One User’s Voice Rewrote Our Pitch Deck

I’d been working on our IR materials since the weekend — a 13-slide scenario, deciding what each slide should say. One slide kept bothering me: the customer slide.

The slide explaining “who fecit’s customer is” was full of plausible sentences. “People who work hard but whose results don’t follow.” “Teams that repeat the same mistakes.” Sentences you nod along to — with one problem: I had made them all up. No actual customer ever said them. They were sentences I imagined a customer might say. A novel titled Persona.

I deleted all of it. Which left a hole.

One comment

That same day, a comment landed on a Threads post of mine — from someone who had tried to root Notion into their company.

“It was a tool that got more fun and more useful the more you learned — but the reason we gave it up was that very learning. … New members refused to learn it, and stopped sharing into the system. … Task management matters for individuals, but it has to add up to the whole picture and work for the company too … and you can’t force people to sit down and learn it. It was simply frustrating.”

I knew the moment I read it. This was it. It stated the problem I’m trying to solve more precisely than any sentence I had written.

What makes it powerful is that it never puts Notion down. It starts by admitting the tool gets more fun the more you learn. And then says the reason they gave up was the same thing — the learning. Not that the tool is bad, but that even a great tool collapses inside an organization if it must be learned before it can be used. The moment a new member refuses to learn, sharing stops, and the whole picture disappears.

What changed in the deck

I made that voice the body of the customer slide. Instead of my descriptions, an actual user’s words state the problem.

Then the other slides re-formed around it, one after another.

The solution slide became exactly the thought I had when I started building fecit — “building your own forms means learning as you go, so just build it well and let people simply use it.” That was the founding idea all along; the deck had been dressed in fancier words.

The competition slide now praises Notion properly. At first I’d slipped qualifiers in after the compliment. I deleted them all. “A freeform canvas where you can build anything — it gets stronger the more you learn.” Full stop. The edge of the comparison is a single line: to use these tools properly, everyone using them must understand a lot of features. The compliment has to be genuine for that one line to carry weight.

The expansion slide now states fecit’s original design goal verbatim — offer a service built for one person, familiar to that one person, then connect it to the group with interfaces that suit users and managers each. The goal: no separate system for new members to learn.

What I learned

The more plausible an invented customer description is, the more dangerous it is. Plausible sentences don’t get verified, and business plans get stacked on top of unverified sentences. The real voice was awkward, long, and unpolished — and that awkwardness was the proof it was real.

And deleting the sentences that put competitors down actually sharpened our position. The more genuinely you admit Notion is a great tool, the heavier the question becomes: then why does it collapse inside organizations? fecit is the tool I’m building to answer that question.

The finished deck is public here. I intend to keep building this in the open.