Nursing home software company. Three months old. No product. Nine term sheets and $8M raised. Here's why.
The founding CEO knew his market cold, and could tell the story in a handful of bullet points.
- Nursing home nurse is the worst job to hire for in the entire medical industry.
- They were in a hiring crisis before COVID.
- During COVID, a third of all nursing home nurses fucked off, never to return.
- The 80-and-over population is projected to double in the next 10 years.
- They had hundreds of nursing homes saying if you can make our existing staff more efficient, please take our money.
That's the whole pitch. No product. No demo. No vision deck about the future of elder care powered by autonomous AI agents. Just five facts an investor could validate with one phone call to anyone they know in MedTech or anyone whose parent is in a home.
And every one of those calls came back: yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's that bad. Yeah, I can't imagine a world where this doesn't get solved.
Term sheet.
I'm bringing this up because I have a client right now wrestling with two versions of his pitch deck. His version is the business he actually thinks he can sell NOW. His co-founder's version is the wild, ambitious, "here's where this could go someday" story.
The co-founder swears the wild version is what gets investors excited.
It doesn't.
Investors don't fund visions derived from first principles. Every engineering founder I've ever met excels at first principles. Give them one data point about an industry they know nothing about and they'll architect for you an internally consistent solution by lunch.
Nobody wants it. Because it's built on imagination.
What investors fund is conviction. And conviction comes from knowing things about your market that they don't. Specifically, things that once heard cannot be unheard. Things they can verify.
If you can't list five facts about your market that make a stranger go "Jesus! I didn't know that, and I can't imagine a world where this isn't solved" — you're not ready to raise.
You're not even ready to build.
Keep learning from your market until are.