Siddarth Kengadaran · Experience Strategist @ BayOne · theproductguy.xyz
11+ years in product and experience design across Thoughtworks, Kellton and BayOne Solutions.
How organisations think, decide and act, and the agent infrastructure that lets AI do real work inside them. Pinnal, my facilitation platform, is where this gets tested.
Writer, mentor, and GDG Coimbatore organiser. I work across product, design, AI and applied psychology.
The tools will change by the time you graduate. What investors evaluate will not.
Is it real, painful and urgent for someone specific?
Is the opportunity big enough to matter if you win?
What proof exists that anyone wants this today?
Why are you the ones who will crack it?
How much, for what milestones, on what terms?
“Investors fund lines, not dots.”
Earn the next 3 minutes
Make them feel the pain
Show the inevitable answer
Traction, demo, numbers
Specific, confident, costed
Applied psychology, not decoration. Persuasion has a structure: attention, tension, resolution, commitment.
Grab attention immediately with an undeniable truth or problem.
“Give me 10 opening hooks for this pitch — stats, questions, and one-line stories. Rank them by surprise.”
Define the specific pain point you are solving and why it needs urgent attention.
“Rewrite my problem statement to name one specific user, quantify their pain, and argue why now.”
Five components. Miss one, and an investor will find the hole for you.
Who exactly hurts — one persona, not “everyone”
What they are trying to do and cannot
The impact, quantified in time, money or risk
What they do today — proof the pain is real
Why now — what changed in market or technology
[user] struggles to [goal], costing them [time / money / risk]. Today they [workaround] — and [what changed] makes this urgent.
“Final-year CSE students struggle to tailor resumes for every company, losing 3+ weeks of placement prep. Today they copy-paste in Word — and AI screening has made generic resumes worthless.”
Introduce your product and explain your unique value proposition.
“Here are my features and 3 competitors. Write my UVP as: the only ___ that ___ for ___.”
Showcase early proof of concept, revenue, or customer growth.
“Here's everything that has happened since we started: [list]. Which of these count as traction, and how do I frame them?”
Be transparent about the funding you need and what milestones it will achieve.
“I'm raising [amount] to achieve [milestones]. Break down use of funds and stress-test whether the math holds.”
| Idea / Pre-seed Angels · incubators |
Seed Angels · seed funds |
Series A Institutional VCs |
Growth Late-stage funds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Story | You and your insight — why this founder, why this problem | Early proof — real users want this and keep coming back | A repeatable engine — it works, here is the machine | Market leadership — the numbers do the talking |
| The ask funds | Small cheque to build an MVP and find first proof | Runway to reach product-market fit and first revenue | Fuel to scale what is already proven: growth and team | Capital for expansion, new markets, new lines |
Investors score evidence, and the evidence they expect is stage-specific. Vision-only at Series A, or metrics cosplay at pre-seed, signals you don't know the game.
TAM / SAM / SOM drafts with sources you then verify
Map the landscape and your wedge in minutes
Unit economics and projection structures to refine
Thesis-fit, portfolio conflicts, warm-intro paths
Simulate the sceptical VC before you meet one
Ten versions of every headline, keep the sharpest
The best pitch in the world fails in front of the wrong fund. Research is the pitch before the pitch.
“I'm a [stage] [sector] startup in India raising [amount]. List 10 funds or angels that match, with their thesis and a recent relevant investment.”
Every claim has a number and every number has a source. Not a dashboard on every slide.
“Here are all my metrics: [paste]. Pick the three numbers that best prove traction, say what chart each should be, and flag any number an investor would doubt.”
“You are a sceptical seed-stage VC in India reviewing this pitch: [pitch]. Ask me the 5 hardest questions you would ask in a partner meeting, rank them by how likely each is to kill the deal, and tell me which slide should answer each one.”
Role + context + concrete deliverable + ranking. That is the whole craft of prompting.
Come back with one startup idea you're willing to have torn apart, real or invented. Pairs are fine. One device per pair is enough.
Real or invented. A problem you have personally seen counts.
Draft it, red-team it, rebuild it, then find your investor.
A few of you deliver to the room. Yes, out loud.
“I'm building [idea] for [specific user]. Write a one-line pitch and a 3-sentence problem statement. Be concrete: name the user, the pain, and what they do about it today.”
You get a v1 pitch, deliberately imperfect. That's the raw material.
“You are a sceptical seed-stage VC. Attack this pitch: [paste v1]. Give me the 5 hardest questions, rank them by deal-killing power, and say what evidence would satisfy you on each.”
You get your pitch's weakest points, before an investor finds them for you.
“Rewrite my pitch to survive those questions: [paste Q&A]. Then compress it into a 60-second elevator pitch — spoken words, plain language, ending with a specific ask.”
You get a pitch that has already survived one hostile review. Now rehearse it.
“Based on this pitch: [paste v2]. Describe my ideal investor — stage, sector, cheque size, geography — and list 5 things I must research about any fund before I email them.”
You get a target profile instead of a spray-and-pray list. Research beats volume.
Applause is mandatory. Feedback is one strength plus one sharpen, from the room, then from me.
Conviction, traction and clarity are still yours to build.
Siddarth Kengadaran
theproductguy.xyz
linkedin.com/in/siddarthkengadaran
Writing, talks, and everything I'm building — in public. Questions now, or connect on LinkedIn.