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IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Tell me about a time you had to significantly revise your pitch or fundraising narrative based on tough feedback from an investor. What specifically changed in your story, your numbers, or your deck, and what was the outcome?
Startup owner pitching to a VC
General

Sample Answer

In our seed round, I got some pretty blunt feedback from a partner at a top fund. He said, “You’re pitching a product, not a business,” and walked me through why our deck felt like a feature tour. At that point we had 300 paying SMB customers, ~8% monthly growth, and 40% of usage concentrated in one workflow, but that wasn’t obvious in the story. I went back, cut 12 slides, and reframed everything around one core narrative: we were a workflow-automation platform for revenue teams, not a generic automation tool. We led with the problem, then a simple cohort chart showing 115% net dollar retention over 6 months and a clear 3-year path to $10M ARR with LTV:CAC at 4:1. I also added a brutally honest competitive slide with our weaknesses. Within four weeks, that revised narrative helped us close a $2.4M seed at a 25% higher valuation than our initial term sheet.

Keywords

Investor feedback that narrative was product-centric, not business-centricCut deck complexity and focused on one clear, problem-driven storyHighlighted specific metrics: NDR, LTV:CAC, growth path to $10M ARROutcome: closed $2.4M seed with 25% better valuation
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