When founders commission research before a raise, the instinct is almost always the same: build the strongest possible case. Prove the market is large, the demand is real, the opportunity is significant. It feels like the right preparation. In most professional contexts, it would be.
But investors aren’t evaluating an opportunity. They’re evaluating a risk profile.
That’s not a subtle distinction. It changes what research needs to do. An opportunity case tries to show how attractive the future could be: how large the market is, how much demand exists, how quickly the business could grow. A risk profile tries to show how clearly the founder understands how to enter that market, what could go wrong along the way, and why they believe it won’t. Those are different questions, and research designed for one rarely does the job of the other.
The founders who get this tend to approach research differently. They don’t use it to build a case. They use it to test whether the case is actually true. And investors, who have seen enough pitch decks to know the difference between evidence and advocacy, tend to notice.
Prove less. More convincingly.
The instinct to sell a good-news story is understandable. You’ve built something, you believe in it, and you need to convince a room of sceptical people to back it with real money. So the result is a study designed to prove potential: big market size, high openness and consideration, strong brand appeal. Each question feels justified on its own. Together they produce a dataset that lacks the substance needed to inspire confidence. What it signals to an investor, without intending to, is that the founder hasn’t yet worked out what they need to prove.
If you accept that investors are evaluating a risk profile, your research objectives become much more focused. You’re not trying to demonstrate public support or improve on an idea. You’re trying to address the fundamentals: the two or three assumptions that, if wrong, could make the product fail, and the investment not worth taking.
That’s not always obvious to a founder who is — and has to be — a staunch defender of their idea. One of the more useful things an experienced research partner can bring to the scoping conversation is helping identify the assumptions that have become invisible. The benefit isn’t just a better research programme. It’s a founder who understands exactly what their story depends on, what evidence supports it, and where investors are most likely to challenge it.
In practice that often means telling founders to spend less, not more. A focused study on the market that matters most to your investor is worth more than broad but thin coverage across five. If you’re raising US money and can demonstrate US traction, that’s where the evidence needs to be convincing. Part of what we do is help founders kill their darlings — the questions that feel essential until you examine what they actually support.
Researching behaviour, not appetite
One reason founders end up with weaker arguments is that they focus on the product rather than the behaviour.
The natural question is: do people like this idea? The more useful question is: what are people currently trying to get done, why isn’t their existing solution good enough and what will it take for them to adopt a new one?
Investors know that most new products don’t fail because people dislike them. They fail because people don’t change their behaviour. Stated interest is easy to generate. Actual switching is hard. The gap between the two is where most investment risk lives.
This is why we spend less time measuring interest and more time understanding friction. What are people doing today? What frustrates them about it? What finally pushes them to switch? What makes them stay with an imperfect solution even when something better exists? Those questions tend to produce more useful evidence because they reveal the forces that drive adoption, and the barriers that might stop it.
This is the logic behind Jobs-to-be-Done thinking, and it’s one of the most useful frames we use when designing research for founders preparing to raise. Not as a formal methodology, but as a way of making sure the questions we’re asking are about behaviour and reality rather than hypothetical appetite. And because those questions get closer to the actual conditions for adoption, they also get closer to where the real investment risk sits.
Evidence that holds up
Investors are human. A striking number opens the door, creates appetite, makes someone lean in.
But investors are also trained sceptics who will pull the thread on anything that looks too good. Research that can’t survive that scrutiny does more damage than no research at all.
Which points to a simple test worth applying to any pitch research. Does it excite: is there a concrete, specific number that make an investor’s pay attention? Does it hold up: is the demand rooted in genuine need rather than hypothetical interest? Does it anticipate the hard question: have you looked for the weaknesses in your own case, and do you have answers?
For example, “74% of current banking customers said they would consider a new digital bank with lower fees” sounds encouraging, but stated interest tells us very little about whether people are dissatisfied enough with their existing bank to move, and almost nothing about the trust, effort and inertia that might prevent them from doing so.
Most pitch research passes the first test. Fewer pass the second. Almost none are designed to pass the third. That’s the gap between a credible pitch and a compelling one.
Research as a signal
There’s one more reason rigorous research matters during a raise. The research itself becomes a signal.
A founder who commissions independent research to stress-test their own assumptions is showing something about how they think. Not just that they’re prepared, but that they’re willing to look for weaknesses to ensure success and engage with uncertainty rather than paper over it. In a room full of decks that all tell the same optimistic story, that quality of thinking might just set you apart.
Essentially, the best pitch research isn’t really designed to support a pitch. It’s designed to discover what’s true.
At Made with Insight, we partner with startups across the full innovation journey, from needs identification through to pricing strategy. That includes helping founders and early-stage teams build the evidence around the questions investors are actually asking, focused on the assumptions that matter most.
Ready to build a stronger case? Let’s talk. charlotte.paris@madewithinsight.com