Prepare your answers.

1. Your name

2. Email

3. Where you're based

4. Links: site, LinkedIn, X

   Website, LinkedIn, X, whatever shows your work. One line, comma-separated.

1. Startup name

2. Industry

   Pick one: AI / ML · Fintech · Health · Consumer · SaaS / B2B · Climate · Crypto / web3 · Other

3. What are you building? (one line)

   This is the one place a single sentence is exactly right. What you do, for whom, and the outcome; concrete, no buzzwords.

   Example answer

   We help indie game studios cut player-support costs by 60% with an AI that answers players inside the game.

4. Stage

   Pick one: Just an idea · Prototype · Launched · Making revenue · Raised a round

5. Funding to date

   Pick one: Bootstrapped · Pre-seed (<€250k) · Seed (€250k–2M) · €2M+ · Prefer not to say

1. What problem are you solving, and who has it?

   A few sentences: name the pain, who feels it most acutely, and how they cope today. Specific beats broad.

   Example answer

   Indie studios live or die on retention, but the moment a game gets traction the support load explodes with refund requests, bug reports, and 'how do I…' questions, and a three-person team has no one to handle it. Today they either let tickets rot for days, so players churn and leave one-star reviews, or a founder burns their evenings answering Discord instead of building. The pain is sharpest right when a game is finally working, which is exactly when they can least afford the distraction.

2. Why you? Your unfair advantage or unique insight

   A short paragraph on your unfair advantage, the insight, access, or ability most people don't have. Earned, not aspirational.

   Example answer

   I spent four years as the second engineer on a live-service game that went from zero to two million players, and I owned the support tooling the whole way. I've seen exactly how player questions cluster, why generic chatbots fail in games (they don't know the player's save state or where they are), and what actually deflects a ticket. I also still have the trust of a dozen studios from that time who are letting me test against their live games, the kind of access most people building this simply couldn't get.

3. Who else is doing this, and why will you win?

   A paragraph: who else solves this (even 'a spreadsheet' or 'nobody'), and the specific edge that lets you win.

   Example answer

   The default today is a generic tool like Zendesk bolted on, which knows nothing about the game and just routes tickets to a human. A couple of AI-chatbot startups exist, but they sit on the website, not in the game, so they can't see what the player is actually doing. Our edge is the in-game SDK: we read the player's state, their level, inventory, and last error, and answer in context, which is the thing that makes deflection actually work. And the integration is the moat: once a studio wires us into their game loop, we're not a tab they can swap out.

4. Traction so far

   A paragraph with real evidence someone wants this. Numbers help: users, revenue, growth, waitlist, pilots, retention. If you're pre-traction, say what you've learned instead.

   Example answer

   We've been live in one studio's game for six weeks. Of roughly 1,400 support conversations, the AI fully resolved 58% with no human touch, and median response time dropped from nine hours to under a minute; the studio's one-star reviews mentioning 'no support' went to zero. Two more studios from my network have signed pilots starting next month, and nine others are on a waitlist. No revenue yet: we're converting that first pilot to a paid contract (~€1.5k/mo) this quarter.

5. How big can this get if it works?

   A paragraph: how big this gets if it works, and the ambition behind it. Reason from your wedge out to the whole.

   Example answer

   There are roughly 50,000 active indie and mid-size studios worldwide, and support is a universal, growing cost as games shift to live-service and stay online for years. If we own in-game support for indies, the natural expansion is up-market to larger studios and outward into the rest of the player relationship, from onboarding to moderation to community. The honest ambition is to become the support layer every game ships with: a multi-billion-dollar spend that today is split between headcount and tools that don't understand the game.

6. What will you build during the week?

   A paragraph on the one thing you'd ship in seven uninterrupted days. Concrete and demoable beats grand and vague.

   Example answer

   By the end of the week I want a second studio fully live, not a demo but our SDK embedded in their actual game, answering real players in production, with a dashboard they can watch. Concretely that's the in-game widget, the state-aware context pipeline, and the deflection analytics working end to end for a game we don't already support. Getting from 'works for one game we hand-tuned' to 'works for a game we've never seen' is what unlocks everything else, and seven clear days is exactly what it needs.

We back people, not résumés. Experience isn't a filter here; this is the part we actually read.

1. Why are you really building this?

   A few honest sentences on why you're really building this, not the pitch version. We read this one closely.

   Example answer

   Honestly, I spent years watching support get treated as a cost to minimise, and I hated that the people who paid for it were players who just wanted help and founders too stretched to give it. I know this problem in my bones and I'm tired of watching good games get review-bombed over something fixable. I'm not doing this because support is a hot category; it isn't. I'm doing it because I can't unsee it and I think I'm one of the few people positioned to fix it properly.

2. Tell us about a time you kept going when quitting made more sense.

   Tell the story: what happened, what quitting would have looked like, and what you actually did. Specifics make it real.

   Example answer

   Eight months ago the first version was a website chatbot and it flat-out didn't work; deflection was under 15% and studios politely churned. The obvious move was to pivot to something easier, and I nearly did; I'd spent my savings and had one studio left. Instead I moved in with that studio for two weeks, sat next to their community manager, and rebuilt the whole thing around in-game state because that's what I saw the questions actually needed. That rebuild is what took deflection to 58%. Quitting would have been the reasonable call; staying and rebuilding from what I'd learned was the right one.

3. What are you like to work with?

   A short paragraph on what people who've worked with you would actually say, the good and the sharp edges.

   Example answer

   People who've worked with me would say I'm relentless about talking to users and allergic to building in a vacuum; I'll ship something rough and put it in front of a player the same day rather than polish in private. The sharp edge is that I can be impatient with process and I move faster than is always comfortable; I've had to learn to slow down and bring people with me. I'm at my best paired with someone more patient and systems-minded, which is honestly part of why I want to be in a room like this.

4. Something you've changed your mind about recently, and why.

   A paragraph on something you've genuinely updated on lately, whether your market, your product, or yourself, and why.

   Example answer

   I used to believe the wedge had to be the website support inbox, because that's where 'support' officially lives. Watching real player questions changed my mind completely: the vast majority happen in the moment of confusion inside the game, not later on a help site, and answering them there is a totally different and much better product. It meant throwing away months of work, but it's the single decision that made the thing actually work, and it taught me to trust what users do over where I assumed the problem lived.

5. Why noclue, why now?

   A paragraph: why this program, and why now for you and the company. Specific to noclue beats generic.

   Example answer

   I've hit the point where the product works and the bottleneck is entirely me; I need a week with nothing else to get the second studio live and prove this generalises, and I need people who'll pressure-test my thinking and push me harder than I push myself. I've been building fairly alone and I can feel the blind spots forming. noclue is a room of founders at the same intensity, off-grid, with operators who've scaled the exact kind of tooling I'm building. Now is right because the next milestone is a focus problem, and this is a week built entirely around focus.

6. CV or résumé (optional)

   Genuinely optional. We look for people, not CVs, so only add one if it helps you tell your story.

7. Pitch deck (optional)

   If you have one. A few rough slides is plenty; we don't need a polished raise deck.