Investors Push for a Pivot Before the Product Ships

“Fourteen yeses out of twenty is unusually concrete. What decision are you actually stuck on now—onboarding those partners, choosing the first market, or proving revenue—and what did you do immediately after the last yes?”

“Good perspective, I see what you mean. Reddit, as many other "internet" environments are heavily influenced by SV media. Big funded startups invent all kind of label, which 90% of the rest of the economies and worlds do not support just to stay in the media. (Gonna give you a free fortune telling here: The next bullshit will be StoryPM) These labels do not change the depth of the product role - you need to remain a generalist still or you become a management specialist. The speciality”

“the small-customers-no-pain vs MNC-real-pain-but-slow-to-buy split is useful signal, I'd look for the mid-market company that has the MNC's actual problem but can still make a buying decision without six approvals. since you can prototype fast, I'd skip pitch-deck-style validation calls and just build the smallest possible working version of your next 2-3 candidate problems, not mockups, actual working software, and hand it to 5 people each for a real task. what people actually open”

“I hope they do, I want everyone to have the hundreds of thousands of dollars OF MY SHIT if these asshole are going to have it, lol. Especially since. Except Google, I bow to you Google. I love Gemma. Please forgive any and all transgressions upon thee Google. lmfao”

“Short story: Validation is simply "would you pay for this?" asked the right way, to make sure that it represents an actual willingness to buy. That's bare minimum, and not too strict. But getting venture capital is a different game, or rather a whole collection of games, where you can play to get VC money rather than validate a proper business. Preparing to launch a profitable business and preparing to get venture capital can be two very very very different things.”

“Not really. It’s a multi-step analysis with separate parsing, market assessment, deterministic scoring, and report generation. The LLM is obviously a core part of it, but it’s not just one prompt with a UI on top.”

“You’re thinking waaaayyyyyy tooooo biiiiiggggg I cannot stress enough You can’t help everyone You’re trying to help everyone You’re doing toooooo muuuuccccchhhh Doing to much You have to find 1 type of business That’s it. That’s all Plumber? Roofer? Landscape? Electrician? Build a custom website with only one company in mind Show how you can help them But you have to know their business What are their problems? How can you solve their problems? AI receptionist? Better google ratings? Better serv”

That unfortunately rings more true than I think it should.

“saas isn't dead, but if you don't have any special IP or market access, then you're ngmi. what do I do you can try and get a job under someone who does have these things you don't. you chose to compete in a mudrace to the bottom. you're looking around at all the other competitors who are struggling with you, while paying money to the race promoters. you've gotta stop being a consumer, dude.”

“Approval delays kill more campaigns than bad strategy does, and nobody writes that into the contract. Crazy man, two weeks of waiting on one tweet and the whole calendar is already dead.”

“next assignment rather than settlement, yeah. i'd hold off on the photo validation though. that's a deep rabbit hole and you don't yet know whether anyone bothers to game it.”

“Sounds like you should pivot and start a simulation company that does drone simulations for a way cheaper than 5-7k each iteration. sheesh.”

Exactly, that friction kills innovation.

“AGI is here according to the company CEOs under the pressure of investors to reach that goal fast. Do you just eat up all the marketing?”

“"Invest in your market and it invests in you.” - says the person complaining about AI slop”

“There are 100's of similar AI services, it was inevitable, compete on better service and features if you're not going to match price.”

“this is the real unlock. the minute comparison is what makes prospects open the spreadsheet in the first place. if you reframe around outcomes — "we set up your call handling end to end and you never think about it again" — the 300 vs 1000 minutes question stops being the headline. maybe even bundle minutes into tiers named after what they solve (solo, team, multi-site) instead of raw counts. the second you stop selling metered airtime, the competitor's per-minute math becomes irre”

“Do you know how much AI inferencing costs they were eating during the pilots?”

Can you say more about their customer recruiting regime?

“Did you raise VC and have an exit? If so, definitely lead with that. If not don’t lead with data. Lead with the problem and solution and show traction asap. Then share why the team will win.”

“What kinds of “hooks” do investors respond to that isn’t just clever hype? My company is a vertical SAAS in a very crowded market and we’ve had success by listening to what the competitors are doing poorly and literally just being better. Solving the problems that the other guys aren’t. This is hard to communicate in the room because “everyone” says they’re just better. I want to cut through the noise.”

“A breath of fresh air compared to the usual Claude dialogue. Very interesting perspective, never thought partners would be happy to tell founders what they expect to hear.”

Not AI slop. For that you get as many upvotes as I can give.

“Fair, i should've said where that applies. The prototype move only makes sense once pain and priority are already confirmed and the deal has stalled for a while. At that point you're translating what they already believe instead of pitching them on the idea. Early on, before any of that's confirmed, i'd agree with you completely, a prototype just anchors the conversation on your idea instead of their actual problem.”

Good point: you’re 100% right.

“your diagnosis is half right and the half that's wrong is the expensive one. investor story vs commercial buyer story is real. but the reason deep tech underfunds marketing isn't that r&d ate the budget. it's that the buyer list is often 40 companies long. when your entire market fits in a spreadsheet, content, campaigns and websites are the wrong instruments, and that's exactly the shape of agency you already run. you'd be selling them the thing they correctly refuse to”

“the idea of applying just to become free market research for a struggling stanford grad's pivot is grim. definitely makes the quiet solo grind feel a lot safer.”

