How My Story Got Lost in the Numbers

My first pitch didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped.

I thought the biggest challenge of Pitch Day would be packaging everything I’d built into a three-minute pitch.

It wasn’t.

The biggest challenge was staying true to myself while trying to sound like the founder I thought investors wanted to hear.

As a first-time founder, I’d built up this idea of what investors expected. I thought I needed to be polished, perfectly rehearsed, and armed with every market statistic, growth projection, and carefully crafted transition. I thought that’s what credibility looked like.

So I wrote a script.

I memorized every word, convinced that if I could deliver it flawlessly, people would take both me and my business more seriously.

The problem was, the more I tried to sound like the founder I thought investors wanted to hear, the less I sounded like the founder who started VOGAYA.

The Story Behind the Brand

VOGAYA wasn’t born because I saw an attractive market opportunity. It wasn’t born because I calculated the size of the luxury handbag industry. It was born because I could no longer ignore the animal cruelty behind the leather industry, something so deeply normalized that most people rarely stop to question it.

For me, this business has never just been about handbags. It’s about the lives behind them.

That’s what gets me out of bed every morning. That’s the story I can tell without notes, without rehearsing, and without ever tripping over my words.

Yet, somewhere between building my pitch and stepping onto the stage, I convinced myself that conviction needed to make room for polish.

I started leading with the numbers, the total addressable market, the growth projections, the industry trends.

All of those things matter. Investors should absolutely understand that there is a real business behind the mission. But somewhere along the way, I started treating those numbers as if they were the heart of my story, when in reality, they were only there to support it.

The irony was that I knew my business better than anyone in the room.

I knew every decision that had brought me to that stage. I knew every challenge, every conversation, and every reason why I believed the world needed better alternatives to animal leather.

VOGAYA exists because of that emotion. Without it, there is no company.

Yet, I kept tripping over my own words, because I was trying to tell a version of the story that didn’t sound like me.

I had become so focused on saying what I thought investors wanted to hear that I was slowly editing out the reason I had started the company in the first place.

Looking back, I don’t think I was afraid of forgetting the numbers. I was afraid that leading with my conviction would make me seem less credible. That talking openly about the animal cruelty behind leather would make people uncomfortable. That speaking from the heart would make me sound too emotional.

But VOGAYA exists because of that emotion. Without it, there is no company.

What Pitch Day Actually Taught Me

The business model, the market opportunity, and the financial projections explain how the business can grow. They don’t explain why it exists.

Pitch Day reminded me that I don’t have to choose between being a passionate founder with a mission and a founder with a business.

The numbers matter because they show that the mission can become commercially viable. But they should never become more important than the reason the company was built in the first place.

So, while my first pitch didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped, I know exactly what I’ll do differently next time.

I’ll stop trying to sound like the founder I think investors want to hear.

And start sounding like the founder who built VOGAYA.

Elke Steijns is the founder of VOGAYA, a luxury plant-leather handbag brand built for a kinder world. VOGAYA creates premium accessories using innovative non-animal materials, for those who believe that style and compassion are not a trade-off. Elke is a founder in the FRWRDx IDEA Program.

If Elke’s experience at Pitch Day resonates, the IDEA Program is built around exactly this kind of preparation. Milestone 7 gives every founder the framework — and the practice — to pitch from conviction, not just from slides. Rolling applications are open.

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