I sit across the table from a lot of founders. Some come to me for R&D Tax Incentive advice. Some want help finding a government grant. Plenty are also out raising money from investors at the same time, and their pitch decks land on my desk too.
There is one mistake I see over and over. It has nothing to do with the numbers. Founders don’t make an investor’s imagination excited.
What “imagination-inducing” actually means?
When you pitch an investor, you are not just asking them to fund what your business does today. You want them thinking about every direction your business could go. The verticals you have not touched yet. The people in their network, they suddenly want to introduce you to. The hires they know who’d be perfect for your team.
Do that, and something shifts. The investor stops marking your spreadsheet and starts building the business with you in their head. I have had investors say, “the market’s bigger than I can even size”, halfway through a call once someone says that out loud, you have got them.
Where founders get this wrong
Most founders I meet walk in with their numbers locked down tight. Every assumption backed up, every hard question rehearsed. I respect that. If your unit economics don’t hold up, nothing else in the pitch matters.
But too many founders stop there. They run the pitch like a maths exam instead of a conversation about a future that doesn’t exist yet. They answer the question they were asked and nothing more. They never give the investor a reason to sit back and think, “Where else could this go?”
Numbers prove you can run the business. Vision is what makes someone want to fund the size of the business you haven’t built yet.
Why this matters most at pre-seed
At pre-seed, the numbers barely exist. You do not have three years of revenue to point to. What you have is a story about where this goes, and how big it gets if you’re right.
An investor writing a pre-seed cheque is betting on a future, not a track record. If you spend your fifteen minutes defending a spreadsheet, which is mostly guesswork anyway, you have picked the wrong argument.
Show them the size of the opportunity. Let them start naming the customers, the partners, the hires. Once they are doing that out loud, they are already halfway to writing the cheque.
Grants want the opposite. Know which room you are in.
Here’s where it gets interesting, and where I see founders trip themselves up. The instincts that win an investor over are the exact instincts that get an R&D Tax Incentive claim or a grant application knocked back.
While an assessor at AusIndustry wants to know “where could this go?” They also want to know what you actually did, and whether you can prove it. Big talk about market size gets an application flagged fast. What gets funded can be boring by comparison. A documented activity. A measurable result. Evidence that holds up.
I have seen founders bring their pitch-deck energy straight into a grant application, then call me confused about why it came back with questions. Different rooms need different arguments. An investor buys the future. A grant assessor checks whether the past actually happened. Mix the two up, and it costs you money either way.
Three questions before your next pitch
Before you walk into your next investor meeting, ask yourself:
- Have I given them at least three directions this business could grow in that I am not building yet?
- Have I named people, customers or partners specific enough that the investor pictures a real introduction?
- Did I leave five minutes of silence where they could imagine out loud, or did I fill every gap with more slides?
If you cannot answer those with real detail, you are pitching a spreadsheet, not a business. Fix that before your next meeting, and keep your numbers just as sharp. You need both. Most founders only bring one.
Bruce Patten
