This is probably a good idea to land high ticket items but I’ve never seen this all inclusive provision done successfully (consistently).
First off, I don’t think you can put a flat rate on this form of service provision. It would probably be very project specific.
Pitch decks, business plans and go to market strategies are pointless if the product/service does not provide unique value to its market. By extension how would you handle being approached for a market that is already well served, which would challenge your ability to get investors interested?
What guarantees will you offer? I think this is a hard sell unless you can offer some kind of money-back guarantee. What happens if it never becomes investor ready and/or funded, which I guarantee will be at least 9 times out of 10. This is not an opinion, 90% of startups funded by YCombinator fail … mind you these are startups that have either demonstrated some success or have a really good team. At project initiation you would have neither because you simply can’t have a team that is experts in every industry.
My advice would be a service with all the aforementioned but where you explicitly state that you do not guarantee investor readiness but guarantee handling everything from market research to development to outreach to gathering user feedback.
By extension how would you handle being approached for a market that is already well served, which would challenge your ability to get investors interested? - This would come down to myself, the founder and my team putting our heads together to try and find something unique we could add to the platform/startup or a way to be unique. It is very hard but we do a surface level check on each startup before we commit to taking them on and going all out.
What guarantees will you offer? - I have thought long and hard about this one as I know from personal experience reaching out to investors/funder is a very annoying and at time crushing experience, not to mention the overwhelming amount of scammers out there. What I was toying with was a money back guarentee after a certain time frame that if we had not secured an investor/funder they would get a full refund but we would still keep reaching out on their behalf. What do you think? I am still up in the air about this one
Its really late here, so I won’t be able to think out my response well.
In relation to well served markets, unique is not enough it has to be uniquely valuable. More times than not, that is impossible to achieve. For example imagine a client approaches you about competing for the short form videos market where the market leader is Tiktok. I can tell you now its impossible. That’s an example of a well-served market.
I floated money back guarantee but I think given statistics you would go in the red and probably lose your team in the process.
Without the investor readiness, I’m fully behind your idea … but as soon as you guarantee investor readiness, you open a can of worms.
I have found that a lot of founders (myself included her when I had my startups) that having money for an a startup (build and proper marketing) it just too far out of reach. This is why I created this service, all someone has to invest is $5,000 and we do our best to get everything done for them.
Yeah, I wouldnt be guaranteeing it but more I will continue to try until it happens or the founder pulls the pin. I might need to reword things LOL still a work in progress
This would be more along the lines of McKinsey from the sound of it as I would be using AI but other partnered agency that I have formed relationships with or my own internal team.
Eventually I partnered up with a founder. We decided to grow from a hustle to a company we can be proud of (and exit). For the last year and a half, we’ve been pitching an idea (with MVPs) to incubators, accelerators, VCs and private investors. It’s been rough and at times embarrassing but hey, it’s our first rodeo.
Rejections are tough man, especially when you’ve already built a product that already has GTM (albeit niche). Imposter syndrome sits on my shoulder every second since I solo develop all our stacks. There’re also the other factors to getting ignored/rejected. Factors a lot of founders don’t like to talk about when they talk about successes… as someone on the browner side of the fence, those are frustrating AF.
Regardless. What is important is that we learned a lot from our failings and rejections:
My partner can now lingo with a VC or investor at any point of time for hours.
We learned to put aside our personal ambitions towards our current product. Leave it bootstrapped and use our tech skills to create and pitch a new idea big money will find more palatable.
We also realized how under the radar we are. We’ve left very positive impressions on the people who agreed to talk to us. Especially in our business planning, execution and software development capabilities.
We’re learning to take advantage of our underdog status by building out a pretty (if I may say so myself) robust PR plan.
It sucked, it sucks and it will be a sucky and frustratingly fun-sad journey. Yet the experience is invaluable as it grows us as founders before we’re even funded (2026 is looking to be a good year for our company).
All that said, my point is that there is a reason why founders are founders. They’re nuts. There’s a need for ownership even if the plan is to exit. Hence also why incubators and accelerators are popular and continue to be so.
Let’s say I were to use your suite of services, why would an investor then invest in me when you did all the work?
I will also be asking, what’s the catch? What’s actually in it for you? If I was a solo founder, I won’t have any leverage on top of paying a tidy sum to your business. At least I know what I’m getting into with an accelerator program.
It’s not even counting all the legal talk and John Hancocks that need to be worked out before, during and after.
I hear you with reaching out to investor and others as I myself have been at it for well over 3 years now and out of the 1000’s of investors/funders that I have spoken to, maybe 30 of them were not scammers or asking for some ridiculous upfront fee and equity. It was heartbreaking for my personal projects and two clients projects (that I did not charge them for) but as you said, you learn from your mistakes.
My mistake was going for the investors themselves or funders, it cost me $1000’s and nearly my relationship
As to answer your questions, I have spent the past 2 of those all those years building relationships with middle men or gatekeepers as some might call them and those people have large networks of investors and funders. So my between myself doing all the the market research and packaging everything in a professional way for you, then going to my connections and letting them pitch it to their networks that they have strong relationships with.
The connections work in different ways, some ask for a small amount of equity, some ask for a small amount upfront and some work on success base but I dont make anything from the deal going through in that sense. I would make my money from my company designing, building and marketing the platform once it is validated and received the right funding or investment.
This service is not for everyone and I understand that but if something like this was around or I found something like this when I has my startups, I would have gone for it. Now that I am in a position and have the team, I thought I would start it and try to help those that are in the situation I was in.
In 2017 I got to have breakfast with a very successful man in the startup world. Best words he said to me was “who the hell are you, and what have you already done?” Followed up with “investors don’t invest in ideas, they invest in the team”.
So how in the world do you expect serious investors to invest in these ideas when the “team” behind the idea is not even capable of creating their own pitch decks, doing the hard leg work of pitching, getting contacts etc etc? And trust me, when I say team, that’s not you or your ai or your 2 contacts that know some people. It’s the actual people who will be running the business.
To be successful you need to be comfortable with failure.
The question, then, is why don’t you just build and run the startup yourself rather than have the startup get a build from you? You’re offering Business as a Service, which isn’t really solving a problem
Someone has an idea, they come to you, and right away, the conversation is about funding.
That’s just not how funding generally works.
Most successful businesses (almost all of them) either never raise funding or they do raise it after proving viability and achieving a real level of success. Talking about funding before the business even exists skips over everything that actually matters, like product, market, traction, and customers.
Honestly, leading with funding sends the wrong signal. It attracts inexperienced founders who may not understand how rare funding actually is, and risks selling them a dream that’s statistically very unlikely.
I just can’t wrap my head around starting the conversation there, instead of focusing on building something solid first.
If you could actually get this right even once, your time would be better spent building you own start up.
Also, so you’ve made the mistake of guaranteeing investor readiness for 2 clients before and predictably could not deliver and therefore couldn’t charge for those projects … and you want to do it again … at scale? I don’t understand.
I just want to say that outside of the funding and investor readiness guarantees, the offering is 100% achievable (but $5000 is a little low). Build some AI agents/automations that are context aware and can handle building pitch decks, market strategies, business plans (not sure this is useful in 2025) and other requests you may get from your client.
