JStarted by Jonathan (AXIS Launch)
The structured-prompt thread for this category. The community rule first, because this category runs against a hard policy line: no securities offerings on-platform — this thread is for refining how you describe your raise, not for soliciting investment. Anything that reads as an offer ("invest in my app, $10k minimum") breaks Rule 2 of the Community Guidelines (/legal/community-guidelines) and is removed, however good the app. What's welcome: the pitch paragraph itself, workshopped.
The format
To workshop a paragraph, start a thread on GitHub Discussions (the link is at the foot of this page) with exactly these five lines — the same skeleton as Layer 4 of the angel-outreach thread, because the artifact you refine here is the one you'll send there:
Product: one sentence — user, task, what changes for them.
Numbers: three, with dates. Include your weakest relevant one. (The revenue-quality thread's six reads are the menu.)
Accumulation: one sentence on what compounds — your wrapper-question answer, compressed.
Raise shape: amount, instrument, and the bottleneck it converts (the MRR thread's question 1 — "every dollar has a job title").
The ask for this thread: which line you want pressure on.
How feedback works here
Feedback should answer the stated ask first — this is a workshop, not a talent show. Feedback standard matches the rest of the platform: specific beats encouraging ("your accumulation line claims a flywheel but names no loop" helps; "sounds great" is noise and gets moderated as such). And the disclosure rule applies in both directions: if you're an investor giving feedback, say so; if you're a founder whose feedback is also market positioning against a competitor's post, that context matters and omitting it is the offense.
Why one paragraph
Because the paragraph is the actual instrument of a micro-raise — the angel-outreach thread's data is that it either earns the meeting or nothing does — and because the compression is diagnostic: founders who can't get the raise into five lines usually have a raise-shape problem, not a writing problem. The workshop surfaces which.
A worked example is pinned in the first reply — it's an illustration, marked as such, not a real company.
Start with the line you trust least — that is usually the one to put in the ask.
The worked example — an illustration for format reference, not a real company or a real raise:
Product: Dispatch-note automation for small HVAC firms — techs talk, the system writes the ticket, the office stops re-typing.
Numbers: $3.1k MRR (July 2026); 4.2% monthly revenue churn (trailing 3 months); 71% honest gross margin (frontier-routed, pre-optimization — worksheet in the margin thread).
Accumulation: Every corrected ticket trains our trade-specific extraction evals — 14k corrections banked, error rate down by a third since March.
Raise shape: $40k on a standard post-money SAFE, converting one bottleneck: the field-service-platform integration that three 20-tech firms have named as their purchase condition.
Ask: pressure the accumulation line — is 14k corrections a loop or a pile?
Note what the example does: the weak number is in there (71% with its cause), the bottleneck has named evidence, and the ask invites the hard question instead of hiding from it. That's the bar — and the answer to its own ask, for the record, is 'a loop only if the evals gate deployments; otherwise a pile.' Which is exactly the kind of answer this thread exists to produce.
Policy note in advance, because this thread walks the platform's sharpest line and the moderation should be predictable rather than surprising: the test we apply is direction of solicitation. Describing your raise to get feedback on the description — allowed, that's the thread. Inviting readers to join the raise — removed, that's an offering, and neither this platform nor this thread is a registered venue for one. The gray zone (a reader contacts you elsewhere, unprompted, wanting in) is legal territory with real rules that depend on jurisdiction and how you proceed — take it to counsel, and note that the few-hundred-dollar-review advice from the red-flags thread was never more load-bearing than at the moment money actually moves. We built this workshop right against the line because that's where it's useful; the line itself doesn't move.
Follow-up question: "My numbers are pre-revenue — waitlist and pilot usage only. Is this thread for me or do I wait?"
Write it now, with the numbers you have — dated pilot-usage figures, retention within the pilot cohort, waitlist-to-activation conversion — and let the format do its diagnostic work: pre-revenue paragraphs fail in a specific, fixable way, usually at the raise-shape line, where 'converts the bottleneck' quietly becomes 'funds finding out.' If the workshop pressure reveals that your dollars don't have job titles yet, you've learned the MRR thread's lesson at comment-cost instead of dilution-cost — that's the workshop succeeding, not you failing. And the numbers line has a pre-revenue discipline all its own: 'signups' is not a number investors can price; 'six pilot firms, four in week-8 retention, two asking for invoices' is. If your three best numbers are all activity rather than retention or intent, that's the diagnosis — go build the retention evidence first, and the thread will still be here.
Follow-up question: "How should I handle feedback I disagree with? The workshop format implies I should just take it."
The opposite — pushback is the workshop working, with one discipline attached: disagree by showing the data, in-thread, so the exchange compounds for the next reader. 'Churn feedback noted, but the cohort table says otherwise — here it is' is the ideal workshop reply; it either corrects the feedback or surfaces that your paragraph hid the evidence (also a fix — to the paragraph). What doesn't compound: relitigating taste ('I like my phrasing'), or the silent version where you absorb wrong feedback into a worse paragraph to be agreeable. Community-workshop calibration, honestly stated: community feedback prices at community rates — directionally useful at best, never authoritative — and the revenue-quality and wrapper threads are the house style guide it should be checked against. The investor across a real table is the only feedback that settles anything; this thread exists to make that meeting shorter.