You're sitting across from a founder:

Pre-seed round. No revenue. No retention metrics. Nothing.

At this stage, you're not evaluating the company. You're evaluating the founder's brain.

And two questions will help you sort signal from noise pretty quickly.

Question 1: Who is your customer?

This sounds basic. It's not.

Most founders fumble this badly - they'll say something like, "Our ICP are women ages 20-45." But that's not a customer persona...that's a census checkbox.

A good answer: "Women ages 20-45 who work in banking, make six figures, and have no time.”

A great answer: "A woman that works in banking, eats lunch at her desk, makes six figures, reads Benzinga for fun, uses apps A, B, and C, and currently solves this problem by doing D, E, and F."

The great answer describes a real person. Someone the founder could play in a musical. (Seriously).

The best founders become besties with their potential customers. They know everything about them and even invite them to Thanksgiving dinner.

Question 2: How will you find your first customers?

Now, you're not asking them to predict which channels will scale.

You're asking whether they've thought about it, and ideally, tried something.

A good answer: "I'll send referral codes to people in this zip code because I gave out 10 at the train station and they worked."

A great answer: "I'm already acquiring customers. Spent $20 so far, drove 40 people to our waitlist through direct mail. Converts at 20%."

Will those economics hold at scale? (Probably not, as costs almost always go up.)

But the point is: this founder is already running experiments and measuring results.

What this means for your next deal

At Hustle Fund, the best founders we’ve backed have all been incredibly metrics-driven.

Not just at Series B, but from Day 1.

That means understanding how much it costs for someone to learn about you, how much it costs to convert them, and how much you make on them over time.

As an angel, THAT should be far more important to you than TAM slides and five-year projections.

And, also pay attention to whether they know their numbers. Not perfect spreadsheets, just a general awareness of how money moves through their business.

Founders who nail this are ahead of 99% of the decks we see.

Those are the bets worth making.