Fundraising & Investors

How do I make a title slide that gets an investor to keep reading past slide one?

A starting point

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

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked

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📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

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.

How to Pitch Your Company (Michael Seibel / Y Combinator)

From Y Combinator by Michael Seibel 12 min read

  • Lead with the company name plus what it does in one predigested sentence, not a mission statement or a category label
  • Use the two-sentence test: if a smart friend can't explain it back in their own words, your one-liner is not done
  • Clarity beats sounding impressive; 'you don't need to sound cool, you need to be clear' is the whole game for slide one
Open ycombinator.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

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.

How to Write a Value Proposition (+ 6 Modern Examples)

From Help Scout by Help Scout team 10 min read

  • Steve Blank's 'we help (X) do (Y) by doing (Z)' forces you to name the customer and the outcome before the feature
  • The worked copywriting example shows the exact shape of a one-line value prop you can paste under your company name
  • Write in your customer's words, not your category's: 'authentic local travel' beats 'peer-to-peer accommodation marketplace'
Open helpscout.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

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.

Pitch Deck Teardown (TechCrunch series)

From TechCrunch by Haje Jan Kamps 15 min read per teardown

  • See real cover slides from decks that closed money, annotated for what the investor actually registers in three seconds
  • Contrast a vague category title slide against a concrete who-plus-outcome one across multiple real companies
  • Some full teardowns sit behind TechCrunch's paywall, but many cover-slide critiques and images are readable free
Open techcrunch.com →

People also ask

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