The Diligence Story Test
An investor is going to call your customers. Will they tell the same story your deck does?
Twelve questions, six minutes. Find the gap between what you pitch and what your customers say, before diligence finds it for you.
Every founder is selling in two rooms at once. In one, the customer decides whether to buy. In the other, the investor decides whether to fund. Most companies furnish one room properly and hope the other takes care of itself.
The gap between them stays invisible right up until diligence, when an investor does reference calls and hears something different from what you pitched. This test finds the gap while you can still do something about it.
The Diligence Story Test
Twelve questions. About six minutes.
An investor who is serious about you will call your customers. Not to check that you exist, but to hear how they describe the value you deliver. If what they say does not match what your deck says, that gap becomes the story of your diligence process.
This is twelve questions. It takes about six minutes. It will not tell you how to fix anything. It will tell you where the gap is.
Your score
0 / 24
The point is not the number, it is which section you score worst in, because that tells you whether the problem is the customer story, the investor translation, or the gap between them.
Wherever you landed, one question is worth sitting with: if an investor called your three best customers this afternoon, would they describe the same value your deck does?
Most founders have never asked it. It is also the exact thing diligence is designed to find out.
I’m Allise Dickson. I position B2B finance and tech companies for a Series A. If anything here landed uncomfortably, I’m happy to talk it through: book 30 minutes.