Hey friends 👋

You know the pattern. Founder gets a no, goes home, and rewrites the business model slide. Tweak the header, reorder some bullets. Progress!

Comes back a month later with a shinier deck and the exact same business. We call it tweaking, and this week we’re calling it out directly (with love, mostly).

The pitch competition circuit trains founders to treat the deck like the product. It isn’t. Your deck is a window, and no amount of new drapery fixes the view if you’re still looking out over a dead field.

We get into the version-to-conversion ratio, why most of the feedback you get lives way higher on the pyramid than you think, and the three questions that’ll tell you if you’re a tweaker.

Plus: the real antidote, which is less dopamine, more discomfort.

Fresh off a Maui trip in which Cameron was brutally mugged by the ocean (three times!), and JDM’s latest music finds tie a little too well into this week’s theme.

As always, thanks for listening.

—Cameron and JDM

Links

* The Investor Feedback Pyramid

* The Bad Actors

Timestamps

* 00:00 - Cold open: back from Maui and ready to call some patterns out

* 03:15 - Naming today’s topic, the “Bro, You Be” tweaking edition

* 05:00 - How the pitch competition circuit breeds serial deck-tweakers

* 07:15 - The dead field metaphor: better drapery won’t fix a bad view

* 10:00 - The version-to-conversion ratio

* 13:30 - Selling the business model, not the story

* 16:00 - Three warning signs you’re a tweaker

* 18:15 - The investor feedback pyramid, revisited

* 23:45 - Procrastivity: the dopamine hit behind deck tweaking

* 28:15 - The real antidote: evidence over facade

* 32:15 - Frivolous Thoughts: Maui losses and new music finds

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