What would it cost if a human did it? How to show ROI in a pitch deck

Sunny Ray · Jul 28, 2026 · 5 min read

A pitch without ROI is a vision statement. The same pitch with three numbers is a reality.

On July 28 we ran the 12th edition of Spark Tank, our live pitch show. Three pitches went up that night, and one of them was mine: I pitched our own business on the same stage as the founders. By the end, every pitch had collected the same note from the investors. Quantify the ROI. Not one founder was spared, and neither was I.

The recurring gap: every pitch needed harder numbers

None of the three pitches lacked a story. They all had a problem, a product and a market. What they lacked was the bridge between the product and money: what does a customer save or make, in numbers, because this exists?

That gap is everywhere. Founders spend their slides on what the product does, because that's what they built and love. Investors spend their questions on what the product is worth to a buyer, because that's what decides whether anyone pays. When the deck doesn't answer it, the Q&A has to, and a founder improvising ROI live is never as convincing as a slide that already did the math.

Human cost versus software cost

The sharpest exchange of the night was with a founder building staffing software. The question on the table was the simplest ROI question there is: "how much would it cost if a human did it? How much did it cost with your software."

That framing works for almost any B2B product that replaces or speeds up labor. Every buyer already knows what a person costs. If you can put your price next to the cost of the person-hours you save, the buyer does the rest of the math in their head, and they believe it, because they supplied half of it.

Founders resist this framing because it sounds like "we replace people." It doesn't have to. It can just as easily be "the same team does three times the work." The comparison is what matters, not the headline.

The three numbers I asked for

When it was my turn to give feedback, I asked her for three data points:

1. Time-to-fill. How long it takes to fill a role the old way versus with her software.
2. Cost per placement. What a placement costs with humans doing the work versus with the software.
3. Placements and savings inside her own agency. How many candidates she'd placed with it, and the saving per hire.

She confirmed the first one live, on stage: time-to-fill went from two weeks to three days. That one sentence did more for the pitch than any slide before it. Two weeks to three days is a number a recruiter feels in their stomach.

The other two she didn't have ready. That's normal. But each one is a slide. Three slides, three numbers, and the pitch stops being "we built something cool for recruiters" and becomes "we cut your time-to-fill by most of two weeks and your cost per hire by this much."

Dog-food it: your own operation is your case study

The third number is the one I care most about, because it's the one pre-revenue founders forget they have. She runs a staffing agency. Her own agency is a customer. Every placement it makes with her software is a case study with real numbers that she controls.

If you're building a tool for a job you do yourself, use it on yourself first and measure everything. Hours before and after. Cost before and after. Output before and after. You don't need a paying customer to show ROI. You need one honest before-and-after, and your own business is the fastest place to get it.

We do this with our own business. Everything we sell, we run on ourselves first: the mailboxes, the invitation campaigns, the show. When I pitch it, the numbers are from our own calendars.

What I got told about my own pitch

Fair is fair. Here's the feedback on mine.

First, say the word "podcast" earlier, and frame it as a relationship engine, not media. I'd led with outbound and the system, and the podcast arrived late in the pitch. But the podcast is the idea. My own line from that pitch says it: "instead of getting going out in the world and asking people for stuff, we start giving stuff." That belongs in the first 30 seconds.

Second, one investor questioned whether it scales, and told me he ignores most podcast invites himself. I took that seriously. It's a fair challenge, and the honest answer is in the numbers: invitation campaigns get replies at multiples of what our pitch campaigns get, even if any one investor says no. One person's inbox isn't a reply rate. But I should have had that number on a slide instead of in my head. Which is the same note I'd just given the founder.

How to build your ROI slide

• Pick the cost your buyer already knows: a person's time, a vendor's fee, a lost deal.
• Put your number next to it, before and after, in the same units.
• Use three numbers at most. Speed, cost and one outcome is plenty.
• If you're pre-revenue, use your own operation or a pilot. One honest before-and-after beats a market-size slide.
• Say the strongest number out loud early. Two weeks to three days is a sentence an investor repeats to their partners.

The best place to test your ROI slide is in front of investors who'll tell you what's missing before it costs you a round. That's what our shows are for, and it's how we help founders meet investors through a show.

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