It’s your first day at Searchflex. Alongside client work, you’ve been handed one internal project: help plan, launch and grow a brand-new ecommerce performance-marketing platform. This is that brief.
Paid within five working days of your presentation, regardless of outcome. You’ve been asked to think strategically about a real business — that’s consulting work, and it should be compensated.
Please spend no more than four hours on this. We’re interested in how you think, not how long you can polish slides. You have 5–7 days to fit it around your commitments — bring your thinking to the live session.
If you disagree with any assumption in this brief — tell us. Tell us what you’d change and why. The best candidates won’t follow the brief blindly: if you think we’re wrong about the product structure, the market or the approach, make the case.
Intelligent disagreement isn’t a risk here. It’s exactly what we’re looking for.
Searchflex is building a platform — an ecommerce performance-marketing platform that gives DTC brands every deliverable they need to scale, in one place. The positioning:
“Scale your ecommerce marketing performance with our simple-to-use platform.”
The reference point is FatJoe — a fixed-price, self-serve content and link-building marketplace used by thousands of agencies. This is that model, rebuilt for ecommerce performance marketing. Instead of content and links, the catalogue spans six capability areas:
It’s designed to work like an ecommerce store — clients browse, order and manage deliverables across four levels:
| Level | What it is |
|---|---|
| Products / SKUs | Fixed scope, fixed price, direct purchase — individual deliverables a client can order like an item from a shop. |
| Bundles | Several SKUs packaged together to solve one broader problem, at a better combined price. |
| Packages | Outcome-based engagements, typically 30–90 days, scoped around a goal rather than a task list. |
| Growth Partnerships | Ongoing, embedded relationships — from advisory retainers to fully managed performance. |
Design and development is handled in-house. Brand, marketing strategy, SEO, content and go-to-market is yours to lead.
This isn’t a blank canvas. Here’s exactly what you’re working with — these constraints are real. We’re not testing whether you can think without limits; we’re testing whether you can think clearly within them.
| Resource | Reality |
|---|---|
| Design & dev | In-house team — 50% of their time committed to the platform. Not negotiable. |
| Your time | You manage 2 existing Searchflex clients at £4k/month each, taking roughly 50% of your capacity. The remaining 50% goes to the new website — unless you’d argue for a different split. |
| Content delivery | AI-assisted briefing and production with human quality control. Claude-powered — but your strategy, your ideas, your tone of voice, delivered at scale. |
| Philippines team member | One full-time team member in a different timezone. A strong executor. How do you plan, brief and quality-control across the distance? |
| Additional budget | £1,000 available for any external resource or tooling you genuinely need. Justify it — or make the case for not spending it yet. |
| External partners | Partners like FatJoe are on the table as potential white-label suppliers. Assess whether and how you’d use them, and what the risks are. |
There are no prescribed deliverables or slide templates. Answer the following in whatever format, order and depth best serves the conversation. A tight, opinionated 10-page document will outscore 40 slides of noise every time.
What are you actually trying to achieve — and by when? Define success commercially, not just in traffic or rankings. What would you stake your reputation on in the first 6 months?
Separate from the objectives — what’s the version of this that genuinely changes Searchflex as a business? What does it look like when it’s working, and what’s the earliest signal you’d trust?
How would you structure the new website? Think like someone who understands both SEO and ecommerce UX. Sketch the key pages, sections and how the catalogue is organised.
What are the priority keyword territories and topics to own in year one? Don’t just list keywords — give us the strategic logic. What content and authority-building approach makes Searchflex the go-to resource for ecommerce brands?
Searchflex is AI-first. How would you approach visibility in AI search — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews? What does a GEO strategy look like for a site like this, and how does it differ from traditional SEO?
What should the new website actually sell, and in what order? Think like a product manager — the core catalogue at launch, what gets added in phase two, what stays off the list entirely. Where does pricing need to be fixed and transparent, and where bespoke?
Beyond SEO — how do you build a brand and an audience from zero? Which channels would you prioritise given your constraints, and why?
Beyond the obvious inbound channels — what are the non-standard ways you’d get the first 50 clients? Referrals, outreach, partnerships, ecosystem plays, events, thought leadership? What would you do that a generic agency wouldn’t think of?
Give us a realistic phased plan. What launches first, what comes after, and what’s deliberately left for later? Call out your dependencies — especially where design and dev capacity is the constraint.
You have limited hours and one offshore team member. Be honest about where your time creates the most leverage and where you’d hand off. How would you brief your Philippines team member, and maintain quality and momentum across timezones?
Where does it go — or do you hold it? Tools, freelancers, content, links, testing, research? Justify every pound, or make the case for not spending it yet.
What do you need to know before you can execute this properly? Bring the questions where the answer would change your strategy — not questions you could answer yourself with 30 minutes of research.
If this website and new positioning launched tomorrow and you had to get one ecommerce brand to sign up within 30 days — what would you do, specifically?
Not a strategy. Not a plan. What would you actually do on Monday morning?
Present your thinking in whatever format you’ve prepared. A tight point of view beats a comprehensive one.
A conversation with two of the Searchflex team. We’ll push back and go deeper — the best presentations deliberately leave room for that rather than answering everything upfront.
Two members of the team score independently, then compare. We’re scoring thinking — not presentation quality or slide design.
Think like a founder. Present like a consultant. Deliver like you’re already on the team.