Deliberately left as a scaffold, as agreed — this gets written once the European pipeline is researched and we know what the recommendation actually is. What follows is the raw material: the findings that would go in it, and the questions that have to be answered before it can be written honestly.
fonio is the only business in the set built on paid performance marketing into an SMB base — 24.2% of its traffic is paid, it is the only one that is Facebook-first, and it made its ad spend self-funding through €300 prepaid credit packs before raising anything. Sierra, Fin and Ada are top-down enterprise motions where CAC is a salesperson and a nine-month cycle. Their playbooks are interesting; fonio's is transferable.
Ada, Fin and Sierra all buy each other's product names on paid search. fonio buys
twilio, vapi, retell — developer infrastructure —
intercepting buyers at the moment their alternative is building it themselves rather than buying a
rival. Cheaper traffic, weaker competing offer, higher intent. This is the single most directly
copyable mechanic in the research.
Every player moved pricing inside a 26-month window, and the moves are not converging: Fin holds $0.99/outcome and publishes rivals' prices as marketing; Sierra charges nothing when the agent fails; Ada tried outcome pricing and publicly reversed, arguing it punishes success; fonio moved credits → subscription in Feb 2026 and got 30%+ MoM growth out of it. What settles the argument is the definition of the billable event — and Fin's "assumed resolution" bills customer silence as success, which is the cautionary example.
Four of the five companies researched are selling the automation of human support work. Ada quantifies it as "one AI agent does the work of 10+ human agents at less than the cost of one"; Fin sells against a fully-loaded human cost of $5–20 per ticket at $0.99. Whatever we take from their GTM playbooks, the demand-side story they are all telling is a story about replacing the service Everhelp provides. That deserves to be a deliberate strategic conversation rather than a footnote in a marketing teardown.