Don't Be a Pitcher

I took out papers and shared them with everyone in the office. Each paper had two questions: (1) Care for feedback from your employees? (2) Care for feedback from your friends?

Some answered yes to one, some to both, some didn't even have direct reports. Didn't matter. I did the same on WhatsApp, and the results were clear: there was demand.

Should I build it for managers only or open it for the general public? Consulted a few friends. Sarahah would be open for all.

That was my rookie "market research." Printed papers and WhatsApp messages. No TAM analysis. No five-year financial forecast.

Sarahah went on to become the #1 app in the world. The world's top VC later emailed "We're ready to dive in".

I made plenty of mistakes along the way. Sarahah may have been better as a corporate solution (that's a story for another day). But I want to talk about something that's been bugging me: somewhere along the way, we started confusing performing with building.

The Rise of "Investor Theater" 🎭

There's an entire industry around getting founders to do things that look like progress but aren't. Fill out this business model canvas for our accelerator application. Calculate your TAM/SAM/SOM for slide 4. Build a competitive analysis matrix. Prepare five-year projections. Oh, and you're missing the SWOT analysis!

Who are these for? Not for you. Not for your customers. They're for an audience. Investors. Judges. Accelerator committees. Mentors who need something to give feedback on.

I watch founders jump from one incubator to the next, one pitch competition to another, collecting feedback from people who have never built a product. A comment from an investor about your unit economics. Another from a junior associate who wants to prove they can find holes in your plan.

And slowly, the founder who started with fire transforms into a full-time pitcher. "Maybe we need to pitch it from a different angle." "Let's reframe our TAM."

Meanwhile, the product sits there. Half-built at best.

I'm Not Saying Don't Think

I looked at the anonymous feedback space before building Sarahah, and I believe I should have looked more. Ben Chestnut at Mailchimp knew his competitor Constant Contact had raised over $100 million, and he deliberately chose a different path.

But there's a world of difference between studying competitors to build better and filling out a competitive analysis slide so an investor feels comfortable. One is building. The other is performing.

Of Long Arms and Fancy Forecasts

I wasn't immune to the theater. Before our trip to Silicon Valley, I thought I needed a suit that would make me look professional. Went to several shops but apparently my arms are longer than average 😅 and I needed a custom one, so I paid over $1500 for a fancy designer suit, only to learn the Valley runs on flip flops.

After advice from a friend, we also prepared a financial forecast that I proudly shared with Sequoia in their office, grinning to show I did my homework. The investor laughed and said: "we know you're not gonna achieve your plan."

She was right. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, once posted: "The reason I don't care about business plans is that I can learn more from 5 minutes of interrogating the founders than from 10 pages of fluff they've written." The co-founder of the most famous startup program in the world doesn't read the documents founders spend months preparing.

Jason Fried of Basecamp wrote: "Let's just call plans what they are: guesses."

Mailchimp didn't pitch. No accelerator. No demo day. Just a tool built as a side project after the founders got laid off. They didn't even go full-time on it until six years later. It sold to Intuit for $12 billion.

The Cost of the Performance

By the time a founder has gone through two accelerators, pitched at three competitions, revised their deck fourteen times, and gotten into a fight with their cofounder who criticized their shaky voice when he got sweaty and anxious in a VC meeting... they've spent their best creative energy performing instead of building. The fire that started the whole thing is barely a flicker.

Founders are builders. The moment you become a full-time pitcher, you've already lost your edge.

So Here's My Challenge

This newsletter is called The Builders for a reason. Before you open that business model canvas template, ask yourself: who is this for? If the answer is an investor or an accelerator application, close the tab. Open your code editor, or grab a notebook and go talk to real customers. Then build what you feel is right for them.

The pitch can come later. The product can't wait.

What are you planning to build?