Seaside Startup Summit: Beyond the Pitch

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This year, Seaside Startup Summit (SSS) returned to Lake Sevan for its tenth edition. I spent two days wandering between tents, observing the crowds, and talking with founders. 

The summit was colorful in every sense of the word. There was the obvious kind: Sevan’s blue, the sharp summer sun, the sand, the semi-wild landscape around the shoreline and the rows of blue tents stretching across the grounds. But there was another kind of energy too: people constantly on the move, music in the background, sports competitions, workshops, side conversations, founders rehearsing their pitches, mentors offering quick advice between sessions. Someone was searching for coffee. Someone else was searching for a teammate. Someone looked slightly lost.

By the second day, there were so many people walking around that spotting someone with a “startupper” badge had almost become a game of its own.

That’s part of what makes Seaside interesting. Many tech events in Armenia, especially the more formal ones, have a familiar rhythm. You often see the same companies, the same faces, the same circles talking to each other in slightly different formats. Seaside feels broader and more unpredictable. There were student founders, as you might expect, alongside professionals who had spent years in entirely different fields and were now trying to turn a problem they knew first-hand into a product. The crowd extended well beyond Armenia’s usual tech circles, bringing together people from companies, government, NGOs and universities, as well as participants from Georgia, Iran, Ukraine and India. Some arrived with polished decks and rehearsed answers. Others were still trying to find the simplest way to explain what they were building.

That mix gives the summit a slightly unusual atmosphere. It is a startup event, of course, but it’s also a place where people seem to briefly try on another version of themselves. Spend enough time there, surrounded by founders talking about markets, users, prototypes and investment, and the thought naturally appears: maybe I should build something too.

I did not have that thought this time, mostly because I had it several years ago.

Back then, I briefly imagined myself as a startup founder. The ambition did not last long. One meeting with an actual founder was enough. She spent several hours explaining, in generous and painful detail, what building a startup really takes: the uncertainty, the exhaustion, the constant rejection, the pressure to sell before you feel ready, and the loneliness of making decisions with incomplete information. By the end of that conversation, my founder era had quietly ended before it properly began.

Maybe that’s why, while walking around Seaside this year, I found myself less interested in the excitement around startups and more curious about the friction underneath it. What do founders keep getting wrong? Which mistakes show up again and again, even after countless acceleration programs, pitch trainings, mentorship sessions, and ecosystem events? What do mentors see from the outside that founders, especially first-time founders, struggle to see from inside their own idea?

From the outside, the startup world often looks like a world of bold ideas. A good pitch can make a product sound inevitable. A confident founder can make uncertainty look like strategy. A crowded event can create the feeling that everyone is building, launching, scaling and disrupting.

Mentors listen differently.

They’ve heard enough pitches to know when a founder is describing a real problem and when they’re mainly in love with the solution. They can usually tell when “market research” means five friendly conversations, when “traction” means early curiosity rather than real demand, and when a team is using startup language to mask a lack of clarity. 

Instead of asking mentors which startup impressed them most, I asked them about the mistakes.

What’s the most common mistake they see in pitches? Which question reveals the most about a founder? What advice do they give repeatedly that founders rarely follow? And what do first-time founders usually underestimate?

I asked three SSS mentors the same set of questions: Rem Darbinyan, founder and CEO of SmartClick and a startup consultant; Nejdeh Hovanessian, country coordinator of the EU4Innovation East program in Armenia and an adjunct lecturer at the American University of Armenia; and Sona Grigoryan, director of Plug and Play Armenia. Their answers often picked up where another left off, gradually assembling a picture of the challenges founders face, and the mistakes they keep repeating.

What Is the Most Common Mistake?

For Nejdeh, the first warning sign appears in the pitch. Many founders struggle to explain clearly what their startup does, which problem it addresses, and how the proposed solution works.

“Instead of explaining what they do in one line, they begin discussing several related topics,” he said. By the time they finish, the listener may know more details but understand less.

Rem sees this confusion as a symptom of an earlier issue. Many startups begin with a technology or an exciting product idea and then search for a reason it should exist.

“They come up with a cool solution or a new technology, and then run around trying to find a problem that matches it,” he said.

Sona points to the missing customer at the center of this gap. “Founders often come up with an interesting idea based on a personal experience, fall in love with it, and assume that they do not need to go and talk to customers,” she said.

Another line she hears regularly is “We don’t have competitors”—sometimes from teams working on fairly familiar ideas.

Customer conversations should test both assumptions. Yet founders keep postponing them, even as AI-based tools make customer discovery easier to organize. Product work simply feels more comfortable: a feature can be improved in private, while a customer may tell you that the entire idea rests on a problem they do not actually have.

Rem pointed to two additional complications: a poorly defined market and a team that lacks experience in the field it wants to enter. A startup might target everyone from “all small and medium-sized businesses” to a niche so narrow that there’s barely room for one company, let alone multiple competitors.

