8 Connect Invests in Hiddan LLC

8 Connect Consulting has invested in Hiddan LLC, adding another company to a venture portfolio we build alongside our advisory work.

Why we invest as well as advise

Most consultancies stop at the recommendation. We have spent years on the other side of it — building products, launching them, and living with the decisions afterwards. Investing in and co-building ventures keeps us honest. It is difficult to give confident advice about scaling a platform, hiring a technical team or raising a round if you have never had to do it with your own capital at stake.

That experience feeds directly back into client work. When we tell a business owner that a particular approach will be expensive to maintain, it is usually because we have maintained it.

How we choose

We look for the same things in a venture that we look for in a client engagement:

• A founder who understands the problem better than we do.
• A market where technology genuinely changes the economics, not just the interface.
• A route to revenue that does not depend on a single platform's goodwill.
• Work we can materially help with — product, engineering, distribution or search visibility.

That last point matters. We are not a passive fund. If we cannot add something beyond capital, we are not the right investor.

The portfolio approach

Venture building sits alongside our digital advisory, AI and search practices rather than separately from them. Products such as OpenAdvisor, MarketIQ, Gamolly and Sellkie all began the same way — as an internal answer to a problem we kept seeing in client work — and several have grown into companies of their own.

We expect to keep doing this. If you are building something and think we could be useful, we would like to hear about it.