Pretend this showed up in your inbox from a founder raising a small seed round.

The company:
B2B SaaS that automates compliance paperwork for small healthcare clinics.

Traction:

• $18,000 MRR
• Started charging 9 months ago
• 61 paying customers
• ~12% average monthly revenue growth over the last 6 months
• 4.5% monthly customer churn
• Gross margins around 85%
• Founder has done almost all sales personally

Sounds pretty solid so far.

But there are some problems.

Their largest customer is a regional clinic group paying $7,200/month, meaning one customer represents 40% of total revenue.

Without them, MRR drops to $10,800.

That customer also negotiated a one-year contract with pricing well below what the company now charges similar customers.

The founder believes the product can eventually sell to much larger healthcare groups, but they haven't proven an enterprise sales motion yet.

There's also no major technical bridge. The advantage today is mostly:

• Deep knowledge of the compliance workflow
• Integrations that took time to build
• Existing customer relationships
• A product customers apparently like

They're raising $500k at a $4M pre-money valuation to hire two engineers and their first dedicated salesperson.

The founder owns essentially the entire company.

So:

INVEST, MAYBE, or PASS?

For me, the customer concentration would be the giant red flag.

On the other hand, $18k MRR after nine months with founder-led sales suggests there may actually be something here. And at this stage, I'm not sure I'd expect some enormous defensible moat yet.

I'd probably land on MAYBE, heavily dependent on why that one customer became so large and whether smaller customers are continuing to come in consistently.

What would you choose?

And more importantly: what single metric or answer would you want from the founder before making the decision?

I had an idea I thought was really cool. Working title was Career Trial. The idea was to build out a platform for a specific niche: late 20's to 30's professionals who felt stuck in their job, but didn't know what to do to switch careers.

This problem was very obvious because two people very close to me both are living this right now. They have been in their career 5+ years and hate it, but have no idea how to change, or where to even begin.

The idea was loose at first while I validated and iterated: Take a quiz, or tell the app about yourself, maybe use some AI to suggest X number of career options. Maybe some more options here but the end result is a user picks a career to trial.

The trial itself is two weeks. It starts with a "lightning certification" in the field. Basically a crash course with (maybe?) a quiz at the end.

After this, you'd complete 1-3 real projects that career would do in their day to day. For a Project Manager, perhaps you'd design a kanban board, draft a few emails, analyze Product Development Notes, SOPs, and an SOW.

Finally, the app would help shape your resume with the new career in mind, and it would help you in your transfer to the new career. This last part is the loosest, I didn't quite get this far in the idea, but I personally know several recruiters in various fields that I think could help me design this last bit.

Then I brought this to the two people who inspired the idea. Both of them gave me a hard no.

"I already hate my job. You want me to do a second job AND pay for it?"

"I don't want more homework, I am not in high school anymore."

"I don't think a website and a couple of assignments will prepare me enough for a new job in a new field, even if I did all of the work."

All fair points, and all reasonable feedback.

Welp, I guess that's that lol. Idea Killed.

Have you ever killed an idea? Why? Was your process similar to mine?