VCs Don’t Care About Your Product

I can't remember the last time I went through a drive-thru window. I'm not sure I ever have, to be honest. I’ve never had a non-NYC address and I normally walk to the restaurants near me. So when a founder spends the first ten pages of a deck walking me through the suburban drive-up experience for their healthy fast casual concept, I'm sitting there blinking silently, nodding along, thinking: “OK, I guess I'll take your word for it.”

For the vast majority of products, no individual investor in that room is your target customer. You're far more likely to be pitching someone who will never use the thing you've built than someone who intuitively understands what's good about it and what isn't. That's true even on the consumer side. Especially on the consumer side.

A demo used to be proof that you could build—and that meant something. Today, that means less and less when you can vibecode something faster than you can read this essay.

Now, showing the product boils down to "trust me, people are going to love this," you've handed me a coin to flip. Unless it genuinely knocks my socks off—unless I happen, by accident, to be exactly the customer—I've got nothing to go on but vibes.

There are only three things that get you out of that trap.

The first is prior product success. When you’re the team that previously launched X app that grew to a million users in three weeks, then I’ll probably take a chance on you. Funny enough, when tech is moving so fast, that prior success probably means less and less. If your team previously launched a successful DTC brand in 2010, how relevant is that going to be today?

What you really want is traction. People are already using it. They like it. They come back. That's not taste anymore—that's evidence. You've removed me from the equation entirely, which is exactly where I want to be when I'm not the person you're building for.

If you don’t have that yet, show me insight. Don't tell me people want healthier alternatives. Tell me what you discovered about the customer that nobody else saw, and walk me through how you got there. This customer needs a smaller version of this. That one doesn't use half the features and would happily pay for a stripped-down option at a different price point. This segment wants flexibility the incumbents refuse to give them. When you can take me down that path—when I can understand exactly why you built what you built—you're not pitching a product anymore. You're pitching your judgment, and judgment is the thing I'm actually buying.

Judgement also gives me the confidence that when customer preferences change or when you pivot the product, that you’ll make the right call.

Insight without evidence, though, is just a nicely-worded opinion. "People want healthy alternatives" isn't an insight, it's a horoscope. What's the data behind it? And can you point to the pattern? Four companies made a version of this same bet in adjacent markets and it worked—here's why we're the ones to do it in this one. That's called plausibility and it’s the difference between a founder who's theorizing and a founder who's been paying attention.

We're now in a world where a team that doesn't like its growth numbers can rebuild the entire product over a weekend. AI-driven coding means whatever you're demoing today might not survive the month. By the time I'd see real results, half of it could be torn down and rebuilt twice.

So the product you put in front of me isn't a prediction. It's a rearview mirror. It tells me where you've been, not where you're going. What I'm actually trying to figure out is whether this team can find product-market fit—whether you understand the customer well enough to keep iterating toward something that works, long after the version in this deck is gone.

That's why pitching me with the demo or a story about features is a losing game. The artifact is temporary. Your taste, your traction, your read on the customer—that's what survives the rewrite.

So stop asking me to vote on your product. I'm not qualified, and even if I were, I'd be voting on something that won't exist in six months. Show me you know who you're building for. Show me you've been right before, or that you're right now.

Everything else is just a guess you built a UI around.