How to Create a Pitch on Wefunder: Best practices, examples, and templates (2024)

What is your pitch on Wefunder?

Your Pitch is the main feature on your campaign page. Treat it like a persuasive story that unfolds one slide at a time and gives investors a complete picture of why they should invest by the end.

When you're setting up your campaign, you'll have the option to upload an existing pitch deck or to build one with text and image from our editor. No matter which method you choose, find our best practices for pitching your company and telling your story below.

Inexperienced founders [...] try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work—if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors.

—Paul Graham, ”How to Convince Investors”

How to create clear slides

Almost everyone has been asked to make a slide deck at some point. Yet, great slide decks are rare. The best place to start making a persuasive slide deck is the individual slide itself. Here are some principles to create solid slides, the building blocks for your overall pitch.

• One point per slide. Each slide should make one point, and one point only. Have lots of points to make? Just make more slides. Let the story unfold one slide at a time.
• Make the most important point your header. Don’t waste the most valuable space on your slide with a header like “The Problem” or “Traction.” The header is what you want your investor to remember—not a chapter marker. A header that says “Traction” means nothing. A header that says “We’re growing 30% MoM since launching 6 months ago” is a takeaway.
• Make your point in 7 words or less. Just like Your 10-second Elevator Pitch, go through the exercise of rewriting your headers (your most important points) until they’re ruthlessly clear and simple. Seven words is a guideline, not a requirement.
• At the end, read the headers of your slide as a story. Isolate your slide headers. Do your headers read as a meaningful, standalone story? If not, keep working the headers until they do.

How to assemble your slides into a persuasive story

Just like a famous novel or a Hollywood film, your pitch deck should begin with a hook. Hook investors into your pitch with the most compelling piece of your story, or your company's greatest strength at this point in time. In other words, don't leave the best for last—make the best part our entry point, and build the rest of the story around it.

If you're a pre-revenue or pre-seed startup with a unique vision for the future, teach us about the opportunity and prove that you'll execute successfully. Remember that your opportunity slide should educate us on a unique insight about the problem—don't just slap a dramatic blanket statement like “The insurance industry is broken” on your slide and call it a hook.

From there, lead with your strongest evidence that you're uniquely poised to succeed. If you have a great team, talk about your team. If you have great customer feedback, lead with your social proof. Go on to hit your solution, business model, the next milestone you can hit, and your vision.

If you're seeing early traction, then lead with your successes. Start with a short blurb about what your company does, and continue by showing (not just telling) how successful you've been so far. Customer reviews, blue-chip logos, and impressive metrics can all be used to signal your traction. From there, fill us in on your problem and solution, team, business model, and why you're raising.

If you're primarily a community venture—maybe a local restaurant, retailer, or even a sports team—then start with a clear picture of exactly what you offer and why people love it. Paint an immersive picture of your space, your product, and your people such that strangers on the internet can understand exactly why people in your existing community love your organization so much. Once you have that hook, build up more detail around your traction and social proof, business model, team, founding story, and more.

If people primarily love you for your mission, then lead with why you exist. Your goal in this type of pitch is to create an emotional hook. Consider beginning with a slide about your mission, a vision of what the world looks like if you succeed, your unique founding story, vivid problem statements, and testimonials from customers. Then fill in the other details, like your solution, team, traction, and proposed use of funds.

If you're a hockey stick and you're allocating part of your VC round to your community, then write why you're raising a Community Round, and the rest could be a blank white page.

What to include in your slides (with examples)

In no particular order, here are core slides to include and what to put on them.

Problem Slides

What is the problem your company solves? Your answer to this question should be the header of the Problem slide.

Note that this is NOT a blanket statement like “the fitness industry is broken,” or “gardeners face huge problems.” In fact, if your problem statement includes the word “problem” in it, it’s not there yet.

Your problem statement is a unique insight that teaches your audience something they didn’t know before. For example, Michael Seibel describes how Gmail’s unique insight reframed what an inbox actually is, rather than saying that people needed “better email”:

“[Gmail's] unique insight was that the email inbox is a personal database of communication and documents. Why would a user ever want to delete anything in their personal database? Gmail gave people enough storage so they would never have to delete a conversation. It’s not that people needed email. It already existed. And it’s not that people needed better email. That’s too vague. A unique insight is specific and doesn’t contain complicated language.”

Here's what you can include in your Problem slide or section:

1. Who is your target customer?
2. What is their pain point?
3. How does your customer solve this problem today?
4. What’s your unique insight about the problem?
5. How does this problem impact real people and/or real businesses?

