Bain pulls a partner-led team to sit alongside you for months. SynthBoard pulls a structurally adversarial AI boardroom in under a minute. The cheapest place to test a strategy is in a room that exists.
The synths walk through the same diagnostics a Bain team would, surfacing the gaps before you commission a study.
Strategist + CFO + investor + skeptic + sales leader. The room Bain would assemble in week three is yours in minute one.
Consensus-scored output with a recommended path, watch-outs, and a 30-day action plan ready for your leadership team.
Real questions. Multiple expert perspectives. Every time.
“Where is our customer-economics leak — acquisition, conversion, or expansion?”
“Should we restructure into business units now or wait another revenue cycle?”
“What is the steel-man case against acquiring our nearest competitor?”
“How would a top-tier strategy firm sequence our portfolio rationalization?”
“Which of our three growth bets has the highest expected return on partner attention?”
Each expert thinks independently — they won’t just agree with each other.
The Strategist
Maps competitive dynamics and strategic options across multi-year horizons.
The CFO
Pressure-tests unit economics, runway, and capital allocation.
The Investor
Thinks like a board, an LP, and a downstream acquirer at once.
The Sales Leader
Anchors decisions to what closes, retains, and expands.
The Skeptic
Questions every premise. Finds blind spots others miss.
A synthesized recommendation from your team of experts — not just opinions, but structured analysis.
Moderate Agreement
Key Recommendations
Synthesized Recommendation
Defer the M&A and instead reinvest the diligence budget into a 90-day expansion-revenue sprint. The economics of organic NRR uplift dominate the synergy case at current multiples.
Full analysis continues with detailed reasoning, trade-offs, and next steps...
Watch Out For
Expert Opinions
“The most expensive part of strategy consulting is not the fee — it is the option-value of all the alternatives you did not get to test. SynthBoard makes the alternatives cheap.”
No SOW, no kickoff deck, no Tuesday-9am-onsite. Open SynthBoard and start.
SynthBoard is cents per session. A Bain workstream is six to seven figures. The 100-1000x cost ratio reshapes what is worth analysing.
Bain partners are diplomatic with clients by training. The synths are engineered to disagree until the case is earned.
One Bain engagement = one swing. SynthBoard = unlimited reruns from different angles, the same evening.
The questions people ask before they sign up.
For the strategic-debate portion of a Bain engagement, yes. For the in-person team, the proprietary benchmark database, the implementation muscle, and the senior-partner brand on the recommendation, no — those are not what SynthBoard is. Use SynthBoard for the thinking. Hire Bain when the brand of the recommendation, or the implementation team, is half the value.
When the decision is real but the budget is under six figures, when the question changes weekly and a 12-week engagement is too slow, or when you want structural disagreement instead of a single polished recommendation. Most operators use SynthBoard to make 90% of their decisions and reserve top-tier consulting for the few decisions that warrant it.
For PE-portfolio diligence with a tight clock, for transformations where the board wants a named firm on the page, and for any engagement that needs primary research across dozens of customers, suppliers, or markets. SynthBoard is a thinking room; Bain is a delivery firm. Different mechanics.
SynthBoard is free to start and scales by usage at low double-digit dollars per month for most operators. A single Bain workstream typically starts in the high six figures and can run into the millions for multi-year engagements. The unit economics are not the same product.
No primary customer or expert interviews, no proprietary cross-industry benchmark library, no on-site team in your office, no transformation PMO, no named-partner reputation backing the recommendation. SynthBoard is the thinking instrument; Bain is the delivery firm.
Yes — and most of our consulting-savvy users do. A pre-engagement session sharpens the brief, surfaces the questions the partners will probe, and gives you a baseline to compare deliverables against. The marginal hours saved in scoping typically pay back the cost of every SynthBoard subscription for a year.
Adjacent decisions, audiences, and methods inside SynthBoard.
The other side of MBB — same analysis.
ExploreBig-Four operator-strategy alternative.
ExploreThe independent-consultant comparison.
ExploreBain-style portfolio decisions, run by a synth panel.
ExploreThe full comparison hub.
ExploreBain-style post-mortems run by a synth panel.
ExploreConvene 24 expert Synths to debate it across rounds. Free to start. No card.