Raising a seed round may be one of the most daunting experiences for any entrepreneur. A idea that’s brilliant in your mind may feel bland in a pitch deck. You want to be concise, but there’s so much to explain. The emotional journey of anticipated or actual rejection can feel overwhelming. Your constant learning and evolution also make the specific pitch a moving target that keeps changing.
This article aims to provide some practical advice to help you focus on what really matters — four things that you need to convince an investor of to raise a seed round. There’s lots of great advice and templates online to build a deck. However, in an actual pitch you may not deliver the deck linearly, or an investor may already be convinced in one area and need more time in another. Focusing on the these four outcomes will help focus your deck, but also give you a north star in the pitch itself.
Be Convincing
The best advice I’ve heard is from YC Startup School, where Brad Flora stressed that it’s more important to convince than to impress investors. You don’t need to be flashy or reality-distorting or super slick, or really anything other than yourself. All you need to do convince.
Practically speaking, there are four things you need to convince an investor of in a seed-round pitch deck:
- Problem & Timing: You’ve spotted a big problem with a “why now” that makes this the right moment.
- Insight & Traction: You have a non-obvious approach or defensible insight, with some external validation of its merit.
- Team: You have a strong, gritty team with good founder-market-fit.
- Vision & Market: There’s a big long-term opportunity with a clear plan for how this round gets you to the next milestone.
Let’s dive into each of these.
Problem and Timing
Step 1: Convince your investors that you’ve spotted a big problem with a “why now” that makes this the right moment.
This is probably the area in which early entrepreneurs most under-invest. Sometimes the problem is so obvious to them that they forget to articulate it and its implications. Sometimes they’re so passionate about the solution that they haven’t even considered what the exact problem is. To do this right, make sure you tackle the following:
- What specifically is the problem you intend to solve? Be concise — you should be able to articulate it in 20 words or less.
- What is the status quo for how people approach solving it? If it’s an important problem, people already are trying, just not succeeding as well as you know is possible. Be clear about the current situation and able to illustrate why it sucks.
- What are the implications of the poor ways people are solving it? What emotions do people experience? How much time and energy and money do people invest in solving it? What results do they get for their efforts?
- What recent underlying technological / behavioral shift allows for a better approach now? Obviously AI… anything else? What’s compelling enough to your potential users, customers that will warrant them to change their behavior?
You want to be concise in the main draft of the pitch, but it’s important to educate the investor if this is not a field they are intimately familiar with. Consider having several elaboration slides on defining the problem in the appendix, and include real-world examples, research you’ve done, quotes you’ve obtained.
Insight & Traction
Step 2: Convince your investors you have a non-obvious approach or defensible insight, with some external validation of its merit.
Most entrepreneurs focus on the insight, but many forget to illustrate that it’s non-obvious, defensible, or externally validated. Let’s elaborate on what great looks like here:
- What is your insight and how will it work? It’s great if you have an MVP going, but focus first on your vision. Show how what you will do will fully address the problems you’ve outlined previously. You may illustrate it with screen shots, tell how you’ll change the timing or cost structures of the industry, give a platform overview — whatever will best convince an investor that your insight has merit.
- What is non-obvious about your insight? Here is good to talk about competition. If this problem is as big as you say, others are likely trying to solve it too. What do you know about how they’re approaching it, and how do you think you can do it better?
- How will you build a defensible moat? Investors will look for both an initial wedge — how you can first get users or customers — and ways you can take to keep them once others start copying your insight.
- What external validation shows its merit? This can take several forms — an MVP that demonstrates technical feasibility, customer research with data and quotes to illustrate the problem, contributions to an open source project, early revenue traction, other investors buying in… This doesn’t have to be conclusive for a seed round, but you need some evidence external to yourself to validate your insight.
Team
Step 3: Convince your investors you have a strong, gritty team with good founder-market-fit.
- What gives you founder-market fit? Articulate what about your background or interests make you a particularly good fit for your chosen market. It could be a personal story, a geographic advantage, a certain skill, or professional experience.
- How have you demonstrated tenacity in your past? Show your investors that you have faced and overcome obstacles. YC in particular asks about times you’ve “hacked a system” and this is a great way of showing that you’ve been able to leverage a non-obvious insight with tenacity and follow through to get results.
- What does your team add to the equation? Show how you’ve been able to enlist great people (even if just a co-founder) and that the caliber of your team means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Vision & Market
Step 4: Convince your investors there’s a big long-term opportunity with a clear plan for how this round gets you to the next milestone.
Most pitch decks make one of two mistakes here — they either focus too narrowly on a market that may be lucrative but insufficient to warrant the attention of a VC, or they talk too much about the billion-dollar TAM and SAM and other buzzwords[^1]. It’s most important to demonstrate how the problem you articulate in step 1 connects with a market. Seed investors need to see a possibility of a big outcome but most importantly want to know you have a viable plan for early traction.
- What is the market? Show what the world can look like in 3-5 years and provide a vision for how solving that problem will position you to take on bigger ones.
- What is the next milestone? What do you need to de-risk in the next 12 months in order to be on track to achieve that vision?
- How much money do you need? What specifically are you trying to raise and what led you to that number?
- How will you spend and make money? Who do you plan to hire, how will you approach GTM? What will you charge? How will your finances evolve over the next 18 months (or 3-5 years)?
Bringing It All Together
You need to tackle these four areas, and ensure that you provide clear answers to each of the sub-bullets within. But be concise! Put the main point in the deck and provide more data in the appendix. The questions in italics need not all be addressed — these are examples of how you can provide an answer to the main bullets.
Good luck, have fun, and please please reach out if I can help you on your journey!
Footnotes and References
- 1984 VC goes so far as to suggest that you ignore market size. Focusing on a niche will help you gain traction, and you can grow from there.
- Qubit: How to Build a Seed Pitch Deck That Raises Capital
- Sterling Road: Seed Fundraising - The 5 Most Common Pitch Mistakes
- YC Startup School and Seed Round Pitch Deck Template
- J12 Seed Pitch Deck Template — more robust and more visual than the YC version