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.

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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: