FIGS Got 400 Rejections by Hunting for Fast Nos

Key Takeaways

• Heather Hasson and Trina Spear pitched between 300 and 400 venture capitalists before finding investors who understood medical apparel.
• Spear treated slow responses and investor hesitation as immediate rejections to stop pipeline drag.
• Investors rejected FIGS because they assumed doctors and nurses covered in fluids had zero interest in design or comfort.
• Hasson rejected existing total addressable market calculations, arguing that category leaders build new demand instead of splitting existing market share.

Hunt for the Fast No to Protect Your Pipeline

Most founders mistake a polite maybe for progress. They send follow-up emails into a void, adjust their pitch decks after lukewarm calls, and spend months waiting on venture capitalists who will never wire funds.

Spear and Hasson took the opposite approach when building FIGS. Pitching an unglamorous category out of a car trunk, they faced constant skepticism. Venture capitalists could not fathom why a nurse or surgeon would care about tailored clothing. Spear remembered the universal dismissal from early pitch meetings: “Nobody cares. No one cares. As a healthcare professional, you don't care how you look. You're getting blood, and you're getting liquids on you, nobody cares.”▶ 44:14

Instead of trying to convince fence-sitters who had never stepped into an emergency room, the co-founders accelerated their pipeline by actively hunting for rejections. “Oh, we got just every I mean we probably got 3 to 400 no's,”▶ 43:32 Spear said. “We were very focused on getting fast no's, fast no's, so, you know, when people were not uh sure or were not getting back to us, okay, that's a no.”▶ 43:55

A fast rejection frees up your calendar. A slow maybe ties up your mental bandwidth, stalls your round, and keeps you from meeting the one contrarian backer who actually sees the angle. If an investor delays or asks for endless supplementary data on basic category assumptions, take the hint, log the refusal, and move down the list.

Never Let an Old Spreadsheet Define Your Market

The most frequent objection FIGS heard was math. Venture capitalists pulled historical industry reports on commodity medical workwear, looked at the low price points of boxy hospital scrubs, and passed. Hasson recalled the chorus from investor meetings: “The TAM's not big enough. It's not big enough. It's not big enough.”▶ 44:28

Traditional market sizing looks backward. It tallies what buyers spent on low-grade incumbent goods last year through medical supply catalogs. It does not measure what professionals will spend when someone gives them a direct-to-consumer product that fits well, lasts longer, and makes them feel human during a 14-hour shift.

Hasson refused to let legacy industry reports dictate the ambition of the company. “And our point was maybe it's not, but that's not the right business to invest in. You need to create the TAM. If you create TAM, that's a whole nother ball game. That's something you would want to invest in.”▶ 44:37

If your pitch deck relies entirely on taking five percent of an existing market, you are selling an incremental replacement. The best businesses expand the boundaries of an unglamorous industry by introducing better design, superior materials, and a direct distribution channel. They make the pie ten times larger.

What to Do With This

Open your investor tracking spreadsheet tomorrow morning and audit every conversation older than five business days. If a venture capitalist left your last email unanswered or asked for a third call without offering partner access or a term sheet, mark them as a pass. Remove them from your active pipeline, stop sending custom data cuts, and book three new initial pitch meetings in their calendar slots.