The Epiphany Brief

Issue #4 | 10 April 2026

Hey {{person.firstName}},

I kept not reading the books

Someone close to me kept sending me books and articles about lean methodology. Eric Ries. Build-measure-learn. Minimum viable products. She was persistent, and she was right. And I kept not reading them.

Eleanor Gibson runs Tilt, a consultancy that advises major international charities on implementing agile ways of working, innovation in teamwork, and collaboration. She launched her consultancy using lean principles and has seen first-hand the impact those principles have across dozens of organisations. When she told me I needed to look at lean, she knew what she was talking about.

But lean felt like the opposite of what I do. I'm a creative. I make things that are considered and finished. The idea that you'd put something rough in front of real people and ask what was wrong with it felt like showing up to a client meeting in your gym kit. And I say that as someone who has actually made a video in his gym kit.

So I resisted. Stubbornly.

I wanted to design an elaborate system and create months of content before showing it to anyone. Twelve-month strategies. Frameworks mapped across platforms. Beautiful documents that looked impressive in a pitch deck. I'd build the whole thing, polish it, and then try to sell the finished version. Every time.

And I had no proof any of it would work.

The accelerator that changed how I think

The seed Eleanor planted did eventually grow. The next year, I joined the Stage One accelerator at Plus X Innovation in Brighton. The programme was built around lean methodology from day one.

I was there to launch Brighton United, a community to bring more diverse representation into business and cultural spaces in Brighton and beyond. Plus X believed in the vision and wanted to help make it real.

The accelerator was run by Toby Kress, now CEO of Plus X. Toby has this way of asking questions that makes you find the gaps in your own thinking. You lay out your grand plan, and he listens, and then he asks the one thing you've been avoiding.

That experience changed how I thought about everything I was building at Epiphany Content. Because for years, I'd been building the whole house before checking whether anyone wanted to live in it.

I'd see the same pattern in my client work. I'd create great content and deliver it, and then it would sit there. Clients either lacked the confidence or the strategy to use it properly. Or they'd share it without clear calls to action or next steps, and it wouldn't lead anywhere. The work was good. The connection between the work and the outcome was missing.

That's a big part of what pushed me to develop the VELO method. I wanted to build something that connected the content to real results. But even the VELO method needed testing. I couldn't just design the whole system and hope it would land.

This newsletter is the test

I want to be honest about something.

The Epiphany Brief is a lean test.

When I started this, the subscribers were contacts, past clients, and people I know and trust. People who will tell me straight whether I'm creating something useful or wasting their Thursday mornings. The open rates, the replies, the conversations that follow each edition. That's my data.

Before I take this format to LinkedIn, before I connect it with video and YouTube, I needed to know that it works. That it starts real conversations. And the validation has been clear. Every week since the first edition, I get messages. Sometimes it's feedback about a specific section. Sometimes it's someone I haven't spoken to in months sending a message: "Hey, it's been a while. Let's catch up for coffee."

That second kind is what I was hoping for. Staying in someone's mind without cold outreach, without paid ads, without chasing an algorithm. That's what the VELO method is supposed to do. This newsletter is how I'm testing whether it actually does.

For those of you using this newsletter as a template for your own, and several of you have told me you are, I'd encourage you to look at what's actually happening underneath. The stories. The news items. The diagnostic tools in the signature. The Thursday morning rhythm. The consistency. This is what lean looks like when you apply it to showing up. You test the format, you listen to what comes back, and you build from there.

This edition, I'm up at 11pm the night before, writing this, because I'm genuinely excited to send it. That's new. And I think it's because the feedback tells me it's landing.

What this means for you

The takeaway is simple and it applies whether you're building a newsletter, a service offering, a repositioning, or a content strategy. Test it before you build it all.

The most expensive mistake I've made in twelve years of running this business was never the project that went wrong. It was the project I spent months building beautifully that nobody needed in the form I'd built it.

If you're sitting on something right now, a new offer, a piece of thinking, a format you want to try, consider that it might be ready enough to test. Ready enough to put in front of five real people and listen to what comes back. Send it to a handful of people who look like the clients you want more of. See what comes back. If they reply with questions, you've got signal. If they don't, you've saved yourself months.

News and Intelligence

Most organisations are structured to prevent the kind of variation that new ideas need.

In a talk on the Lean Startup method, Eric Ries defines a startup as "a human institution designed to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty." His core argument: progress should be measured by validated learning, and the fastest way to learn is to reduce the time between pivots. He describes building 25,000 lines of code at IMVU before discovering, through simple usability tests, that the core hypothesis was wrong. The same insight could have come from a landing page and a conversation. For anyone building a service offering or content strategy, the lesson is the same: the cheapest experiment that tells you whether people want what you're building is worth more than months of polished execution.

94% of B2B buying groups have ranked their vendors before they make contact.

A 6sense study from 2025 found that the vast majority of B2B buyers have already decided who they're going to talk to before they pick up the phone. The vendor ranked first wins roughly 80% of the time. If they've never seen your thinking or forwarded something you've written to a colleague, you were never in the conversation to begin with. That's the gap this newsletter is designed to close.

86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process.

Forrester's 2024 research found that 86% of B2B deals stall at some point, and 81% of buyers end up dissatisfied with who they chose. I read those numbers and thought about every proposal I've ever sent into silence. It's usually not that they found someone better. The whole process just seized up. The thing that keeps a deal moving when it wants to stall is whether they've already seen enough of your thinking to trust you through the pause.

One thing to try this week

Write one paragraph describing what you're building right now. The honest version, not the polished one. What it is, who it's for, what problem it solves. Send it to five people who look like the clients you want more of. Not as a sales pitch. As a genuine question: does this land? Would this be useful to you?

If three of them reply with a question of their own, you've got signal. Build from there.

If nobody replies, you've just saved yourself months of building something nobody asked for.

That's Issue #4.

Issue #1 was about the cost of going quiet. Issue #2 was about finding the raw material to show up with. Issue #3 was about making sure you show up as the right thing. This one is about testing whether what you're building is worth building, before you've built it all.

If anything here landed, reply to this email. I read every one.

Kevan Smith

Founder, Epiphany Content

I help B2B founders turn their expertise into material that shortens sales cycles. If you're watching deals stall or getting ghosted in your pipeline, I built a few free tools that might help:

→ Trust Velocity Diagnostic (5 min)

→ Friction Audit Canvas

→ What's Your Leadership Style? Take the Quiz

→ GEO Audit

Instagram · YouTube · LinkedIn

P.S. If you want to go deeper on lean thinking, Eleanor Gibson's Tilt works with international charities on agile and lean principles. Plus X Innovation in Brighton runs accelerator programmes grounded in this methodology. Both worth a look.

Unsubscribe from Marketing Emails | Update preferences