DISCOVER YOUR PREMISE.
WE GO WAY BEYOND YOUR PITCH
This questionnaire finds your company's central argument, or Premise.
A Premise doesn't live in the pitch. It lives in your backstory, your failures, your mentors, the choices you made when nobody was watching, the moment you almost quit. It's in the details you remember and the details you forgot you remembered.
We’re not trying to be your therapist, we’re looking for a through line. A Premise is a pattern, and patterns show up in multiple versions of the same story.
BEFORE YOU START...
Six rules. They matter more than the questions.
Don't polish. First draft, typos in. The cleaned-up version is the one we can't use — that's the version you'd say on a panel.
Put us in the room. Time of day, who was there, what got said. A summary tells us what you think, but a scene tells us who you are.
Kill your adjectives. If you wrote "passionate about quality," delete it and write what you actually did and what it cost.
Past tense, always. Don't tell us what you'd do. Tell us what you did. What you'd do for a million dollars is a fantasy. What you turned down last March is a fact.
No length rules. One answer can run a page. The next can be four words. Both are fine. You also don’t have to do this in one sitting. Come back to the ones you skipped.
Skipping is allowed. If a question does nothing for you, leave it. If a question makes you uncomfortable, that's the one.
NOBODY ELSE READS THIS. Not your team, not your investors, not the internet. The only output is a one or two sentence Premise. Be honest, be vulnerable, be vulgar.
PART 1: the setup