HACKER Q&A
📣 johnzakkam

Do founders get honest feedback on their pitch decks?


I've been through a few VC meetings and noticed a pattern: friends and advisors are too polite when reviewing pitch decks. They miss the brutal questions VCs actually ask.

Thinking about building a tool that generates realistic VC questions based on your pitch deck - the skeptical stuff like "Your TAM math doesn't add up" or "Why can't BigCorp clone this?"

Is this actually a problem other founders face? How do you currently get honest pitch feedback before investor meetings?

  👤 GianFabien Accepted Answer ✓
The key to the disparity is that potentially having skin in the game is what makes a potential investor more analytical and critical than any non-investor. Furthermore, every investor has a different set of criteria. I don't believe that any simulation whether available persons or some software can ever be a viable substitute for reality.

I suggest a simple process, one that I have used in the past:

    Make a list of at least 5, pref 10+ potential investors.
    Rank them in order of how much you would like them to invest.
    Start with the lowest one on the list
        Present and gather feedback
        Refine pitch deck to incorporate feedback
    Repeat with next investor, working up the list, repeat the feedback and refinement process.
Ideally by the time you reach your more ideal investors, your pitch deck is much improved and you increase your chances of a favorable outcome. In fact, you could end up with bidding rounds.
👤 muzani
You ask the VCs for feedback. Being turned down isn't rejection, it's a data point. Do it early. Don't "practice" on people who don't know what they're talking about.

Often friends aren't simply polite, they just don't have the experience. They haven't invested in things that fail... heck, many won't even know a guy who invested in a failure. And when they do, it's a single data point and they'll come to some dumb conclusion like "it was losing money," as if every successful startup wasn't.

👤 sandra_vu
Hey, this is a super common problem founders face.

And you will encounter them again again even during your GTM phase.

The team at Wiz (acquired by Google for USD 32 billion) has the perfect strategy to overcome the sugar-coated feedback when pitching. They called it the "false positive"

I covered it here https://www.sandrasletter.com/p/the-design-strategy-behind-t...

👤 r_thambapillai
i did a round of feedback with some fellow founders and they were way, way more difficult than the VCs were.