The confusion may show up in the pitch, but it often starts well before the founder steps onto the stage.

What Question Reveals the Most About a Founder?

Mentors often have one or two questions that cut through the polished pitch and surface the assumptions beneath it.

Sona asks: “Why did you decide to start this particular startup?”

She listens for a clear connection between the founder’s background, motivation and the problem they’ve chosen. A founder doesn’t need to have spent an entire career in the industry, but a genuine connection to the problem helps. Without knowledge of the field or relationships within it, reaching customers becomes considerably harder.

Nejdeh turns to market size. He recalled speaking with a startup that planned to begin in Yerevan. He asked the founders how many potential users they could realistically reach and what scale the business would need to achieve.

“They had no idea,” he said.

The calculation can be unforgiving. It may reveal that the market is too small to support the business envisioned around it.

Rem’s revealing question returns to the same problem. When he asks founders to describe their startup, he listens for the customer’s pain. If the answer revolves entirely around the product, it suggests the founders may still understand their solution better than the need it’s supposed to address.

The three mentors approach the founder from different directions, but their questions form a useful sequence: Why you? Why this problem? And why would enough people pay to have it solved?

What Advice Do Founders Keep Ignoring?

Sona repeatedly gives two pieces of advice: speak with potential customers and get an MVP into the market quickly.

Many founders prefer to keep improving the product until it feels ready. The launch moves further away as new features are added, details are polished, and one more problem is fixed.

“By the time they finally release it, it may already be outdated or no longer relevant,” she said.

Rem encounters the same reluctance. “Most startups keep improving the product and adding features instead of selling it,” he said.

Perfectionism can look like dedication, but it delays the moment when the market gets a vote. Rem’s advice is to solve one meaningful problem first: “Do one thing, but do it well.”

That advice has become more urgent as building products has gotten easier. Ten years ago, Rem explained, strong developers, UX designers and other specialists were expensive and hard to access. Product development itself created a significant barrier to entry.

“Today, product development has become much more affordable, so distribution is king,” he said.

An MVP alone no longer attracts the attention it once did. Rem argued that almost anyone at the summit could pitch him an idea and, within two days, he could produce a working copy. The advantage now lies in knowing what to build, whom to sell it to and how to reach those people.

Nejdeh’s recurring advice concerns something smaller, but important: the pitch deck. Founders often overload the slides with text, forcing the audience to choose between reading and listening. The crowded slide reflects the same instinct as the crowded product—the sense that adding more will make the idea more convincing.

The instinct also shows up during mentoring sessions. Rem usually has only 10 to 15 minutes with a startup. Some founders spend 12 or 14 of those minutes explaining and selling the company, leaving almost no time to ask questions or hear feedback.

“I’m not the right person to sell it to,” he said.

Rem would prefer founders to explain their difficulties briefly and use the rest of the session to listen. Whether it’s a product, a presentation or a mentoring conversation, founders often fill every available space. Learning begins when they leave room for someone else to respond.

What Do First-time Founders Underestimate?

At this point, my long-ago anti-startup lecture began to feel thoroughly validated.

Sona said first-time founders underestimate how difficult and consuming the work will be. Starting a company has become fashionable. From the outside, startup life can look like a series of events, conversations, and exciting opportunities.

“That side exists, of course, but reaching it requires extremely hard work,” she said. “It is not a nine-to-five job; for founders, the real work often starts after normal working hours.”

She compared building a startup to raising a child. It demands commitment, patience, and a willingness to keep going through failure and uncertainty.

Nejdeh framed the same issue as a matter of expectations. First-time founders may overestimate their own capabilities and underestimate the likelihood that their first attempt will fail. Strong belief in an idea can easily turn into certainty that every decision is correct.

Rem focused on a commercial blind spot: marketing. Many founders believe that once a good-looking product is ready, they can switch on Facebook or Google ads, share it in a few communities, and watch people line up to register and pay.

“Reality is very far from that,” he said.

Competition is intense, marketing channels are becoming more expensive, and finding the first 100 paying customers can take far more time and money than founders expect. Many also assume sales can be delegated early. They plan to raise funding, hire salespeople, and leave customer acquisition to them.

Rem believes founders need to make the first sales themselves. For the first year or two, they should learn how customers respond, which objections keep coming up and what kind of sales process works. Only then will they have a playbook that someone else can follow.

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Over two days at Sevan, I saw how differently people experience SSS depending on what they came to test. Some arrived with near-finished products ready for the stage; others came with little more than an idea, refining it through conversations and feedback.

Some founders would leave with a prize or a promising new contact. Others would carry home a deck full of notes, an uncomfortable question, or the realization that their product needed to change. In startup life, each of these can count as progress.

My own founder ambitions remain safely retired. What grew instead was my respect for people willing to test an idea in public, listen when the feedback is uncomfortable, and return to work when the first plan fails.

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