Quayside: Seed Readiness.

You sent the seed deck (22 slides), a market sizing workbook and a short note: you plan to open conversations with eight funds in November and want to know what will stop them. We read every page, checked the claims that matter against public sources and looked for competitors the deck does not mention.

One pattern sits under almost every finding, so it is worth saying up front: the deck pitches a marketplace, and the evidence describes a well-liked booking tool. A booking tool is a fundable business. A marketplace story told on booking-tool evidence is what makes an investor stop trusting the rest of the deck.

Items marked [OPEN] are questions only you can answer. Each one changes a recommendation. Treat this draft as directionally right and precisely wrong until they close.

The product is real, marinas like it and net revenue retention is strong. None of that is the problem. The problem is that a careful investor will find four things in the first hour of diligence, and each one makes the next one look worse.

1. 1.The customer count does not reconcile. Slide 9 says 41 marinas are live. Slide 14's MRR at your own average price implies 30 paying.
2. 2.The market size is the marinas' revenue, not yours. $4.1B is berth fees. Your reachable software spend is closer to $15M a year.
3. 3."No direct competitors" is not true. Two funded booking platforms already sell to the same harbormasters in the UK and the Netherlands.
4. 4.The marketplace is 6% of bookings. The rest come through each marina's own website widget, which is SaaS revenue, valued as SaaS.

Re-cut the story as the booking and payments layer for independent marinas, with the consumer app as upside rather than the thesis. That version survives diligence. The current version invites a valuation you cannot defend.

The competitor slide is the one to fix first. A missing competitor is the fastest way to lose an investor's trust, because it suggests either you do not know the market or you hoped they would not check. Both platforms have raised in the last eighteen months and both list UK marinas as customers on their own websites.

Sources: Competitor websites and published funding announcements; UK and Dutch marina association member counts.

Strip out the marketplace framing and the numbers are good for this stage: 118% net revenue retention, zero logo churn in twelve months and a sales cycle that has fallen from eleven weeks to five. That is the story to lead with.

• ✦Model: subscription plus a payments margin. The margin is where the upside is, and it depends on becoming a payments platform (see Slow Steps First).
• ✦Market: about 1,900 independent marinas across your two countries. At your realized price that is a $15M a year opportunity before expansion, enough for a seed round, not enough for the valuation implied on slide 20.
• ✦Team: strong on product and sales. No one has run payments or compliance, and the plan now depends on both.

OPENIs the 6% app share rising month on month? If it has doubled since spring, the marketplace story has evidence behind it and should stay, with the chart.

The payments approval matters most. Every month it slips is a month the payments margin in your model does not exist, and an investor will discount the forecast accordingly. Starting it now also gives you a better answer to the question you will be asked in every meeting: what is the money for?

• ✦Deal-breaker: the unreconciled customer count. Investors forgive small numbers. They do not forgive numbers that change between slides.
• ✦Deal-breaker: the missing convertible note. A cap table that is wrong in a data room stops legal diligence until it is fixed, and makes the investor wonder what else is wrong.
• ✦Slows it down: market sizing, competitor slide, marketplace framing. Each is fixable in a week of work.

1. 1.Reconcile slide 9 and slide 14 and show paying, piloting and signed separately.
2. 2.Put the 2023 note on the cap table and have counsel confirm the conversion terms.
3. 3.Rebuild the competitor slide with the two platforms on it and the honest reason marinas pick you.
4. 4.Apply for payments platform approval and add the timeline to the use-of-funds slide.
5. 5.Replace the $4.1B slide with the bottom-up number and the expansion path beyond it.
6. 6.Re-run the deck with us before the first fund meeting in November.

• ✦If the 11 non-paying marinas have signed contracts with billing dates, the traction gap is timing and slide 9 needs a footnote, not a rewrite.
• ✦If app bookings are growing faster than widget bookings, keep the marketplace story and prove it with the trend.
• ✦If the convertible note has already converted, the cap table issue is paperwork, not a deal-breaker.

Everything in this report is the same recommendation at different levels of detail: describe Quayside as the booking and payments layer for independent marinas, make every number agree with every other number, and start the slow steps before you need them. That gives investors a clearer basis to assess the business in November.