The Tree of Life is what we call the diligence process. It’s a little different than how a traditional diligence process looks. It is a combination of meetings and hands-on, collaborative exercises, as well as internal research on our own to learn more about your business. It typically takes a week to complete and requires a lot of active time on each of our calendars and usually has some asynchronous follow ups we ask for.

The purpose of this engagement is to understand your business, map out the paths in front of you today, and the paths that would be opened up by additional product development. The outcome of this process is how we determine if villagers is able to invest in your company, but regardless of our decision, you’re welcome to make use of any and all the work we do together to guide you as you move forwards with your business

When you’re ready to do the Tree of Life: Here’s what to expect

We’ve taken years of learnings from our careers and used them to create our take on a diligence process for villagers. The end results should look familiar but we altered the paths we take to get there, including some of our own terminology and frameworks.

The phases we need to complete vary in how long they take but they’re intended to capture the past, present, and potential (future) ‘views’ of your business that informs our investment decision. 

Here are the phases

(The exact order we progress through them can vary)

Base Camp

During this phase we spend time with you and your team to build out 3 main blocks so we know where you’re coming from. 

•  The Team: what are the team’s backgrounds and core competencies?

•  Oasis: this is the term we use often that simply means, “If everything goes your way, several years from now, what does your life look like? What does the company look like?”

•  Inventory: What is everything you have today? Product? Users? Waitlist? IP? What are you working on? What is missing?

Users and Products

•  User groups -- who are the users, what do we know about them

•  How do they solve these problems today? What do they do without your service?

•  Observations and assumptions -- what are your observations and assumptions about the market and your users that have informed your decision making process to date?

•  Hypotheses -- How can we connect all of these pieces to build something that creates value?

GTM - Looking Ahead

•  Roadmap -- what is the current plan to grow?

•  Pricing -- how much does the product/service cost how do you find your people?

•  How might we -- classic design thinking exercise.

Perhaps one of the main differences is that we ask for a down payment to complete this process.

Taking a downpayment before starting the exercise ensures that we don't have people who have no intention of partnering with us sign up just to get a week of free consulting.

If we can invest

The down payment is exactly that - a down payment on the total amount repayable. Think of this as having some skin in the game. It's just not realistic for us to spend tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars building products and IP for another company without them having made some kind of token commitment to the project.

If we cannot invest

We will refund half the down-payment. We will also provide the write-up for the Tree of Life (which we don't do if we are able to fund you). This will include recommendations and gaps that, if "filled" could make the difference. We would encourage you to check back in once you've had time to digest and iterate, and we commit to discussing with you and re-evaluating our decision (with no second down payment or anything).

Conclusion - Tree of Life 

We do this mostly internally but at the end of the Tree of Life we put it all together to come up with our recommendations. As mentioned above, if we don’t believe we can invest we’ll take everything and put it into a summary report document that illustrates what we’re looking for. You can always come back to us anytime if you feel you’re ready for a re-evaluation. If we can invest we’ll present you with a term sheet that outlines the product/services we propose along with core features and a total cost.

If you have more questions about this process please reach out. We’re always happy to chat.