Nock

Nock your pitch before you take the shot.

A nock is the notch you set an arrow into before you draw and loose. Nock is the same idea for a pitch:
set it, check your aim, and find what's off — before the meeting that counts.

Two Claude skills in one repo:

• nock/ — for founders. Reads your pitch deck and tells you the questions
  Nikunj Kothari (seed/Series A investor) would ask, and — more importantly —
  what he'd find missing. Distilled from 53 real pitch & diligence meetings plus his essays.
• build-your-nock/ — for investors. A playbook to build your own version from your own recorded
  meetings, so it asks the questions you ask.

Example quotes are anonymized to a category (e.g. "AI-infra pitch") — no real companies or founders are named.

For founders — nock/

What you get

Point it at a deck and it returns, in order:

1. The questions he'd ask, mapped to your slides.
2. What your deck already answers well — named slide by slide.
3. The gaps — where he'd push, and the red-flag patterns it spots (boil-the-ocean with no wedge,
   "category of one," a secret that's really category boilerplate, vision with no concrete next step).
4. An insight-count check — how many of the three unique insights (tech / market / GTM) you carry.
   One isn't enough anymore.
5. Your weakest 3 claims + the follow-ups he'd use to test whether a secret is earned or faked.
6. The "dinner test" — would this still be on his mind after the meeting? — and the one thing to fix first.

If your deck has an ask slide, it also runs a raise-mechanics read from his essay on fundraising in a
consensus market: is the ask sized to actually close, price/dilution sanity (no lead goes under 10%; a
"great deal" begets questions, not interest), no competitor-round comps, current-month traction, great new
hires showcased. And you can skip the deck entirely and just ask it raise-process questions — "how much
should I raise," "who do I talk to at a firm," "what do I say about my timeline."

It leads with the why and the how (his actual frameworks and voice), not a generic product/market/tech
checklist.

Install — Claude Code

Easiest: paste this to Claude Code and let it do the work —

Install the skill from https://github.com/kothari-nikunj/nock — clone the repo and copy the nock
folder into my Claude skills directory (~/.claude/skills/).

Or do it yourself in a terminal:

git clone https://github.com/kothari-nikunj/nock
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r nock/nock ~/.claude/skills/

Restart Claude Code, attach your deck (PDF) or paste an outline, and say "nock my pitch" / "review my
deck." It'll ask your stage and category, then run the full review.

Use in ChatGPT / Claude.ai / Cursor / anything else

Paste nock/lens/principles.md and nock/lens/question-bank.md into the chat (add
nock/lens/raise-playbook.md if you want the raise-mechanics read too), then:

You are reviewing my pitch deck using the lens in the two files above (principles.md = how this investor
reads a founder; question-bank.md = the questions he asks and how he asks them). My stage is
[pre-seed/seed/A] and category is [e.g. AI infra]. Give me: (1) the questions he'd ask mapped to my
deck, (2) what I already answer well, (3) the gaps he'd push on, (4) an insight-count check across
tech/market/GTM, (5) my weakest 3 claims with the follow-ups he'd use to break a faked secret, and (6) the
"dinner test." Write it in his voice — warm but direct, founder-to-founder, no VC jargon.

Here is my deck: [paste / attach]

Read nock/lens/principles.md on its own even without a deck — it's a tight summary of what he's actually
listening for (the Pull, earned secrets, revealed preferences, latitude + agency, why-you-win).

For investors — build-your-nock/

Want a Nock that asks your questions, not his? build-your-nock/ is the playbook: pull your recorded pitch
meetings (Granola API), filter to the ones you drove, extract your own questions, distill them into a
question-bank + principles in your voice, calibrate against a few real decks, and ship your own Nock.
Includes the scripts (pull.py, extract.py, distill-prompt.md).

Install it the same way — point Claude Code at this repo and ask it to copy the build-your-nock folder
into ~/.claude/skills/, or:

git clone https://github.com/kothari-nikunj/nock
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r nock/build-your-nock ~/.claude/skills/

Then say "build my nock." It walks you through it end to end. Your raw transcripts stay local; the
shipped lens is anonymized.

Honest caveats

• This is one investor's lens. Strong signal, not a guarantee — every investor differs. Use it to find
  the holes in your story, not to predict the exact conversation.
• It's distilled from open-ended conversations and applied to a static deck, so treat the gaps as the real
  value — they're what he'd have to drag out of you live.
• It plays to this investor's strengths (product, market, GTM, conviction) and deliberately doesn't simulate
  deep financial-structure diligence.

Reach out

If Nock helps tighten your pitch — or you'd just like to talk it through — email Nikunj directly at
[email protected]. He built this partly to meet more founders. And if it's useful, pass it to one.

More of his writing: Balancing Act. Licensed MIT — copy it, fork it, make it yours.