Most founders waste their best pitch on the wrong problem.
I've seen hundreds of decks over the years. Built Su-Kam from scratch into a ₹2,000 crore company. Navigated bankruptcy. Rebuilt. Now, with Kunwwer.ai, I'm deep in the next chapter. And across all of it — the raising, the mentoring, the investing — I've noticed one thing that kills more deals than bad products or weak teams.
Founders pitch the solution before they've proven the problem.
The Slide That Kills Most Pitches
It's usually slide 3 or 4. The 'Problem' slide.
Here's what I see constantly: a vague market description dressed up as a pain point. 'Small businesses struggle with cash flow.' 'Enterprises face digital transformation challenges.' These aren't problems — they're categories.
A real problem statement answers three things precisely:
- Who is experiencing this, exactly?
- What are they doing today to solve it (and why is that painful)?
- What does it cost them — in time, money, or opportunity — to live with this pain?
If your problem slide can't answer all three in under 60 seconds, your solution doesn't matter yet.
What I Actually Look For
When I sit across from a founder, I'm not evaluating the idea first. I'm evaluating whether this person has spent real time with real customers experiencing real pain.
At Su-Kam, I didn't build inverters because I thought they were a good business. I built them because power cuts were destroying small businesses and homes across India, and nobody was solving it for the mass market. I lived in that problem. I understood the frustration, the workarounds, the economics of it.
That lived understanding — that obsession with the problem — is what I look for in founders.
The second thing I look for is self-awareness about what they don't know. The founders who scare me are the ones with a perfect answer for every question. The founders who excite me are the ones who say: here's what I know cold, and here's where I need help.
The Fix
Before your next pitch:
- Write down the problem in one sentence with a specific person as the subject. Not 'companies' — a specific type of person at a specific type of company facing a specific situation.
- Write down what that person does today. The workaround. The hack. The expensive alternative.
- Write down what it costs them to keep doing that.
If you can do that in under five minutes without looking at your deck, you're ready to pitch. If you can't, go back to your customers.