Ruth.

There are extra resources too, deep dives on different subject areas, Canva whiteboard versions of the exercises should you want to do them with your business partner live.

On the campfire calls, Ruth and Richard cover whatever the group's actually working on that month, submit your questions, what you’re struggling with in the chat, and we’ll shape the conversation around that.

What's included:

  • Video walkthrough of every section of the workbook, alongside the book or course itself

  • Digital Canva versions of every tool in the workbook, ready to fill in and share

  • A live monthly call with Ruth and Richard

  • A growing library of deep-dive content - case studies, new research and thinking, and material that goes further than the workbook

  • A community of founders doing this work in parallel, not alone, to share with and grow together

Like everything in founder life, this is an experiment

This isn't a finished, polished platform, it's the first version, built with the founders who join now. That means the price you join at is the price you keep, for as long as you stay. You’ll help shape it, and in exchange, we’ll keep the price low for those brave enough to join early!

£20 a month. Capped to the first 50 founding members.

We built Palmer&Co on the belief that the founders who most need this kind of thinking are often the ones who can least afford to pay for it yet, before funding, before revenue, when belief is genuinely the only thing you're working with. If that's you and the price is what's stopping you, tell us. We keep a small number of seats open for exactly that conversation.

Want more than a monthly call?

The Campfire is built for founders working through this at their own pace, with a group (or not, that’s up to you). If you want live feedback from Ruth and Richard on your actual work as you build it, head over to Shoots Circle Cohort.

Why this works

The Seed to Sequoia workbook wasn’t written in a classroom or a consultancy. It was built from the lived experience of real business, from the mistakes, the pivots, the moments of clarity, and the expensive lessons that only come from actually doing it.

Ruth Palmer spent years as the accidental head of marketing at D3O, the impact protection technology that went on to supply the world’s leading sports, defence and workwear brands. She learned what startup marketing actually looks like from the inside (when you have to make big things happen with no budget).

Richard Palmer founded D3O from a spark of inspiration on a ski slope and built it into a globally recognised technology brand. EPO Inventor of the Year finalist. O2 Entrepreneur of the Year. Member of the EPO European Inventor Network.

Since then, Palmer&Co has worked with many startups at every stage of growth, from founders with nothing but an idea and a belief, to funded businesses navigating their first serious scale.

There's another reason to get your foundations right early. AI search tools now recommend brands based on clarity, consistency and what others say about you, not just your Google ranking. A brand with clear positioning and a distinctive story doesn't just communicate better with humans. It gets found by the AI tools your future customers are already using to make decisions.

Find out more about Ruth, Richard and Palmer&Co →

Who this is for.

  • You’re a solopreneur or early-stage founder with an idea worth backing, and you want to give it the best possible chance of working

  • You’ve never built a business before and you’d rather learn from someone else’s mistakes than make all of them yourself

  • You’re tired of generic startup advice that assumes you have a team of ten and a Series A in the bank or trying to learn how to build a brand from YouTube videos

  • You want a process that respects your time, your intelligence and your budget

Who this isn’t for.

  • You’re looking for a get-rich-quick formula, building a brand (and a business) takes time.

  • You want someone to do it for you. (For hands-on strategic support, see Sapling and Sequoia.)

  • You’re not willing to do the thinking. The process works. But only if you do.

Where Seed fits

The Seed to Sequoia workbook and the Campfire Community are the first stage of the Seed to Sequoia framework.

When you're ready to go deeper, with live facilitation, a small cohort of founders, Shoots Circle Cohort is your natural next step.

Kind words from our ecosystem