We Didn't Pitch With a Deck

"We didn't pitch with a deck. We pitched with proof."

Recently, we had a conversation with Ed Keng — investor at Spark Labs by Arc Invest and Chief Strategy Officer of startups.com — who shared why What's Good caught their attention, and why they'd invest without ever seeing a pitch deck.

"[They have] contracts with entire cities. You know how hard it is to sell to a city? … it's a year-long contract, no fuss no muss."

Here's the part they didn't see:

We didn't start by targeting governments. We started by solving a problem in public — generating 30M impressions over two years as we built, iterated, and proved proof of concept.

That visibility created champions. People who saw what we were building and said, "Have you considered working with tourism boards? DMOs? Cities?"

When we pivoted into destination marketing, we didn't walk in cold. We had:

• A validated product
• Revenue from day one (advertising in our ecosystem)
• Partners who'd already been watching us build

The contracts came because we'd already proven distribution worked.

"Development is easy now. Distribution is the battleground." — Ed Keng

That insight is exactly right — and it's the philosophy we've built the company around from the beginning.

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