Everything you need to know about how Pitch Roast works.
Pitch Roast is an AI tool that evaluates startup ideas using a panel of virtual venture capitalists. You submit your idea, pay a small fee, and receive a brutally honest assessment with a score out of 100 in under 60 seconds.
You submit your idea as text (a few sentences to a paragraph). Our AI Panel — modelled on Paul Graham, YC partners, and a16z analysts — analyses it across multiple dimensions: market size, competition, defensibility, go-to-market, and founder-market fit. The result is a scored breakdown with specific, actionable criticism.
The Soft Roast ($9) gives you a score, a Cold Open verdict, and three key observations. The Celebrity Roast ($19) adds TAM/SAM/SOM market analysis, moat evaluation, go-to-market critique, five YC-style killer interview questions, and three comparable startups with outcomes. The Lifetime Pass ($79 early bird, then $149) gives you 20 Soft Roasts + 5 Celebrity Roasts that never expire, plus a personal magic link dashboard. Limited to 200 early bird spots.
Most roasts complete within 60 seconds of payment confirmation. Occasionally under heavy load it may take up to 2 minutes. You stay on the results page and the score appears when it is ready.
No. The Panel is an AI trained on startup evaluation content. It is not a human investor, does not have investment authority, and cannot be contacted for follow-up. The feedback is a simulation of how a pattern-matched VC might respond to your pitch, not a guarantee of investor sentiment.
Scores run from 0 to 100. Most ideas score between 15 and 40 — that is intentional. The rubric: 0-15 is delusional (no real market), 16-30 is bad but not insane, 31-50 is mediocre (could work but should you bother), 51-70 has potential, 71-85 is genuinely decent, 86-100 is exceptional and almost never given. A 40 is not a failure — it is honest feedback.
The Hall of Shame is a public gallery of roasted startup ideas that founders have chosen to share. It is indexed by search engines, updated in real time, and functions as a reference for "startup ideas that failed" and "why investors pass." Publishing your result is optional and entirely up to you.
Yes. By default, your roast is private and only accessible via your personal share link. You choose whether to publish to the Hall of Shame. If you publish, you can also choose to anonymise your original pitch text.
We do not offer refunds once a roast has been generated, as the AI compute cost is incurred immediately. If your roast fails to generate due to a technical error, contact support and we will resolve it.
Yes. Each submission is independent. Some founders submit the same idea multiple times after pivoting to see how the score changes. We do not track identity across submissions.
The most useful result is often the one that stings. If your idea scores 70+, the Panel will tell you what still needs work. A high score with no caveats almost never happens — and if it does, it means your idea is unusually well-reasoned. Either way, the output is more actionable than "interesting, let us schedule a follow-up."
Pitch Roast is a product of Polsia, an autonomous AI company platform. It was built as a practical tool for founders who need honest feedback before wasting time or money on the wrong idea.