Maria Pirson

"Startups are prone to falling in love with their own ideas. This bias is natural—to become emotionally attached to what you're building. Even experienced founders and brilliant teams often fall into this trap: mixing what they want to create with what the market actually needs, wasting time and money in the process.

"As an external consultant, my role is to provide counterbalance, pulling them back toward market reality."

"I sometimes joke that nobody likes working with a market researcher. While that's not necessarily true, from time to time I have to be the bearer of bad news. When data reveals that efforts have become sunk costs—that the target segment is chosen wrong, the users do not really have this pain, the cost of acquisition is twice as high as their lifetime value, the TAM is too small and you don't have anywhere to scale, etc.—founders aren't always ready to accept it. This reaction is grief. I get it. But the market either is there or it isn't exist. You can't negotiate reality, and in a startup, limited resources make costly mistakes more dangerous."

"Creating a compelling pitch deck is like the fable of stone soup. It seems simple: just compile slides with market data. But when you start talking to founders and it turns out, even their vision of the business is different, without them realizing it. We map the business logic, and gaps appear. We test assumptions, and they crumble. I sit with founders to harmonize their vision, revisit flawed assumptions, and sometimes it needs to rebuild entire aspects of the business—all to create a viable, data-driven pitch deck. It's not about making a PDF. The PDF is just the stone in that soup."

"Founders sometimes say, "We need to agree with investors on market size." But this is a misconception - the market either exists or it doesn't. 'I'm currently raising investments, I've already prepared the investment presentation, I just need to draw this damn slide for the investor where I'll show the Total Addressable Market.'' The estimates should be reasonable primarily for you, so that you understand, whether you can build a business here."