The Consulting Patterns That Became Products

The Third Time You Solve the Same Problem

Somewhere around year eight of consulting, I stopped being surprised. A logistics company in Bangkok had the same lead generation problem as a fintech startup in Amsterdam. A manufacturing firm in Singapore was drowning in the same spreadsheet chaos as a services company in Atlanta.

Different industries. Different continents. Same broken workflows.

I kept building custom solutions — one for this client, another for that one. Each engagement ended with a working system tailored to their stack, their team, their budget. And each time, I'd carry the lessons into the next project, knowing I'd see the same problems again within six months.

Fifteen Years, Four Countries, One Realization

My consulting career started in Thailand, moved through the Netherlands, then Singapore, and eventually landed in the US. Along the way, I worked with companies ranging from 5-person agencies to 200-person regional players. The work changed. The problems didn't.

Here's what kept showing up:

1. Lead generation was manual and painful. Sales teams spent 30-40% of their time researching prospects instead of selling. Every company had some version of a spreadsheet CRM they'd outgrown two years ago.

2. Email marketing was overpriced and underused. Companies paying $200-400/month for Mailchimp or Keap, sending maybe two campaigns a month. Paying per-contact for lists where half the addresses bounced.

3. Data lived in silos. CRM here, invoicing there, project management somewhere else. No single view of the customer. Integrations that broke every quarter.

4. "AI-powered" tools were anything but. Clients would buy software marketed as AI and discover it was just rule-based automation with a chatbot skin.

These weren't edge cases. These were the norm.

The Moment It Clicked

In late 2023, I finished back-to-back consulting engagements — one with a B2B SaaS company, one with a professional services firm. Both needed lead gen solutions. Both had tried and abandoned at least two tools. Both described their ideal system using almost identical language.

I called Kevin that evening. We'd been talking for months about building something together. I said: "I keep solving the same five problems. What if we stop building for one client at a time and start building for all of them?"

His response was characteristically direct: "Send me the list."

The Three-Strike Rule

We needed a filter. Not every recurring problem deserves a product. Some are too niche. Some are already solved well enough. Some are just annoying but not worth paying to fix.

So we created the three-strike rule:

• Strike one: A client has this problem. We note it.
• Strike two: A different client, different industry or geography, same core problem. We research the existing solutions.
• Strike three: Third occurrence. If the existing solutions are overpriced, overcomplicated, or just bad — we green-light the product.

Lead generation hit strike three within my first year of tracking. Email marketing hit it six months later. Data integration was close behind.

Why Consulting Is the Best Product Research

Product teams at funded startups spend months on discovery. They run surveys, conduct interviews, build prototypes, test with beta users. All of that is valuable.

But consulting gives you something surveys can't: you watch people work.

You see the workarounds they've normalized. You see the tools they've stopped using but still pay for. You see the moment their face changes when you show them a better way to do something they assumed was permanently painful.

That observational data is worth more than a thousand survey responses. People tell you what they think they want. Watching them work shows you what they actually need.

From Patterns to Veldspark

Kevin and I formalized the partnership in early 2024. The structure was simple: 50/50, I handle business development and product strategy, he handles engineering. No board, no investors, no advisory committee.

The name came from my Dutch roots. Veld means field or open ground. Spark means ignition. Products born from the field — from real client work, not from pitch decks or trend reports.

We started with LeadScoutr because it had the strongest signal. Every B2B client I'd worked with in the previous three years had some version of the same complaint: "We can't find the right prospects without spending hours on manual research."

What We Learned from the First Build

Building LeadScoutr confirmed the model. The product roadmap practically wrote itself because we'd already solved the problem multiple times in consulting. We knew which features mattered (real-time search, contact enrichment, plain-language queries) and which were noise (gamified dashboards, social media integrations nobody uses).

We also learned something we hadn't expected: the consulting work got better. Having a product in the same space sharpened our understanding of the market. Clients trusted our consulting advice more because we had skin in the game.

The Flywheel

This is what Veldspark Labs is: a flywheel between consulting and products.

Consulting reveals patterns. Patterns become products. Products build credibility. Credibility attracts better consulting clients. Better clients surface deeper patterns. The cycle continues.

We're not trying to build a unicorn. We're building a portfolio of focused tools — each one born from a problem we couldn't stop seeing, validated by real users before we wrote the first line of code.

If you've been consulting long enough to recognize your own patterns, you probably already know what your first product should be.