After eighteen months of building, running, and breaking Maren in our own business, Cohort 1 is opening in the coming months.

This post is the field guide. Who it is for, what it costs, what it gets you, why it is small on purpose, and what happens if you join the waitlist.

What Cohort 1 actually is

Cohort 1 is the first group of paying customers who run on Maren outside of InnovateX. It is not a beta. The platform is in production every day inside one Australian business. What Cohort 1 opens up is the operational maturity, the architecture, and the founder-led onboarding to a small set of other small and mid-size business owners.

There is no app store moment. No public signup form behind a marketing page. Every Cohort 1 onboarding is a conversation with the founder, a tour of your business, and a structured setup of the connectors, skills, and brand voice that match what you actually do.

That is a slow funnel by SaaS standards. It is the right shape for a product whose job is to learn your business and run with it.

Why Cohort 1 is small

Two reasons. One operational, one strategic.

The operational reason is capacity. Founder-led onboarding only works if there is a founder available for every customer. That puts a hard ceiling on how many businesses Cohort 1 can hold. We are aiming for a number that lets us spend real time with each one, not a number that hits a TAM slide.

The strategic reason is product feedback. The first group of customers shapes which connectors ship next, which skills get prioritised, which hubs get built first. That conversation only works if it is high-fidelity. Twenty engaged operators give us better signal than two hundred passive trialists.

If you are in Cohort 1, your “feature requests” become conversations with the person building the platform. We are looking for businesses that want that level of input, not businesses looking to passively receive whatever ships.

What founding pricing buys you

Cohort 1 pricing is founder-negotiated based on your business size, your tool stack, and how you plan to use Maren. There is no public number because the price is matched to the outcomes she replaces in your specific operation.

The lock is the part that matters: whatever rate you land at as a Cohort 1 member is yours permanently. When tiered SaaS pricing ships for the wider market, Cohort 1 stays on its original rate. No tier creep. No “we are migrating you to the new plan” emails in eighteen months.

That lock is the single biggest reason to join early. Public pricing is going to be priced for the value Maren delivers at maturity, which is meaningfully higher than the founder rate Cohort 1 will lock in. We would rather give the people who help shape the product the better long-term economics than chase margin from day one.

What is included from day one

Every Cohort 1 customer gets the full platform. Not a stripped-down starter tier:

• The full conversational brain with persistent memory
• The workflow engine with confidence-gated playbooks
• All hubs as they ship: Ops, CRM, Marketing, Notes
• Connector access across every integration we publish
• Multi-LLM support: pick your model per skill or per task
• Customisable guardrails, brand voice, and personality scales
• Australian-hosted tenant aligned to the Privacy Act
• Audit log, cost observability, and data export from day one

Plus a per-month included AI credit so Maren works out of the box without you needing to set up Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or Grok accounts first. When you want heavier usage or your own vendor relationship, plug in your key and your token costs land directly on your provider’s bill, untouched.

Who Cohort 1 is for

Maren is a fit for owners running 1 to 50 person businesses across professional services, trades, e-commerce, real estate, coaching, health and wellness, creative agencies, and managed service providers. Not because the product is vertical-specific, but because those owners share a common shape: they wear too many hats, they have a real client base that needs context, and the AI tools they have tried so far have not stuck.

You are probably a fit if:

• You spend more than five hours a week on operational tasks an AI could shoulder
• You have a CRM, an accounting system, and an email account, and they do not talk to each other
• You have tried a chatbot, a workflow automation, or both, and felt the limits
• You want an AI that knows your business specifically, not a generic assistant
• You can pay for outcomes, not seats

You are probably not a fit if:

• You want a free or near-free tool to dabble with
• You are looking for a chatbot to embed on your website
• You need an enterprise-grade solution today (we are not there yet, but we will be)
• You want to manage a fleet of agents rather than one teammate

We will tell you honestly during the first conversation if Cohort 1 is the right place for you. If it is not, that is okay. The waitlist stays open. The platform improves. The conversation can pick up later.

What happens when you join the waitlist

You write a few sentences about your business, what you would want Maren to run first, and why now. The form goes straight to the founder. Every request is read personally.

If there is a fit, you get a calendar link to a real conversation. We talk through your ops, your tool stack, your team, your goals. We design a Cohort 1 setup that matches. We agree on a founding rate. You get onboarded.

If there is not a fit yet, you stay on the waitlist. You hear from us when something has changed: a new connector, a new hub, a new skill that makes Cohort 1 viable for your situation. We do not spam.

That is the whole funnel. No marketing sequences. No sales motions. Just one founder, a small group of operators, and a platform we have run on ourselves.

Join the waitlist.