“The useful early test is whether a specific buyer can describe the agency pain in their own words. That signal is harder to fake than clicks or polite feedback.”

“This. You need to test your own offer and collect your own data. That’s the only way you can actually know, otherwise you’re just guessing based on (mostly) vanity metrics.”

“A lot of these are much easier if the problem and market conditions are well framed. I have tried pricing a feature that was not tested and proven, it was an endless back-and-forth.”

“Yes we can do that for sure, the problem is we don’t know which industry to lock in on or atleast which workflows (that are common to multiple industries) we should focus on…? What would you say?”

“That's a really good distinction. I'm trying hard not to treat this validation yet more like like hypothesis that's getting clearer with every conversation. "The plan stopped fitting the week." is a much better way of describing it than I've been able to. Appreciate you sharing the prospective.”

“Also Dashboards are about to be killed as you run adhoc analysis instead with Claude/chatgpt against your data. We will terminate our tableau license in the next months and analysts either become more technical or leave probably.”

“Looking for recurring complaints and workarounds makes more sense to me than asking AI for a broad market report. The part I still wouldn’t trust it to answer is whether the problem matters enough for someone to change what they already do. Once you find the same complaint in a few threads, how are you planning to check it with the people who wrote it?”

“I agree with the comment about trying to sell lower in the market where SOC2 is not as much of a barrier, but sometimes even there, sensitivity to data breaches can be a blocker. One thing you can try is to do an extended demo environment where the customer can start using the system with dummy data to further building their advocacy for buying your product. It takes some additional work, but it is better than having them walk away cold. There you are treating them more like a design partner to”

“Every single day people write how shocked they are business actually matters. Frankly AI made crapping out products market-blind easier.”

“I'd split the asks by stage before spending the last few months of runway on SOC2. For a demo, they shouldn't need your cert if no customer data touches your system. For a pilot, the question is usually narrower: what data leaves their environment, where repos/logs live, who can access them, and what gets deleted after the run. For production, yeah, the formal report starts to matter. That gives you a better sales path than "wait six months until we're certified." Build the”

“I found this comment interesting and tend to disagree but wonder if it is just a question of how you define "don't fund." My view: having revenue, particularly strong revenue, is part of valuation - part of making your case that your company is worth something. Granted, there are companies who never make revenue and get funded on customer numbers, hype, peer validation, hope, and sometimes just misguided strategy.. but would you say this is a representative case for the average fou”

“If the customers aren’t paying, they haven’t said “yes” yet. Paying customers is pretty much the only thing that investors will consider as evidence of product market fit. Without that you’re still on the “friends, family, and fools” stage.”

“This is super high level. You need to be explaining exactly how it does this. To the world.”

“the split you're describing is one of the healthier positions to be in actually, even though it doesn't feel like it. customers saying yes = your product is real. investors saying no = your story or stage doesn't match their fund thesis, which is a completely separate signal that has almost nothing to do with whether your business works. the numb part wears off around no #30 or so, replaced by something more useful: you stop reading rejections as verdicts and start reading them as fi”

“You call it stress testing, but I would call it bare minimum without which you haven’t done validation and obviously couldn’t properly have found pmf. Which investors would expect as bare minimum. So right now you might be running to investors look like some amateur vibe founder, right? Which would explain the silence that you’re met with.”

“I like to fix things, and understand how it all works. I knew it was a dumpster fire, my gut was right in the end heh. This may just be beyond my ability depending on factors outside my control”

“Your 11 contact requests with zero orders suggest the next bottleneck is not reach but qualification or offer friction. Before pivoting to tutorials, interview those 11 non-buyers and rebuild one constrained offer with a clear starting price, defined deliverable, paid deposit, and capped monthly slots; if that converts, use creator endorsements as a repeatable referral channel and outsource only the standardized steps. Test B2B as a separate offer rather than mixing it into the current funnel.”

“No not devil incarnate and your biases are pretty obvious here. Yes you are salty. Yes sometimes the partners do seem like jerks but partly that's because they can tell who the bottom feeders are that are wasting their time. They really are dealing with a lot of competition for high-performing people who want to build something and not sit around and whine and bitch about their personal philosophy.”

“I guarantee 80% of these people won't make one sale”

“Loads of companies are seeing only single digit growth or negative growth this year. I'm talking about non AI companies. I analyze company financials a lot, and I absolutely notice much less non-AI growth. As for recessions... Canada hit a technical recession this year. And the UK economy has been terrible too. The US is just lagging behind. I doubt the US will enter a recession, but if you remove AI growth and government handouts to these companies then the economy doesn't look great. T”

The data makes no sense, plus the juxtaposition in the last sentence

All of them have offices in SoCal

Agreed.

“The reason you failed was not because of you, maybe it's an idea to write code by AI & get dashboards in seconds, it just because data isn't a joke The way data get handled, many approaches and scenarios works behind that, AI can clean & Navigate the data but how the data to be separated - it's hard to think That's the reason businesses hire data analysts & ofc each businesses have their own aim. HONEST OPINION : "Multi agent syestem might works, try it once, wit”

“Paying customers beat a waitlist by a large margin. Most have only validated how easy it is to fall for their own bullshit. Most products fail in the marketplace. To get your head screwed on straight the process should be called invalidation. Validation is the big lie in startup culture.”