I am going to tell you what is wrong with this
Most pitches open with a strength. I am going to open with our worst number, because I have sat on your side of this table and I know exactly what you are doing while someone talks at you. You are not listening for reasons to invest. You are listening for the thing they are hiding.
So let me save us both twenty minutes.
The weakness
Our retention at month six is 61%. The category average is 74%. That is our worst number and it is the number I want to talk about, because it is the whole company in a single figure.
Here is what is actually happening. Customers love the product for eleven weeks. In week twelve, the person who championed it internally moves teams, and nothing in our product survives that. We built for the individual and we are being paid by the organisation.
That is a real problem. It is not a marketing problem. It is an architecture problem, and it has a name: we have no team-level object.
The plan and the cost
Fixing it takes two quarters and most of our engineering capacity. It will slow our feature velocity to roughly a third of what it is now, and I am telling you that because you will see it in the numbers next quarter and I would rather you heard it from me first.
What we get for that trade is a product that survives the org chart. Our estimate — and it is an estimate, with the assumptions on page nine — is month-six retention above 80% within three quarters of shipping.
Why I am telling you this
Because if I hide the 61%, you will spend the rest of this meeting hunting, and you will find it, and then every other number I have given you becomes suspect. Trust does not decay linearly. It collapses in a single moment and takes the whole deck with it.
If I hand you the 61% myself, we get to spend this meeting on the only question that matters: is the fix worth the two quarters?
The ask
We are raising to fund exactly this. If you believe the diagnosis, we should talk. If you think the diagnosis is wrong, tell me now — I would rather be corrected by someone who has read page nine than funded by someone who has not.