Edited from an email exchange on the ‘London Open Coffee’ Meetup.com group:

1. It’s too long and boring.  Nobody will read it.

2. Your business only works at scale, and you’ve no idea how to get there.

3. You have no experience in the market – e.g. you don’t even know what the trade association is called.

3 1/2 You’ve never delivered a software project before, and you’re outsourcing to an overseas team who only work at night and whose language you don’t even speak. They already despair at your inability to specify your project, and have quoted for something entirely different than what’s in your head. You’ve quoted their time and cost figures verbatim, with no allowance for delays and rework.

4. All your market research is rubbish, and consists of asking people who aren’t even  buyers to lie to you so they don’t hurt your feelings.

5. You’ve assumed you’re going to get 1% of a bazillion dollar market, despite a peasant’s marketing budget and a product nobody even likes.

6. Your financial projections are total drivel, concocted to look good: e.g. everyone pays on time; nobody cancels. You’ve also forgotten to include major costs, such as recruitment. This is all despite realistic figures being readily available from your competitors.

6 1/2 You’ve not structured any of your analysis of the market or competition in a way that anyone else can understand (eg a feature table) , and you’ve not bothered to find or integrate any independent data sources.

7. You clearly don’t understand cost of sales, churn, and other crucial numbers used throughout the industry.

8. Despite the tiny amount of effort required, you’ve not bothered to test your conversion rates, cost per lead or cost per conversion using real traffic sent to a fake sales page.

8 1/2 You have no understanding that there are massive diseconomies of scale as you chase niche traffic in volume (not all fruit is low-hanging).

9. You’ve not noticed that ten other teams, with far more money and connections, are already doing the exact same thing – when a tiny pivot would take you into virgin territory. One of the startups you’re competing with is called ‘Google’.

10. Your team is either just you, or just as bad as you.

10. You don’t realise that a fatal combination of the above blunders makes your idea totally uninvestable. You are therefore a terrible judge of character and of risk. You are consequentially just a dangerous and expensive liability to your own business.

10. You will only be able to attract third rate investors, who add no value to your shambles of a project – massively worsening team risk.