The best companies get built because the founder couldn't find the thing
There's a version of a founding story that never fails in a pitch meeting, and it's the simplest one: I needed this, it didn't exist, so I built it.
Not "I saw a market opportunity." Not "I analyzed the competitive landscape and identified a white space." Just: I was trying to do something, it was way harder than it should have been, and I got frustrated enough to build the thing myself.
That story works because it answers two questions at once. Is this a real problem? Yes, the founder lived it. Will this founder stick with it when things get hard? Yes, they were already obsessing over it before anyone gave them a dollar to solve it.
I've watched VCs ask founders "why did you start this?" hundreds of times and the answers that land are never the polished ones. They're the ones where you can hear the frustration in the room, where the founder describes some specific, tedious, maddening thing they had to do over and over until they finally snapped and decided nobody should have to do this anymore.
That's not a small story. That's the story. Because if one person was frustrated enough to quit their job and build a company around it, there are thousands of people quietly dealing with the same thing every day and just assuming that's how it works.
Put it in the deck, but not as a paragraph of backstory buried on the team slide. Make it the setup. Before you explain what you built, explain what you went looking for and couldn't find. Let the VC feel the gap before you fill it, because the gap is what makes the product make sense.
The Bottom Line
The most fundable origin stories aren't grand visions. They're specific frustrations. Show the VC what you couldn't find before you show them what you built.
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The Round I Would Have Backed
Astute — $1.2M Pre-Seed | Oversubscribed
B2B creator platform connecting companies with newsletter, podcast, and social media creators
Vida Stanić used to spend her evenings scrolling Substack looking for contact information that was never listed. She was the head of growth at Fluidstack, trying to reach B2B creators for partnerships, and the process was absurdly manual: pitch a hundred creators, wait five weeks, maybe get one yes.
That's the founding story. Not a market analysis, not a trend report. One person, doing a job, hitting the same wall over and over, and eventually deciding to tear it down.
Astute is the platform she couldn't find. It handles what used to take weeks of manual searching and cold outreach and compresses it into minutes — connecting B2B companies with the 20 million+ independent creators across newsletters, podcasts, LinkedIn, and X who now control the audiences that used to belong to traditional media.
The timing is right because the shift has already happened in consumer marketing. Influencer marketing is one of the biggest budget items in direct-to-consumer. B2B is next, and what's holding it back isn't demand — it's access. Companies want to work with creators, they just can't find them, vet them, or manage the relationships at scale.
The round was $1.2M pre-seed, oversubscribed, with Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and strategic angels. Oversubscribed at pre-seed means multiple investors saw this and wanted in faster than the founder could allocate the cap table — which is what happens when the founding story is so specific and so relatable that investors immediately think of their own portfolio companies who need this.
The deck probably opened with that Substack story. One founder, late at night, scrolling for an email address that didn't exist. That's the moment the company started, and it's the slide that closed the round.
-Vicki / DeckToVC
