How do I make a title slide that gets an investor to keep reading past slide one?
The short answer
Your title slide is not a logo parking lot. Put your one-line value proposition in plain language directly under the company name, so a stranger knows what you do in three seconds. Skip the mission statement and the stock photo. The single sharpest thing you can add is a concrete tagline that states who you serve and the outcome you create, not what category you are in.
Go deeper, your way
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeBeginner
Why we picked it
This is the discipline your title slide lives or dies by: Seibel's rule is to name the company and say what it does in the plainest possible words, then run the two-sentence test (email a smart friend, have them explain it back, revise until they get it with zero questions). His worked line, 'Socialcam is a mobile app that makes it easy to take videos and share them with friends and family,' is exactly the one-liner you drop under your company name.
Why we picked it
This is the fill-in-the-blank machine for the tagline itself. It teaches Steve Blank's 'we help X do Y by doing Z' formula and shows it worked live ('I help marketing teams resonate with their target audiences by communicating with clarity and compassion'), so you can write who-you-serve plus the-outcome in one pass. It also dissects Slack, Airbnb, and four others so you see the customer language, not category jargon, that actually lands.
Why we picked it
You asked for annotated real title slides from funded startups, and this is the deepest running archive of exactly that: slide-by-slide teardowns of decks that actually raised (MegaMod's $1.9M seed, Xyte's $30M Series A, Uber's pre-seed), with the cover slide critiqued alongside the rest. Reading three or four of these shows you precisely how a weak logo-and-mission title slide reads to an investor versus one that states who it serves in the first line.
