Most venture selection criteria are vague by design. "Strong founder," "large market," "defensible moat" — these tell you almost nothing about what an investor is actually looking for. They're frameworks that protect the investor from being held accountable to a standard rather than criteria that help founders understand whether a conversation is worth having.
We'd rather be specific. Here are the five questions we actually ask about every potential company. They don't cover everything, but they're the five things we'd bet on most.
1. Do you have 10+ years inside this specific vertical?
Domain depth isn't just about knowing the workflow. It's about knowing who the buyers are, what they've been burned by before, which vendors they distrust, and what they'd pay for if it existed. That knowledge takes years to accumulate and is almost impossible to fake in front of a buyer who has it too.
We're not looking for someone who has "studied" a market or consulted in it for two years. We're looking for someone who ran operations in it, managed the people who did, and has enough scar tissue to know exactly where the problems live. The difference in conviction between those two profiles is enormous — and it shows in every customer call, every demo, and every hiring decision the company makes in its first year.
vertical SaaS is won at the detail level. The founder who knows the specific taxonomy of their industry, the difference between the two types of buyers and what each one cares about, the software their customers are already using and hate — that founder has an advantage that can't be acquired with a market research budget.
2. Can you name 10 potential customers and call them next week?
The fastest signal that a problem is worth building toward is that the person building it has a contact list. Not a target account spreadsheet — an actual list of people they've worked with, sold to, or been colleagues with who have this problem right now.
This question is partly about market validation and partly about personal accountability. An operator who can call 10 people next week is someone who has been thinking about this problem seriously for long enough to keep those relationships warm. That same quality — maintaining real relationships in a vertical — is what drives early customer acquisition, design partners, and word-of-mouth referrals at the stage where none of the standard growth channels work.
3. Is the problem specific and painful — not broad and annoying?
"Operations are messy in my industry" is not a product thesis. It's a complaint. Almost every vertical has messy operations. The founder who can't get more specific than that hasn't done the thinking yet.
"Residential plumbing dispatchers lose three hours every day manually reconciling technician job logs with billing because no software connects those two workflows" — that's a product thesis. It names a specific person, a specific time cost, a specific workflow, and a specific gap in existing tooling. A developer reading that description knows roughly what they're building. A buyer reading it either leans in because it's their life or doesn't because it's not — and that clarity is valuable.
Specificity is not a limitation. Broad problems produce broad products that compete with everyone. Specific problems produce defensible products that nobody else is building because they don't know the workflow well enough to see it. Specificity is what creates the moat.
4. Are you ready to go full-time in the next 30 days?
We move fast in Q1 because speed matters more than polish at the zero-to-one stage. The goal of the first quarter is to build something, get it in front of real customers, and find out whether it's valuable. That timeline doesn't work if the founder is checking in on weekends while keeping their existing job.
Studios fail founders who are hedging. The most common version of this is financial — "I need three more months of income before I can make the leap." That's a real constraint and we take it seriously. There are ways to structure a transition that address it. But the version we can't work around is psychological hedging: the founder who uses their day job as protection against being fully committed to the company being real.
If you're not ready to go full-time in 30 days, that's worth examining. Sometimes the right answer is to wait until you are. Sometimes it reveals that the conviction isn't actually there. Either way, knowing is better than hedging.
5. Does this want to be a software company — or a services business?
Some operator problems want to be solved by software. Some want to be solved by a better-run agency. The distinction matters because they produce fundamentally different businesses — different unit economics, different hiring profiles, different growth curves.
The signal we look for: if the core value proposition is "we do this for you," it's probably a services business. If the core value proposition is "here is a tool that makes you dramatically faster at this specific thing," it might be a software company. The test is whether the value scales without proportionally scaling headcount. Software does. Services usually don't, at least not in the early stages.
We're not building agencies. But we're also honest about the fact that some operator ideas are genuinely better as service businesses — and that's not a failure. It's a routing decision. If the path to value in your vertical runs through software, we want to talk. If it runs through operations, there are better partners for that.
What happens when you reach out
Send us two paragraphs about the problem you're working on. Tell us which vertical, what the specific workflow is, and why you're the right person to solve it. We don't need a deck, a financial model, or a formal pitch — just the thesis in plain language.
We respond to every note within 48 hours. If it looks like a fit, we'll set up a 30-minute call. If it's not a fit, we'll tell you why, and if there's someone we think you should talk to instead, we'll make the introduction.