Pitch Memo

Pitch memo

Source: Josh Constine's Fundraising & Pitch Deck Guide — specifically his 15-question memo template — plus Kramon's BLUF rule, Konrad's "tell me a secret about the future," and the existing pitch-coach framework.

Why a memo (not a deck)

For pre-seed and seed companies, a memo can outperform a deck:

• No design wrangling. No fiddling with slide layouts or hiring a designer.
• Pretty design can hide weak thinking; a memo can't. If the founder can't write the 15 answers cleanly, they're not ready to pitch.
• It's the deck script. Even if you eventually build a deck, the memo is the narrative spine — write it first, design slides to support it, not the other way around.
• Decks leave investors with questions; memos answer them upfront. Less follow-up email cycle.

A memo replaces a deck for: pre-seed, founders who think in text more than imagery, and any raise where you're competing on substance over presentation. A memo complements a deck for everyone else.

The 15 questions (Constine)

Every investor asks the same 15 things. A memo that answers all of them in order is the most efficient possible pitch artifact.

1. Company name

Ideally, if you hear it you can spell it; if you read it you can pronounce it. You should be the top Google or App Store result for your name + a relevant keyword.

2. Tagline

One-line description. Plain English. No buzzwords. "AI co-pilot for notaries." / "Forward-deployed engineers, but as software." / "Stripe for healthcare data."

3. Problem

• What's wrong with the world?
• How acute is the pain?
• Who specifically has it? (A must-have for a small niche beats a nice-to-have for a wide market.)
• Show emotional resonance — your own first-customer story or a named person's story, not abstractions.

4. Solution

• Core functionality of the product
• How did you come up with it (origin story matters)
• How does it make a few people's lives a lot better, or a lot of people's lives a little better?
• One screenshot or a short demo video walking the most common use case
• Why is this exponentially better, not linearly better?

5. Big vision

• If you succeed, how does the world change?
• What's the path from beachhead → $10B company?
• Why is this your legacy?
• Why do you want to spend the next 10 years on this?

6. Team

• Specific roles + companies for each founder (not just logos)
• LinkedIn for each
• Why are you the best team in the world to tackle this?
• The "superhero origin story" — the personal arc that means you'll never quit
• Co-founder dynamic (this is what kills early-stage startups)
• Advisors only if they're high-quality — max 2 or 3, never lean on their credibility

7. Market size

• Serviceable Addressable Market — bottom-up, not vague TAM
• TAM only as a layer for adjacent products you'd launch later
• How fast is the market itself growing?
• How much are people spending on or losing because of the problem today?

8. Business model

• How do you earn money?
• Pricing model
• Margin
• What's your affordable customer acquisition strategy?

9. Go-to-market / customer

• Who specifically do you sell to (named segments, not "SMBs")?
• Demographic
• Channels — direct, partnerships, PLG, etc.
• Who on the team owns sales/growth?
• Marketing strategy
• How does the product grow itself?

10. Traction

• Current state — customers, users, revenue, growth rate
• Day-30 / Day-90 retention
• Dollar and logo retention
• Top customers + spend + room for expansion
• Pipeline
• Focus on the north-star metric, not vanity metrics

11. Competition

• Direct startups attacking the same problem
• Big incumbents who could move in
• Status quo / old-school way customers solve this today
• 2×2 matrix or differentiation checklist
• The graveyard — what have you learned from past failures in this space? (See graveyard-historian skill.)
• Why is this a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market?
• Your defensible moat / accruing advantage as you grow

12. Why now

• Tech, behavior, macroeconomic, or regulatory shifts unlocking this
• Why couldn't this have been built 5 years ago?
• What changed in the last 18 months that makes the timing work?

13. Raise history

• Total raised to date, round by round
• Lead investors, angels, valuations, SAFE vs. priced
• Most helpful people on the cap table
• Burn rate and runway

14. Raise

• How much you're raising
• SAFE or priced round
• Ballpark valuation cap (or no, if you'd rather investors price it)
• What you're looking for in your investors (operator help, recruiting, GTM, regulatory expertise, etc.)

15. What's next

• Hiring plan
• Key hires that complement founders' skillsets
• Specific milestones you'll hit before raising the next round
• Common targets: $200K ARR before seed, $1M before A, $9M before B, then doubling

Writing rules — apply across all 15

These come from points/ and apply to every section of the memo:

• BLUF. Each section opens with the conclusion, not the buildup.
• Specific over abstract. "47 of 100 PMs interviewed" beats "many people we talked to." Use vividness --mode noun-level.
• Banned jargon. No synergy/leverage/drive/strategize/empower/at the intersection of. Use style-tells --target jargon.
• No em-dashes in the deliverable. Use commas, periods, colons. (See style-tells --target em-dashes.)
• Show, don't tell. Quote a customer with attribution, don't paraphrase. Cite a specific number, don't say "significant."
• A "secret about the future" belongs in the Why-Now section. (See tell-them-something-new.)
• Address the strongest counterargument in Competition, not a strawman.
• Adverb hygiene. No empty intensifiers ("very," "really," "actually"). Use style-tells --target adverbs.

Length

A pre-seed memo is typically 800–1,500 words. A seed memo can run 1,500–3,000. Anything beyond 3,000 means the founder is hiding something behind volume.

If you can't compress to 1,500 words at pre-seed, it's a thinking problem, not a length problem. Cut.

Output format

When invoked from scratch:

# [Company name]: [Tagline]

[3-line opener: a "secret about the future" about the market, then the company name, then what you do. Lead with the insight, not the credentials.]

## Problem
...

## Solution
...

[continue through all 15 questions in order]

## Highlights (TL;DR for the impatient investor)
- [Single most important number]
- [Single most important customer or partnership]
- [Single most important "why-now" data point]

## Closing
[2-3 sentences: what you're raising, what kind of investor you want, the small specific ask.]

When invoked to critique an existing memo:

1. Score each of the 15 sections on (a) presence, (b) specificity, (c) BLUF
2. Flag the weakest 3 sections — those are where investors will dig
3. Rewrite the weakest one fully, leave the others as bulleted critiques
4. Identify any of the 15 that are missing entirely — most early-draft memos skip Competition's graveyard, the moat, or the Why-Now

Common failure modes

• Skipping the graveyard in Competition. Investors love founders who name dead startups in the space and explain why each died. Most memos pretend nobody tried this before.
• Vague "why now." "AI is transforming everything" is not a why-now. A specific tech / regulatory / behavioral shift in the last 18 months is.
• TAM theater. Listing a $50B TAM with no SAM derivation is a tell. Bottom-up beats top-down.
• Vanity metrics. Total downloads, total signups, total impressions. Replace with retention or revenue.
• No superhero origin story. Investors back people, not just markets. The team section without a founder arc is dead.
• Trying to do too much at once. A memo that lists 4 product lines reads as unfocused. Pick the wedge; show the roadmap.

Companion skills

• pitch-coach — covers the spoken pitch and the deck. Use both: memo first, then deck.
• graveyard-historian — feeds the Competition section's graveyard
• warm-intro-finder — produces the forwardable blurb that gets the memo in the right inbox
• winning-writing-critic — final rubric pass before sending

The Constine litmus test

"It's very difficult to hide [weak thinking] in a memo."

Read your memo cold a week later. If you can't defend a claim in 30 seconds without checking your notes, the claim is decoration. Cut it or get the data to back it.