A founder’s honest diary entry on the slow, humbling process of workshopping a pitch deck into something that might actually land
Eleven rejections. I have started keeping a spreadsheet, because at a certain point tracking the pattern felt more useful than simply absorbing each individual “not quite the right fit for us at this time” email as a fresh wound. After the eleventh, I finally sat down and watched the recording of my own pitch back, slide by slide, timing exactly where each investor’s body language shifted from polite engagement to something closer to checking their phone under the table.
Slide Four Is Apparently the Problem
It is always, without exception, slide four. Slide four is my market size slide, a genuinely enormous number I calculated by taking the total global spend on a broad category and asserting, with considerably more confidence than the underlying maths deserved, that my product could plausibly capture a meaningful slice of it. Watching the recordings back, I can pinpoint the exact second, almost to the frame, where investors’ eyes narrow slightly, as though they too have done this specific maths before and know precisely how it was arrived at.
Why I Kept Doing It Anyway
Every pitch deck template I have ever consulted insists on a big, exciting market size number early in the deck, on the theory that investors need to see the scale of the opportunity before they’ll invest emotional energy in the rest of the story. What nobody tells you is that experienced investors have seen this exact slide a thousand times, in a thousand decks, each one claiming to capture some ambitious slice of an enormous total addressable market that, in practice, almost nobody ever actually captures.
The Feedback I Finally Got in Writing
Rejection twelve, mercifully, came with actual detailed feedback rather than the usual polite deflection, and it confirmed exactly what the recordings had already shown me: my market sizing felt “aspirational rather than grounded,” a phrase that stung considerably but which I have, after some reflection, decided to take as genuinely useful rather than simply crushing.
The Rebuild I Am Currently Attempting
I have spent the past two weeks rebuilding slide four from the ground up, starting instead from a much smaller, much more defensible number based on actual comparable companies and realistic capture rates, rather than an inspiring but essentially fictional top-down calculation. It is a considerably less exciting slide. It is also, I suspect, a considerably more credible one, and I have begun to understand that those two qualities are not always the same thing in this particular room.
What Else I’ve Quietly Fixed Along the Way
While I was in there rebuilding slide four, I also finally cut the two slides about our “vision for the future” that, in retrospect, contained almost no actual information beyond vague optimism, and tightened the actual product demo section that I had, embarrassingly, been rushing through to leave more time for the market size slide that was apparently losing everyone anyway.
Where I Stand Going Into Pitch Twelve
I have a meeting booked for next week, deck rebuilt, market sizing considerably more modest and considerably more honest. I do not know if it will work. I know, at minimum, that I have finally stopped losing the room at the exact same predictable moment, which feels, after eleven rounds of the same specific failure, like genuine progress rather than simply another rejection waiting to happen. Further London startup pitch diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with additional London business coverage available at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/