Pre-fund
Due Diligence.
Founders get very good at answering product questions. Two meetings in, a rehearsed answer and a real one sound the same.
An outside read on product capability, inside your diligence window.
Product due diligence · The deal seat · Before close
When it applies
Term sheet issued, before close
- A term sheet is out, and the only product read on it is your own.
- You have been building conviction for weeks, which is the job, and also why you are the least neutral reader of it in the room.
- The technical read came back clean. It was never going to answer whether the roadmap is coherent.
- The company is pre-product-leadership, and the founder is absorbing the function. That is normal at this stage, and it is not the same as it being handled.
The seam in the panel
What the diligence you already buy does not cover
Technical DD
Architecture, code quality, scalability
Misses: Whether the roadmap is coherent
Commercial DD
Market, customers, pipeline
Misses: Whether the team can hold a direction under sales pressure
Financial and legal DD
Numbers, cap table, exposure
Misses: Product capability entirely
Nobody on that panel answers whether the team knows what it is building. If product capability is the thing most likely to be missing, and nobody assesses it before the cheque, it is the cheapest failure to have prevented.
Roughly four in five companies in a seed portfolio we classified had no empowered senior product owner. Every one of them had been through somebody's diligence.
What we do
Sit with the founding team inside your diligence window and read one thing: can they build the right thing, and keep building it. We push past the first answer, which is where a real product decision and a rehearsed one separate.
What it produces
A written read on product capability: whether this team knows what they are building, whether the roadmap is coherent, and whether they can hold a direction under sales pressure. Plus what would have to be true post-close.
What it isn't
Not a technical audit of the stack and not a market study. Those are the diligence you already buy, and they are good at what they do. This is the seat next to them, not a replacement for either.
What we listen for
A prepared answer survives one question, not the third
The reasoning reconstructs
Ask why three times and it holds its shape. A rehearsed answer changes shape, because there was never a structure under it.
They can produce the counterfactual
What would have changed this decision. Someone who actually decided knows what nearly tipped it. Someone reciting an outcome does not.
The story is messy
Real decisions have a wrong turn in them. A clean narrative is usually a narrative.
The hierarchy is stable
What matters most stays the same across three unrelated questions. Performed answers reorder priorities to fit whatever was asked.
They remember being wrong
Specifically, recently, and without being asked to.
This is not a checklist you can run yourself, and that is the point. Any founder worth backing can answer the questions. They separate underneath, in whether there is a structure behind the answer or a story on top of it.
Who does the reading
Raphaël gave these answers himself before he read them: product leadership at Horangi, MVP through to the Bitdefender acquisition, and Google before that. The seat he is reading for is the one he sat in.
What you are committing to
Typical shape, not a fixed package
How long
Inside your window. A diligence process runs weeks, and this is scoped to close before it does.
Your time
An introduction to the founding team. After that it runs without you until the read comes back.
What you keep
A written read on product capability, and what would have to be true after close.
Commissioned by the deal seat, on the deal's diligence line, alongside legal, financial and technical. Scope and fee are set against the window you are working to, so both start with the deal rather than with a package.
On the record
“… He doesn't jump to solutions. He gets to the crux of the problem first, builds solid hypotheses, and does the foundational research to back them up. The rigor was real. …”
Deal in front of you?
Tell us the window and the shape of the company. We will come back with what a read would cover and what it would cost, or tell you it is not worth it on this one.
Worth making contact before you need it. A diligence window is weeks, which is not long enough to find someone and work out whether to trust them.
No obligation either way. We will come back with a tailored answer, or tell you it is not us.
Or write to us directly at contact@sha-rp.com.
Also for funds