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 Job: Who do you serve, and can they get a "wow" moment in under two minutes?
The "Receipts": Can you prove your product works with a real input, showing the final output and the exact cost?
The Data Moat: Do you have a legal right to use and improve on customer data?
The Workflow Lock-in: How deeply are you embedded in your customer's daily operations?
The Distribution Wedge: What is your single, repeatable channel for finding new customers?
The Unit Economics: Do you have a clear path to 70%+ gross margins?
The Team Speed: Can you prove you ship weekly? (Show the last 3 releases).
The takeaway is simple. Before you walk into a pitch, look at your deck. If a slide doesn't have a hard number on it, fix it.Speak soon, — Dmitry