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Draft — not yet in force

This document still has unresolved placeholders, marked in yellow below, and is not published policy. It stops showing this notice once every placeholder is filled in.

Terms of Service — The Pitch Room

Draft for founder and legal review. Not yet published.

Written from what the product actually does. Placeholders in [[double brackets]] are decisions only you can make. Where the code enforces a rule, these terms describe the rule as the code enforces it, not as we might wish it worked.

Version: [[choose a value, e.g. `2026-09-13`. Whatever you pick becomes `TERMS_VERSION` in the environment and is stored against every founder's consent, so treat it as permanent.]]

Last updated: [[date you publish]]

Who we are: The Pitch Room is run by [[your full name]], an individual, not a registered company. [[Postal address for legal notices.]] References to "we" and "us" mean that person.

Contact: [[email address]]

1. What this is

The Pitch Room is a private beta. Founders publish short video pitches. Viewers must genuinely watch before they can react, score, or comment, and nobody sees the room's numbers before giving their own.

By using the site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use it.

Because this is a beta, things will change, break, and occasionally be taken down without notice.

2. Your account

You need an account to respond to a pitch or to publish one. Watching is open to anyone.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Do not share your sign-in. Tell us if you think someone else is using it.

Email. We use your address to send sign-in codes, notifications about your own pitches, and a newsletter about The Pitch Room. You can switch the notifications and the newsletter off at any time, from your settings or the unsubscribe link. Sign-in codes cannot be switched off, because they are how you sign in.

[[State a minimum age. The code does not ask for or check age anywhere today, so either add an attestation at sign-up or state this as a rule you enforce on report rather than a control.]]

We may suspend or remove an account that breaks these terms. A suspended account's past responses stop counting toward any public number, but the records remain.

3. Pitching

What you are promising us

When you submit a pitch for review you confirm that you own the video and any deck you attach, or have permission to share them, and that you accept these terms. We record that confirmation, with the version of these terms you accepted and the moment you accepted it.

Review

Every pitch is checked by a person before it can go live. A reviewer checks that exact version against the rules: that it is a pitch, that it runs between 30 seconds and 3 minutes, and that it appears to be your own work. Nobody judges whether your idea is good. That is what the room is for.

The decision appears on your dashboard, which is the place to check. We may also email you about it, unless you have switched notifications off. [[Today the system sends no such email and the dashboard is the only channel. Keep this sentence only once notifications actually ship; until then say "The decision appears on your dashboard. We do not email you about it." — see founder note 2.]]

If your pitch is approved, you choose when it goes live. If it is rejected, you will see why, and you can submit a new version.

Publishing makes your video public

This is the most important thing in this document, so it gets its own paragraph.

Once you publish, your video and its captions are served from public addresses that require no account. Anyone with the link can watch. Search engines may index a link that someone shares. A PDF deck attached to a published pitch can be opened by any viewer of that pitch. Do not put anything in a pitch, a deck, or your profile that you would not be comfortable seeing in public.

Before publication your video is private, and only you and a reviewer can watch it.

A published version cannot be edited

Once live, a pitch's content is fixed. The database enforces this. If you want to change something, create a new version. This exists so that responses always attach to the exact thing people actually watched.

You keep your rights, and you give us two permissions

Your pitch is yours. You own it, and nothing here transfers that.

On the site. You give us permission to host your pitch, stream it, transcribe it into captions, show it to viewers, and display it around the site while it is published. That permission ends when your pitch is removed, except for copies kept in backups for a normal period and anything we must keep for the reasons in section 7.

Off the site, for marketing. You also give us permission to promote The Pitch Room using your published pitch video, and nothing else. That means we may post the video, an edited clip of it, or a still frame from it on social platforms including Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube and TikTok, in our newsletter, and in other marketing material. We may show it alongside your startup's name, one-line description, industry and stage, and the profile details you chose to make public, which may include your name, your role, your location and your public links.

This permission is limited in four ways:

  • It covers the video only. Your PDF deck is never used in marketing, and neither is any other document or file you attach. A deck often contains financials, a roadmap, or customer names, and those are yours alone to circulate.
  • It covers published pitches only. A draft, a rejected version, and anything you never published are never used.
  • It follows your visibility setting. If you chose "startup name only", we will not attach your name. If you marked a link private, it stays private. Your contact address is never used in marketing.
  • It is for promoting The Pitch Room, not for selling your pitch to anyone else, and we will not licence it on to a third party for their own advertising.

