We ran the Malpani Ventures MVP 2.0 program to fund pre-seed B2B SAAS companies and received ~100 applications. Our team invited only nine (10%) founders for the next discussion, and we shared individual feedback on their pitch decks with all startups!

To help early-stage founders pitch better, we are open-sourcing some of our filtering criteria used in the cohort:

Lack of focus on founder-market fit

Most startups presented a single slide on founders focusing on their education or previous work experience. This is no better than a simple LinkedIn profile or resume.

As early-stage investors, we want to understand why are you best-placed to solve a particular problem: Do you have any unfair advantages in going into this market? Can you tap into an existing network in a unique manner?  

Limited explanation of the MVP

What is your current hypothesis? How have you tested this?

While at the pre-seed stage, it is difficult to demonstrate paying customers, very few pitch decks provided us with leading indicators of why the startup will work. Pith decks can include

• beta customers
• usage patterns
• survey results
• waitlists/ pipeline 
• feedback/ testimonials

Nailing the ‘Why now?

While most founders spend a lot of time explaining a large TAM, very few explain the underlying shift they are catering to – technology change, human behaviour change, legal or macro change. Mind you capturing a large TAM is best possible if you riding a rising tide!

This also helps explain the next point for a founder

Lack of an honest assessment of the underlying market:

Very few applications answered the following questions from a customer’s perspective: Is it an urgent problem for potential customers?  Is it an important one?  And do they have a budget?

 This time around we received a lot of pitches that focused on creating marketplaces/ platforms or influencers or creators! While the TAM seemingly appears large in the influencer market, more than 95% of the value is usually captured by the top 5% of creators. Very few creators will ever pay and the real market is not as fragmented for a platform to build a marketplace!

Check out Spotify's earning trends:

To sum up, your pitch deck should focus on

• Perfect founder/market fit
• Demonstrate huge TAM and Your " how + why?" narrative to access it
• An honest assessment of your market

Finally, passing up of deal by an investor is just another opinion for founders to consider. Understand the investor’s POV, seek your facts, and build your business your way!