Letter from Investors to Startup Founders
Subject: Marketing Pilots Don’t Pay Salaries & Vanity Metrics Don’t Build Markets
Dear Founder,
We know you love your pilots. You call them “proof of concept,” “MVP traction,” “market acceptance.” We call them “free samples that never paid a bill.”
Let’s be honest: pilots are like college romances - exciting, time-consuming, and almost never leading to marriage. Yet every time we meet you, you wave pilot reports like love letters.
We’ve seen your kind before. One founder from Pune proudly said, “We’re in talks with BigBasket, Flipkart, and or State Government.” We checked. Translation: he once shook hands at an expo, sent a follow-up email, and ran one free trial batch that nobody repeated.
Another agritech founder in Gurgaon told us, “Farmers love our IoT device.” Reality? He sold 25 units to his uncle’s cooperative and gave away 50 more at a discount so deep it resembled charity.
Market fit is not a handshake. It’s repeat business. It’s customers coming back with their wallets, not with polite smiles.
Scaling is not “we have interest from five corporates.” Scaling is “we have signed contracts with three, and the invoices have been paid.”
We’re not trying to be cruel; we’re trying to save you from your own illusions. Many startups die not from lack of ideas, but from overdosing on their own press releases.
Traction is not a selfie with a minister, or a pilot report with no follow-up. Traction is money in the bank, repeat orders, churn that shrinks, and margins that improve. Anything else is noise.
And about scaling, stop thinking geography is scale. Expanding from Bangalore to Delhi without fixing your unit economics is like trying to run a marathon when you still trip over your shoelaces.
We’ve watched founders open new cities, hire 50 salespeople, and then realize each city bleeds more money than the last. Scaling doesn’t multiply your problems, it magnifies them.
What we really want to see is discipline. Show us one market you’ve cracked, one customer segment that sticks, one model that doesn’t collapse when subsidies vanish or when your cofounder stops babysitting farmers. Then we’ll believe you can scale. Until then, pilots are homework, not proof.
We’re not against ambition. We’re against fiction. You can tell us you serve “India’s 140 crore population,” but if your current customer base is five gated societies in South Delhi, just admit it. We’d respect you more. A focused, small wedge of loyal customers is a better story than a delusional map of the whole country.
So, dear founder, remember: pilots impress journalists, not investors. Vanity metrics (likes, signups, free trials) look good on slides, but they don’t pay salaries. When you show us real market fit — money, margins, and repeat customers — we’ll not only invest, we’ll stand beside you as you scale.
Until then, keep your PowerPoints polished. We’ll keep our skepticism sharper.
With bruised hope and cautious optimism,
The Investor Community
Scarred by pilots, allergic to vanity, still hunting for real traction