Problem Slide Examples

Solution Slides

What are you building to solve the problem? Your answer to this question is the headline of your solution slide. Just like your problem statement, this requires specificity and insight. If your solution statement includes the word “solution” in it, you can probably keep working on it.

Here’s what you can include in your Solution slides:

1. What are you building?
2. Who are you building for?
3. Why is your solution unique?
4. What are the key benefits your solution helps your user achieve?
5. Why now?

Solution Slide Examples

Traction Slides

In the words of YC’s Michael Seibel, “What is the ratio between what you’ve done and how long you’ve been working on it?”

You may choose to show your traction by including a graph. If you do, remember to summarize your graph clearly into an insight in your header (e.g. “We 3x’d revenue in the past 9 months”). Do not rely on your readers to actually interpret your graph.

Remember to label your axes and figures clearly, so that an investor can either skim the headline or look closer for details.

When showing growth, monthly growth will often look better than annual, and line graphs will get the point across better than bar graphs.

Here’s what you can include in your Traction slides—in order of most to least powerful:

1. # of customers since {time}
2. $ of revenue since {time}
3. Organic growth since {time}
4. Key product development milestones since {time}
5. Partnerships {with household names}
6. Raised funds {from household names}
7. Endorsem*nts {from household names}
8. Qualitative social proof, like testimonials

Traction Slide Examples

Your Business Model Slides

How you make money? How do your users translate to revenue? Include actuals, plans, and hopes. If this is complicated, add the details to Wefunder’s Q&A section rather than getting bogged down in the details in your pitch.

Your business model slides can include:

1. Pricing
2. Average account size and/or lifetime value
3. Sales & distribution model
4. Customer/pipeline list

Business Model Slide Examples

Opportunity Size Slides

What’s the size of the opportunity you’re tackling? How much do you stand to win if you’re successful? Show your most persuasive evidence that this opportunity is real.

Don't conjure a random huge number just for the sake of including this slide—if you don't have something meaningful to say here, then omit this slide. A good reason to include it is if you can show your work and break down how you arrived at the number, so that investors can understand your thought process.

Here are some ways to show the opportunity size:

1. Bottom-up market sizing (read more on how to conduct market sizing here)
2. Big exit potential
3. Market timing: new regulation or technology
4. Valuation / attractive deal

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Opportunity Slide Examples

Team Slides

What gives your team an unfair advantage in this space? Instead of listing your team members’ generic bios and headshots, show the specific relation between their experience and the problem you’re solving.

Here’s what you can include in your team slides:

1. Founding team's relevant experience with your particular problem
2. Previous exits or operator experience
3. Blue-chip brands in team’s past experience

Team Slide Examples

Customer Testimonial Slides

When you’re showing customer testimonials, make sure to select quotes that provide context. For example, showing 3 customer reviews that all say “This changed my life and I can’t believe I didn’t know about it before” is a waste of a quote. Instead, reviews should restate the specific value of your solution in your customers’ words.

If you have long quotes, don’t expect an investor to read the whole thing. Summarize the quotes or style the quote with your own emphasis (like inline bolding).

Also consider capturing reviews in the native app they were posted in, so that they look organic and realistic. (For example, a screenshot from Trustpilot, Apple’s App Store, TikTok videos, IG stories, and tweets.)

Testimonial Slide Examples

Press Slides

When showing Press as social proof, don’t just post a link to the press. Surface the important points right on the campaign page: the name of the publication (and a logo if blue chip), the title of the piece, and an excerpt from the piece that strengthens your pitch.

Don’t expect on investors to click into a press piece and read the whole thing—summarize it for them instead.

Press Slide Examples

Use of Funds Slides

Let investors know what milestones you’ll hit with this new round of funding.

Lots of Wefunder investors are excited to follow your journey after they invest. Once you add hundreds of them to your cap table, you could even reach out to them for introductions, referrals, or other creative ways to involve them in hitting your next goals.

Here’s some things you can include in your Use of Funds slide:

1. Name the fundraising goal amount again
2. What you’ll use it for
3. What milestones you’ll hit in how much time

Use of Funds Slide Examples

End on a sincere CTA

Say thank you, be positive, and close with a call to action: “Invest in {company} and become part of our future.”

CTA Slide Examples

Extra Resources

1. ‍“How to Present to Investors” by Paul Graham (Y Combinator)
2. “How to Convince Investors” by Paul Graham (Y Combinator)
3. “Advice on Pitching” by Aaron Harris (Y Combinator)
4. “How to Build Your Seed Round Pitch Deck” by Aaron Harris (Y Combinator)
5. “How to Design a Better Pitch Deck” by Kevin Hale (Y Combinator)