Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
My client's pitch deck was all tech. I told him to delete it.
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Hey Reader, Alex, a founder I'm advising, was about to walk into his first big investor meeting. His pitch was a masterclass in engineering — custom models, low latency, elegant prompts. He was proud of it. I told him it was the fastest way to get a "no." He made a common mistake: he assumed investors wanted a deep dive into his tech. They don't. In today's market, especially at pre-seed, the tech is rarely the moat. Investors have a mental checklist, and it's all about your Go-to-Market. They want to know how you'll win, not just how the tech works. I told him to rebuild his entire deck to answer these questions with hard numbers:
The takeaway is simple. Before you walk into a pitch, look at your deck. P.S. If you're preparing to raise and want to make sure your pitch is built around the moats that investors actually care about, let's talk. Book your free 30-minute strategy call. |
Clarity Filter
Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Hey Reader, Founders love to pitch an inevitable future. They see a clear shift in the market, build a product for that future, and launch. Then they get silent buyers and a dead pipeline. They assume the product is broken. Or the marketing is wrong. But the problem is usually much simpler: they are early. And in an early-stage startup, being ahead of your time is functionally indistinguishable from being wrong. A market can be directionally attractive and still be a terrible opportunity...
Hey Reader, In my last email, I broke down how Sam Altman’s relationship network literally purchased his first company's failure for millions. Most builders read that and thought: "Great, but I don't live in SF and I don't know any VCs." You are looking at networking all wrong. You don’t need billionaires. You need a net of adjacent peers who are 6 to 12 months ahead of you. If you want to know if your current network is there yet, here's a handy validator for ya: Look at your calendar for...
Hey Reader, Founders love the myth of the exceptional product. They believe Silicon Valley legends won because they built better software. Here is the reality. Sam Altman's first company, Loopt, had no real traction. It failed as a consumer product. It was acquired for millions anyway. Not because the tech was brilliant. Because Altman had well-connected VC relationships. When the app failed, his network caught him. The relationships were the infrastructure that literally purchased his...