Thread by @NimaRoohiS

If you are raising a seed round, I found @zebulgar’s blog “How to raise before launch” on preparing a deck interesting and somewhat different from other essays on this topic.

Here are a few takeaways:

0- At early stages, investors mainly rely on founders to tell a compelling story about the problem they are solving and much less on metrics.

1- Te best companies are founded from a simple to understand value proposition. The first slide should highlight that. e.g.

2- Distill your startup’s story into a single paragraph (i.e. your elevator pitch). Use sentences as titles of your slides. e.g. from Opendoor

3- What problem are you solving? What about the current state of the world sucks? You need to make the reader of your story want to drive change. Having a customer persona may help trigger that.

4- How is your state of the world better? You need to tell how the world will be better while you make money through the process!

5- Where’s the money? You need to show that you understand your unit economics (it’s definitely tough to get it right at early stages!)

6- What are the risks against your success? I found this one particularly interesting, I’ve see a lot of founders not being upfront with the risks

7- How much money do you need? Which risks are you going to remove first? And through what time frame? I find this one helpful for founders to develop a strategy for their seed round with clarity.

8- Team: not pure credentials. What makes you likely to solve this problem? Talk about some unfair advantages E.g

Here is the full blog: medium.com/@zebulgar/how-…

Thanks to @rabois for directing me to it.