Executive summary

First Concepts is becoming a creative operating system for early-stage advertising and concepting: a workspace that reduces context fragmentation and tool friction, while preserving taste and judgement and enabling faster pitch-ready outputs.

The wedge is agency pitching and concepting because it is where the pain is most acute (fragile, high-stakes, high-spend), the workflow is messiest (tool switching, lost references, misalignment), and it offers a clear ROI story (speed, win-rate, reduced pitch cost).

The deeper moat is a creative memory and context engine: persistent, structured context across project, user and agency, plus governance and audit trails.

The brand and culture conversation converges on a paradox: build structured context under the hood while presenting an interface that feels like freedom — a playground where the tools disappear.

Key themes

Context fragmentation is the core pain

The recurring problem statement is not "make content" but maintain context across a messy creative workflow. "Context fragmentation is the biggest issue at the pitch and earlier stages." Context here includes brief constraints, brand constraints, references, decisions, rationale, prior learnings, and a creator's digital fingerprint.

Taste is the scarce resource

Across the founding team, the future is human-plus-AI synergy, and the human's differentiator becomes taste, judgement and intent. "All that's left is taste." The product promise is about maintaining taste and judgment — the workflow should be human taste selecting among machine suggestions. Positioning that overemphasises AI outputs risks triggering "AI slop" narratives. Positioning that emphasises taste leverage aligns better with the founders' worldview.

Freedom versus structure

The team wants to sell a feeling of creative freedom while building structured systems for context, collaboration and compliance. "How do you design an experience that feels like a space, a playground, when you're actually building really structured systems to maintain context?" This paradox is a core design and brand challenge. Solve it well and you get differentiation. Fail, and the product either feels like a rigid enterprise tool (rejected by creatives) or a chaotic sandbox (fails in teams).

Pitching and concepting as the wedge

The product is anchored to concepting and pitch development as the initial high-value use case. "We focus on the pitch because it's the most fragile part of creative work." Buyer economics support this — agencies spend up to £200,000 on a single pitch. The right wedge not just for urgency but for measurable ROI: time saved, win-rate lift, cost avoided.

Governance and audit as a real wedge

There is explicit pull for audit trails of prompts, models and assets to mitigate legal and brand risks. "They need to provide audit sheets of prompts, images, models for every project — First Concepts captures everything." This can be framed in creative-friendly terms (provenance, receipts, show your workings), but it remains a powerful enterprise-tier driver.

The founding team as a system

The team's effectiveness comes from complementary roles and periodic realignment: Conor's high-level vision becomes product vision through Polina, and becomes something practical through Marin. "If you remove one of the three, it just wouldn't work at all." This is both a strength and a scaling risk — misalignment, or overload of one role, becomes the main failure mode.

What users are hiring this for

Primary: vague to sharp to pitchable, without losing context

• Rapidly expand and refine directions from a seed idea
• Stay brief-aligned and brand-aligned while exploring
• Gather and curate references (visual, tonal, cultural) quickly
• Produce pitch-ready artefacts: decks, scripts, frames, concept film direction
• Preserve provenance and decisions for team continuity

Secondary: reduce tool-proficiency barriers and keep creators in flow

• Remove friction from tool switching and steep learning curves
• Allow creators to keep working their way while the system structures and exports

Emerging: creative memory that compounds advantage

• Reuse past learnings, constraints, preferences and outcomes
• Avoid repeating "why did we decide that?" and "what did the brand like last time?"

Core tensions to resolve

Freedom vs structure

Creatives resent tools that feel like timesheets. Teams and clients need traceability and exportable structure. The interaction design must feel expressive; the backend must be strict.

Speed to pilots vs building the moat

Pitch urgency demands a fast pilot-win loop. The long-term moat (creative memory, context engine) requires protected investment time. The two-speed plan addresses this.

Seat-based SaaS vs usage-based pricing

The current model is £50 per seat per month. But AI costs are usage-driven, not seat-driven. A hybrid model (seats plus usage quotas and overages) is the likely compromise, but needs crisp packaging.

AI scepticism vs the curious leading edge

Over 90% of creatives are already using AI weekly. The target is the curious, not the sceptics — but the narrative should not trigger sceptics unnecessarily.

Clean code vs ruthless shipping

The codebase is deliberately imperfect while pursuing product-market fit. This requires an explicit "when we pay down debt" milestone gate.

Founder motivations

Conor

Momentum, cultural proximity, relationship-led go-to-market. Wants to be in the rooms where culture is shaped and to see the best creatives using what he helped build. Not money-motivated.

Polina

Meaning, identity, empowering creatives, human-plus-AI entity teams. Stayed for people. Holds a conviction about synergistic AI-human collaboration that shapes the product's soul.

Marin

First-principles builder. Wants to work on something people use every day and love. Everything is irrelevant until people are willing to pay. Pragmatic to the core.

Positioning signals

Consistent phrases and frames that appear across all materials:

1. AI-native workspace (not a chatbot) for creative teams
2. Taste-first, judgement-first (anti-slop)
3. Context engine and creative memory as compounding advantage
4. Playground plus structure: the UI feels like freedom, the backend keeps receipts

Questions for the team

Product clarity and wedge

• What exactly is the pitch-concepting workflow in three to five steps? Which artefacts are must-have outputs?
• What does "70% faster" specifically mean? Faster versus what baseline?
• What is the minimum viable "single source of truth" — what must be captured to solve context fragmentation?

Differentiation

• What is the non-negotiable differentiator: browser-extension connective tissue, creative memory engine, governance trail, or a specific concepting-loop UX?
• Where does "creative DNA" land in the roadmap?

Commercial model

• Who is the initial economic buyer? Creative director, strategy lead, ops, agency leadership?
• What packaging will drive the easiest pilot-to-paid conversion: seats, usage, or pitch packs?

Brand

• How to articulate the paradox — "tools disappear, context remains" — in creative-native language?
• What is the tone: iconoclastic rule-breaker vs professional reliability? Can the brand hold both?

Scaling

• What rituals prevent the key failure mode (imbalance of load across speed, meaning and execution)?
• Is the "creator fingerprint" framing something FC actually wants to build? If yes, what privacy and IP model enables it?