Two things you should understand before you publish, because they cannot be undone:

  • Once we post to a third-party platform, that platform's terms apply to the post, and anyone can screenshot, download or repost it. Taking your pitch off The Pitch Room does not pull those copies back.
  • You can ask us to take a post down and we will, as far as each platform allows. We cannot recall what other people have reshared.

This permission is optional, and it is off unless you give it. At the review step, before you submit, there is a separate tick box for it, sitting apart from the box that confirms your rights and accepts these terms. Leaving it unticked has no effect on whether your pitch is reviewed, approved, or published — it means only that we will not post your video on our social accounts.

If you never tick it, we never post. That applies to every pitch submitted before this choice existed, too: those were submitted under a single combined box, so no separable permission was given, and none is assumed.

Each version is its own decision. Ticking it for one version does not carry to the next.

You can archive a version at any time. Archiving stops it being shown on the site, and the video file behind it is deleted from our video provider by a scheduled job. Tell us if you also want existing social posts removed.

4. Responding to a pitch

The gate

You cannot react, score, or comment until you have watched enough of the video. Enough means 45 seconds, or half the pitch, whichever is shorter. Only genuine watching counts: dragging the scrubber, playing in a hidden tab, or running at unusual speed does not.

This is enforced on our side, not just in the page. Attempting to defeat it is a breach of these terms.

One person, one response

One reaction and one set of scores per pitch, per person. Once submitted, a reaction or a score cannot be changed or deleted, by you or by us. The database refuses it. That is deliberate: the numbers are only worth something if they cannot be quietly revised afterwards.

Comments are different. You can delete a comment, which replaces its text and leaves the conversation readable.

What your response is

A reaction and a score are your opinion. They are not advice, and they are not a measure of anyone's investment quality. Do not treat the room's numbers as diligence, and do not present them as such to anyone else.

5. What you may not do

The full list lives in the [[community rules]], which form part of these terms. They cover what a pitch may contain, how to respond to one, and what happens when a rule is broken. Read them before you publish or comment.

In summary, and without narrowing what that page says:

  • Post anything you do not have the right to post, or present someone else's work or company as your own.
  • Make a factual claim about your company you cannot support.
  • Post anything unlawful, hateful, harassing, or sexually explicit.
  • Manipulate the watch gate, the counts, or the reveal thresholds, including by using more than one account.
  • Repost or redistribute someone else's pitch as your own.
  • Scrape the site, or extract its content in bulk.
  • Attempt to reach the database, other people's drafts, or anything else you have not been given access to.
  • Use anyone's contact details, which you see only after responding to their pitch, to send unsolicited marketing.

We can remove content or suspend accounts for any of these. In a beta, we will usually talk to you first, but we do not have to.

One thing we will not do: reject or remove a pitch for being a weak idea. The reviewer checks that a pitch is genuine, legal, and yours. The room decides everything else.

6. Reporting and moderation

You can report a pitch or a comment. A person reviews reports and decides. Decisions are recorded, including the reason, in a log we keep.

We do not promise a response time. This is a small operation.

7. Deleting your account

You can request deletion from your settings. Your public profile is hidden immediately. The rest is completed by a person, who removes or anonymises your account, your content, and your stored files.

Some things survive, deliberately:

  • Reactions and scores, because they cannot be deleted at all and because other people's published pitches carry counts that would otherwise silently change.
  • Moderation records and reports, so decisions remain reviewable.
  • Consent records, which are the evidence of what you agreed to and when.

Where we can anonymise instead of keeping something attached to you, we will. The privacy policy describes this in more detail.

8. The beta, and what we do not promise

The site may be unavailable, lose work in progress, or change without warning. We do not promise it will be available, that any pitch will be seen by anyone, or that responses will arrive.

The service is provided as is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, revenue, or opportunity.

[[A lawyer should set the liability cap, the warranty disclaimer, and the indemnity to match your jurisdiction. The paragraph above is a placeholder, not a drafted clause.]]

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

9. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Each version has its own identifier, and the version you accepted is stored with your pitch. If we change them materially, we will say so on the site, and publishing a new pitch will require accepting the current version.

10. Ending it

You can stop using the site at any time, and you can archive your pitches or request deletion.

We can suspend or end your access if you break these terms, or if we stop running the service. If we shut down, we will give reasonable notice so you can retrieve your content.

11. Law and disputes

[[Choose a governing law and a place for disputes. Nothing in the codebase states one, so this is a decision, not a fact to be looked up.]]

12. Contact

[[Email address.]]