Cleanup on slide 5!

It’s our 50th episode — so first, thank you for listening, sharing, and occasionally heckling from the sidelines. To celebrate, we’re tackling one of the most common founder slip-ups: mistaking a shiny pitch deck for a solid business model. Investors rarely pass because of your storytelling — they pass because slide 5 reveals you don’t actually have the goods. In this milestone episode, JDM and Cam roast a selection of bad slides, then show how to “clean them up” by grounding them in evidence instead of ego. Along the way, they unpack the Startup Core — the four critical business model questions (Who, What, How, and Why) — and show how almost every slide fail is really a strategy fail in disguise. In This Episode * Why pitch deck “polish” can’t fix a broken business model * The Startup Core: four questions every founder should answer cold * How to turn TAM-from-space into a realistic wedge market * Why problem and solution slides must be perfectly in sync * The dangers of fantasyland five-year projections and the “Delusion J-Curve” * The metrics investors actually want to see (and they’re not all revenue) Slide Makeovers * Market Slide – From “We’ll take 0.1% of a $4.2T industry” to a $48M wedge grounded in customer interviews * Solution Slide – From vague “wellness engagement” buzzwords to a crisp feature–pain match for solo therapists * Financials Slide – From an imaginary J-curve to real CAC, payback, and live traction metrics Frivolous Thoughts * JDM experiments with a stripped-down “10 tasks a day” analog productivity habit * Cam recommends a TikTok/Instagram creator who skewers over-the-top business gurus This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com