The Story of PitchSlap

Hi, I’m S-J and I’m a founder turned startup mentor and advisor.

In 2011, I co-founded Tinybeans, the family photo-sharing app that New York Magazine called the “most loving space on the internet”. We bootstrapped for nearly three years, wearing every hat; from customer service and sales, to product development and fundraising.

By the time of our IPO in 2017, we’d grown to over 1.5m global users, maintained a 5-star rating in the App Store and moved our HQ to New York.It’s fair to say I’m obsessed startup storytelling.

I think it’s as important to have a powerful, easy to remember story as it is to have an exceptional product.

I now spend my days consulting with funded startups and scaleups to fix their positioning and get to product market fit. I give back by mentoring early stage startups.

But I don’t have the bandwidth to help all the startup founders who reach out to me. That had been weighing on my mind.

Then in early 2025 I noticed 2 things...

Number 1
Founders are inundated with advice and information but what they really need are tools to help them get jobs done rather than be sent another video to watch or article to read.

I started to think about how I could help them knock some of those big jobs to be done off their never-ending list.
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Then one day I was on a call to give feedback on some first draft pitches. Some founders nailed it. Most didn’t.

I didn’t want to be discouraging but some of them really needed to burn their pitches down and start again. I didn’t say that.

Which led to realisation Number 2 — most founders really suck at pitching to start with (I did!) and most humans struggle to give brutally honest feedback.

I started building PitchSlap that afternoon hoping I could find a way to scale the way I help founders, by giving them the feedback and narrative they needed to help them nail their pitch.

I can’t wait to hear what you think!

If you're interested in working together, message me on LinkedIn or email me at sj (at) pitchslap.me