I Pitched Before I Was Ready. I Just Didn't Know It Yet.

By Michael Weisfeld, founder of 9xNine

I'd been carrying the same ask around for weeks.

There's a soccer club director I've known for a while. Good person, great club, and exactly the kind of business 9xNine is built for. Every time I saw him, I thought about bringing it up. Every time, I didn't.

I had a good reason. Or what felt like one.

The respectable version of fear

9xNine is an AI-first marketing company, and I'm building it solo. I've had one patient beta subscriber who has let me break things, fix them, and break them again. That partnership has made the system much better. It also gave me a perfect excuse.

I've defined our MVP as 3 conditions. One of them is simple to say: a subscriber can review and approve their own content in their own portal. None of the 3 are fully met yet.

So I told myself business development could wait. Wait until the engine was reliable. Wait until I trusted it completely. Wait until MVP.

That's the respectable version of fear. It looks like diligence. It feels like standards.

It's still waiting.

The door opened sideways

On the evening of October 13, he stopped me to talk about something completely unrelated.

And I took the shot.

No script. I told him, honestly, that I'd been nervous to even mention it. That I'd been sitting on this for weeks.

He told me I shouldn't feel that way. That I should feel comfortable coming to him with things.

I want to be honest about that moment too. It was kind, and it was real. He was also the warmest possible lead: someone who already knew me and wanted good things for me. That's the lesson I'd give any founder sitting on an ask. Your first shot doesn't have to be a cold pitch to a stranger. Start with the people who would tell you not to be shy.

What he asked for vs. what he needed

He was open. He was also candid. Budget is tight, and he wondered whether what we do overlapped with what they already have.

What he said he wanted was a social media manager. Someone posting.

So I looked closer. The club is doing genuinely cool things, and they're posting about them. But almost everything is wins and accolades. Scores, trophies, congratulations.

There's nothing about what the director actually believes about the game. Nothing about how the club develops players, or why a family should choose them over the club across town.

That's not a posting problem. It's a point-of-view problem.

Most clubs get this wrong, and it isn't their fault. Wins are easy to post. A philosophy takes work to put into words. But wins are what every club shares. The point of view is the one thing only that club can share.

So I went to work. The first version I'd prepared was a generic brand style guide, and the honest feedback at home was that it was meaningless and I shouldn't send it. They were right. So I scrapped it and spent about 4 hours that night building something tailored to this club, working late into the night, and scheduled the email to land at 8:45 the next morning. The deck made one argument: there's no overlap. A social media manager distributes content. What's missing is the content worth distributing. A home base with a blog and coach profiles, built around the director's voice, with social carrying it out into the world.

Then I found out I was behind

Here's the part I didn't plan on writing.

Part of what got me to finally speak up was confidence from a big build over the weekend. I thought it put us at an early MVP. After the deck was already out the door, I took a harder look and realized we were further behind than I believed. That's its own post: I Became the Loop Before the Loop Existed.

So did I pitch on false confidence?

A little. Yes.

But here's what I keep coming back to. The timeline slipped. The insight didn't. What I offered him wasn't a finished machine. It was a clear read on what his club is missing and how to fix it. That read is true whether my build is nearly done or still has real work ahead.

I don't believe readiness is a feeling you wait for. If I'd waited until I felt ready, I'd still be waiting. And I'd have been wrong about being ready anyway.

The first turn of the snowball

He hasn't said yes. The budget concern is real, and I respect it.

But for weeks, the only thing standing between the idea and the ask was me. That's no longer true.

If you're building something and holding back until it's perfect, here's my one suggestion. Find the warmest door you have. Wait for it to open even a crack. Then say the thing, nerves and all.

That's how a snowball starts.