Founders don't quit

Hey Founders 👋

The community has been busy, and this edition brings you a front-row seat to the action. We’ve got a great before-and-after deck teardown from a recent Community Pitch, hard-won pitch advice from the person who’s hosted every single one of them, two founder spotlights, and a testimonial that honestly made us proud to run this community. Let’s get into it.

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HydraNova Labs had their Community Pitch on March 18th. The company is building what they describe as the biological infrastructure layer for next-generation agriculture, using automation and a stem cell cloning process to reset plant biology and eliminate accumulated stress, disease, and degradation. Think of it as a clean room for plants, not a plant company.

Ben had detailed feedback across the deck, but two slide revisions in particular are worth pulling out as lessons for anyone building or refining their pitch.

Before: The original slide made strong claims about HydraNova's edge. It called out high-volume manual labs as being limited by 90% labor costs, flagged the legacy risk of manual propagation compounding biological variability, and stated the automation-native architecture delivers 5x production density. All solid positioning points. But it was entirely text-based. If you're an investor scanning a deck, you're reading a paragraph and trying to mentally map who the competitors are and where this company fits. That's too much cognitive work for a single slide.

After: Ben specifically asked for a Gartner-style quadrant chart with competitor logos. The revised slide delivers exactly that. It maps the competitive landscape across two axes: "Ability to Execute" and "Completeness of Vision." Legacy incumbents like Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva, and BASF sit in the lower left as high-execution but low-vision players locked into commodity seed economics and manual infrastructure. Next-gen peers like Conception Nurseries, Klonetics Plant Sciences, and Phinest Cannabis are positioned as visionaries who offer high-quality clean stock but lack HydraNova's specific combination of automation-native production density and proprietary 3N genetics. HydraNova sits alone in the leader quadrant.

The slide also includes a competitive moat comparison table listing each competitor alongside their technology focus and primary weakness relative to HydraNova. Now an investor can absorb the entire competitive landscape in seconds rather than reading through text and mentally assembling the picture themselves.

The principle: If your competition slide doesn't have a visual framework, you're making investors do assembly work in their heads. A quadrant, matrix, or landscape map with logos lets someone absorb your positioning at a glance. The text supports the visual. It doesn't replace it. And as Ben pointed out during the session, including recognizable logos like Bayer immediately anchors the scale of the market you're competing in.

Before: These were two separate slides. One covered unit economics: COGS under $3.00, EBITDA breakeven at roughly 650K plants per month, and under 24-month payback, with a production and financial growth projections chart. The other covered the business model: tiered pricing from $6 to $60 per plantlet, blended average selling price of roughly $15, and gross margins of 88 to 92%, with a visual showing the tiered pricing structure. Both slides contained good, investor-relevant information. But they were telling two halves of the same financial story in two different places.

After: Ben's feedback was direct: combine them. The revised version puts unit economics on the left with the growth projections chart, and the business model on the right with the tiered pricing visual. A single tagline ties it together at the bottom: "Scales like advanced manufacturing, not agriculture." One slide, one financial narrative. The investor sees cost structure, pricing model, margins, and growth trajectory all in one view without flipping back and forth.

The principle: If two slides are answering the same fundamental investor question ("How does this business make money and how does it scale?"), they probably belong on one page. This isn't about cutting content. It's about making your financial story scannable. An investor should never have to mentally reconnect slides that tell one story.

And there is so much more, so be sure to watch the full Community Pitch.

Adam Meek has hosted 100% of The Founders' Group's Community Pitches over the past nine months. That's a front-row seat to what works and what doesn't when founders take the stage. He recently dropped some hard-earned insights in Discord that are worth pulling out for everyone.

Tailor your deck to your audience. Adam pointed out that you can run your data and research through AI tools to create a deck layout specifically tailored to the VC firms you're targeting. He shared his own experience of building a custom deck for firms whose thesis aligned with his company. It's not about gaming the system. It's about showing investors you understand what they care about and framing your story accordingly.

Keep it short. Over nine months of pitches, only five have come in under 10 minutes. A couple were under five. His rule of thumb: if any part of your script is longer than three sentences, compress it to two. The goal is to control the narrative by leaving room for questions. You want a Q&A, not a lecture. As Adam put it: it should be Q&A you want, not verbal vomit.

Jump into the conversation

We couldn’t pick just one this edition. Two founders, two paths, both proving what this community is about.

Here's a question most pet owners have thought about but few have solved for: what happens to your pet if you can't make it home? Maybe you live alone. Maybe you're traveling. Maybe something unexpected happens. Without a clear system for someone to step in, pets can go without care for an unknown amount of time. Emergencies don't send calendar invites.

TailSafe, currently live as a Minimum Viable Product, is designed as a simple and reliable safety net. The app prompts a daily "I'm OK" check-in from the user. If they don't respond, TailSafe automatically alerts a designated emergency contact with instructions to check on their pets. It's not trying to replace pet care services or vet platforms. It fills the gap for the moments you don't plan for.

Shannon's path to launch is one that many non-technical founders will recognize. Over three years, she worked through three separate developers. The first disappeared mid-build. The second overpromised and underdelivered, leading to termination. The third finally brought the MVP to life. Instead of giving up at any of those inflection points, Shannon stayed committed to getting the product out the door, proving that persistence and patience are sometimes the most underrated founder traits.

TailSafe launched just over a week ago and is in its earliest stage of user growth. Shannon's immediate focus is a local beta rollout targeting 50 to 100 paying users to validate the MVP before seeking external funding. Early feedback has been consistently strong, particularly during direct conversations with pet owners at local parks and small businesses. The emotional resonance is clearly there. Now the challenge is translating that into a repeatable acquisition channel.

Shannon is currently leading growth efforts herself through grassroots distribution, from local partnerships to direct in-person outreach in her community.

TailSafe was built using off-the-shelf development tools, which got the MVP to market but limits long-term flexibility and scalability. Rather than pursuing a large upfront raise for a full engineering rebuild, Shannon is exploring how modern AI tools can support a native rebuild more efficiently, shifting capital needs toward growth, distribution, and customer acquisition instead.

When she's not building, Shannon works full-time as a Chief of Staff at a healthtech startup, serves as captain of her bocce team (Mission Imbocceball), volunteers in her local community, and spends weekends hiking with her two golden retrievers, Zoe and Luna.

At its core, TailSafe reflects a founder who identified a deeply human problem, validated it in the real world, and is building a solution people trust in the moments they never saw coming.

Caleb Gipson, founder of a growing e-commerce and brick-and-mortar brand Midwest Aquatic Suppliers, recently closed his full funding round with direct support from The Founders' Group. According to Caleb, the TFG team went beyond introductions. They brought the right investors to the table, guided the team through the process, and helped get the deal across the finish line in just a few weeks.

His takeaway was that the experience felt efficient, hands-on, and aligned with where his company is heading. For any founder looking to raise capital without wasting time, Caleb's experience is a proof point for what this community can do when it works.