Discovery Addendum: Gate 1 Decisions

Purpose

This addendum records the decisions and direction Clent gave at the Gate 1 review on 27 June 2026, in response to the CP1 Discovery Summary (Discover Summary). It supersedes the corresponding open items where a decision has been made, and it is canonical input for the Design phase. This 1 July refresh keeps every decision intact and aligns the language to the now-known product mechanics from the 29 June guide and the live Jewell partner site. No decision below is changed; no open item is resolved that Clent left open. Where Clent set direction but exact wording or numbers remain his to finalise, that is flagged.

Decision 1: The audience is universal

The engine is appropriate for every kind of organisation, across all sizes and sectors: personal brand, solo operator, small and medium business, corporate organisation, not for profit, and all levels of government. The core-question position holds, with a wider aperture: Maxxim is a commercialisation engine and growth platform that any organisation can run, delivered through trusted partners.

Implication for Design: positioning, messaging, and the customer profile must read across organisation types, not just SMEs. The constant across all of them is the same: a proven, gated method plus AI speed plus an accountable human. The variable is context, tier, and compliance (government and not for profit carry procurement and probity considerations). The three named specialists (Max for words, Sal for pixels in the Design Studio, Pip for the Social Studio) are the same engine regardless of entity type; only the brief inputs and the tier change.

Decision 2: Front door now is the partner, with a self-serve portal as the north star

Near term: the front door is the partner, with Jewell as the first and exemplar partner. Maxxim goes to market through operators who run the 3D Process for their own clients. The live Jewell site is the concrete embodiment: the client enters through Jewell, Discover is always human, and Design and Deploy hand off to Maxxim at scale.

North star: an end-user self-serve portal. End users take themselves through Discovery and output their own 3D deliverables. The portal is AI enabled: it delivers intelligence and holds all of the organisation's digital assets online, with ongoing self learning. This is an evolution of the read-only client portal that already exists in the product, the one with Files, Help, and the private assistant Ari, from a knowledge surface into a self-serve engine.

Sequencing: partner-led delivery proves the method and produces the pilot economics first. The self-serve portal becomes a second, product-led front door once the partner motion is proven. This resolves the earlier open item on Maxxim visibility to end clients: visibility is partner-mediated now, direct through the portal later.

Still open, flagged for Clent: the exact staging and trigger for opening the self-serve portal, and how end-client ownership is assigned when a client arrives through the portal rather than a partner.

Decision 3: Front-door product recommendation

Clent is open to recommendation. The recommendation is to lead with the Growth Diagnostic, the $4,950 Discovery Sprint, as the universal front-door product, sold by every partner as the first step for every organisation type.

Why this product:

• It is the only fully settled price in the ladder, so partners can sell it without waiting on the open economics.
• It is low risk for the buyer because it is credited toward the larger engagement, which lowers the barrier across all entity types.
• It qualifies the client and the fit before a partner commits delivery time.
• It produces one clean, repeatable first sale, which is exactly the activity that generates the pilot data needed to lock the floor, the clip, and the cap.
• It carries the Jewell lead word, growth, in its name.

The 3D engagement and the Deepen retainer are the expand step in a land and expand motion. The self-serve portal becomes the second front-door product later. The category lead word for Maxxim itself remains open and is not invented here. Jewell's own ladder (Growth Diagnostic, then a Fractional CMO engine, then Maxxim at scale) is Jewell's packaging as a partner; the Fractional CMO model is not adopted as a Maxxim-brand fact.

Critical thinking: how Jewell works as a partner, and why it is the reference implementation

Jewell is the method owner at Layer 1, and in delivery terms it also operates as a partner that runs clients through Maxxim. In the v2.1 flow model this is the Jewell-direct flow, and the live Jewell site now shows it working in market: "Strategy first. AI enabled. Human led. Built to move what matters." Clent wears two hats, owner of Maxxim and principal of Jewell the partner, and the discipline is to keep those hats separate, the same rule applied to Christy. Clent is owner and co-founder with Raef, nothing more in the ownership line.

Jewell is the worked example every partner is shown. The 3D work already delivered through Jewell is the proof that the method works when a human runs it. Pottsville Acupuncture is the cleared public example: a full Discover, Design, Deploy run that produced a launched site the client owns outright. Other runs (Beyond the Clinic, Jewell Tyres, OTR Earthmover, Hidrive and others) sit in the internal library under their clearance rules, and Jewell's own named results on the live site stay under Jewell's banner, not re-used as Maxxim's own public proof. What a prospective partner is really buying is confidence that they can put their name on the output, and Jewell is the evidence.

The partner engagement mirrors the Jewell pattern exactly:

• Onboard to the platform and the standards.
• Take a client through Pre-3D, Discover, Design, Deploy, Deepen, with Max, Sal and Pip running the repeatable 80 percent and the gates enforced mechanically.
• Own the relationship and the margin; sign off the 20 percent that carries their name.
• Operate under Jewell standards and the gates.
• Hand the client assets they own, the Pottsville pattern, hosted on their own domain and unlockable to hand-editable HTML.
• Pay the platform floor plus the per-engagement clip, with per-action costs never shown to the partner.

A point of integrity: for the model to be proven rather than asserted, Jewell as a partner should run on the same rails and the same floor plus clip as any licensed partner, even if internally netted. If the owner's own delivery arm does not run on the standard rails, the economics are not really tested. Jewell is therefore both the proof and the first pilot of the partner model, and its live site is the first public evidence that the seam holds.

Critical thinking: the partner community, the human moat

The strategic case is that in an age where AI commoditises the first 80 percent, the durable advantage is the human layer: trust, taste, and judgment, held not by one operator but by a community of them. Together the partners are stronger than any of them working alone. The community is the moat, and building it online and offline is a first-order strategic act, not a nicety.

What the community is for, in four layers:

• Compounding knowledge. Extend the v2.1 compounding loop to every partner: each partner's client friction feeds shared learning, and the method and Max improve for everyone. This is the flywheel a lone operator can never build.
• Shared deal flow. Partners refer and collaborate across strengths. A partner strong in trades brings in one strong in not for profit or government. The network creates work that no member would win alone.
• Belonging and retention. Partners stay for the people, not only the tool. The rhythm and the offsite are what make it a family rather than a vendor list.
• A shared quality bar. Peer review keeps taste and judgment high and consistent, which protects the standard that the whole model depends on.

Operating rhythm, building on Clent's cadence:

Infrastructure. Online, a partner hub that can extend the existing dashboard: the shared 3D method library and playbooks, a channel for the weekly table, a deal-share board, and a partner directory by specialty. Offline, the annual offsite plus regional meetups.

The membership compact. Make family concrete and reciprocal. What a partner gives: share learnings, uphold the standard, contribute to the table. What a partner gets: the engine, the proof, the community, and the shared deal flow. This turns sentiment into a clear, mutual deal.

Guardrails. Independent operators sharing client intelligence need light confidentiality norms: no named client specifics shared without consent, consistent with the existing rule that named partners are not used publicly without consent. Keep the community partner-led with light facilitation so it does not become a support burden.

For the 3 July showcase. Run it as the first meeting of this community, a partner discovery and alignment session rather than a demo, with the output being a partner map and an invitation into the cadence.