The ten checks investors run before they ever meet you

Founders imagine due diligence as something that happens after interest. A partner likes the pitch, then the checking begins.

It's the reverse. The checking is how interest is formed. In the minutes after your link is opened — the deck, the site, the intro email — a fast, unglamorous checklist runs. Not a committee. A skim. And the skim has a structure you can prepare for, because it's roughly the same everywhere:

1. Problem clarity. Can they repeat your problem statement to a colleague after one read? If they'd have to paraphrase vaguely, the meeting never happens.
2. Traction evidence. One real metric, with a number and a date. Not "growing fast."
3. Team. Who are you, what did you build before, where can they verify it in one click?
4. Business model. Who pays, for what, how much. Written down, not implied.
5. Market sizing. A TAM they could challenge — and you could defend.
6. The deck. Current, sendable today, not "after one more pass."
7. Data room. Could you share it within the hour of being asked?
8. Legal basics. Incorporation and a cap table without surprises.
9. Financial model. An 18-month view with assumptions visible.
10. The ask. Round, range, use of funds. Founders who can't say it precisely look like founders who haven't thought about it.

None of these checks measure whether your startup is good. They measure whether you're legible — whether a stranger with fifty tabs open can understand and verify you fast. Plenty of good startups fail the skim and never get to show they're good.

The useful part: every check is binary, and every check is fixable in days, not months. That's exactly what our Investor-Readiness Score grades — the same ten checks, computed automatically from your listing, each failure mapped to the free StartupKit tool that closes it.

Run the skim on yourself before an investor does. It's free, and unlike the investor, it tells you what it found.