The question before the pitch deck

Every founder who asks me for fundraising advice gets the same question back.

Most of them struggle to answer it.

The question isn't about your deck, your narrative, or your target investor list. It's simpler than that: what do you actually want this to become?

Exit or lifestyle business. That's it.

It sounds philosophical. It isn't. In a market with a limited number of customers, this question is structural. It determines your capital strategy, your hiring philosophy, your burn rate tolerance, and which investors actually belong on your cap table. Get it wrong and you spend years optimizing for an outcome you never consciously chose.

At Perch, we never sat down and said "we're building this to exit." We just assumed it. That assumption quietly shaped everything: how much we raised, how fast we tried to grow, how we thought about profitability. For eight years we built toward an end game we never named out loud.

It luckily worked out. The acquisition by Catapult was a real outcome and I'm proud of what we built. But I'll be honest: a lot of that was luck. The product was good enough to survive the ambiguity. That's not a strategy I'd recommend.

The acquirer pool in sports tech is small. There are only so many companies with the balance sheet and the strategic motivation to buy you. If exit is actually your goal, you need to build a business that makes that outcome likely while preserving enough founder upside to make the pain worth it. Raising capital aggressively to chase growth might feel like the right move. But in a constrained market, it can quietly reduce your options rather than expand them. Raise too much and any reasonable acquisition stops leaving real upside for founders and employees.

The flip side is real though. Sports is a genuinely good market to build a lifestyle business in. Sticky customers, annual contracts, high retention, and relationships that compound over years. The people who work in sports tend to stay in sports. If you love the market, love working for yourself, and want to build something that runs well and returns real money without needing an acquirer to validate it, that path is not a consolation prize. It's a choice. More founders should make it on purpose.

So when a founder asks me for fundraising advice and then goes quiet when I flip the question, I'm not trying to be difficult.

If you can't answer what you want this to become, you're not ready to optimize how you get there. Every fundraising decision is downstream of that one answer. The deck, the round size, the investor profile, all of it.

You don't need certainty. But you need honesty. Especially about the market you're actually in.