Introduction

2023 was a tough year for a lot of companies and 2024 isn’t going to be an exception (or will it?). Nearly 30If you have been following our posts, you probably would know us as a CFO co-pilot. And if you are new here, we are Obsidian - a B2B SaaS platform that is changing the way companies track KPIs and manage financial workflows.

We launched on 2nd Jan 2024 and have 8 paying customers so far with 104+ in free trials. We are building Obsidian in public and are excited to share our progress transparently. We currently have 450+ integrations across various banks, accounting tools, billing systems, product analytics, and more.K companies shut down in 2023 as they ran out of cash and couldn’t raise capital further.

‍Our vision is to give you a pocket CFO so you are never stuck without answers.

Last week, we initiated our pre-seed fundraising campaign and I spent about 2 weeks preparing for it extensively. In the sections below, I will be sharing a few aspects of how I designed our pitch deck, the thought process behind it, feedback loops and iterations of the deck, investor reachout, and more.

How I made our pitch deck?

A lot of first time founders run after making the deck look good without realising the importance of the content. My initial plan was to focus on getting the content of the slides clear. In the process, I created our draft deck with 31 slides.

Now the herculean task was to cut down the content just right enough to tease investors. So, I created a layout as below to streamline the content. With the content at hand and a layout, the slides were cut down to half the first draft.

The next step was to determine what slides would be heavily visual and what would be descriptive. When you’re making a slide deck, you want to make sure everything you do is well thought out - especially asking WHY REMOVE and not WHY ADD to each bit of content.

Once I had the final version ready, I reached out to angel investors on LinkedIn who have helped other startups in the past with the decks. Some of them are Johannis Hatt, Hendry Hosemann, Harry Morgan, Dr. Oksana Koryak, and others.

The feedback I received from them was varying but is summarised below -

1. GTM (Go-to-market strategy) is poorly explained.

2. GTM requires clear communication.

3. Market sizing needs revisiting.

4. Competition: Comparison with intelligent bookkeeping tools and the market landscape should be clear.

5. Deal terms: Articulate the use of funds more clearly. They were too abstract.

So, I sat down to fix these and re-sent it to another batch of friends / angels. This time it was all okay.

Now the job was to create a target list of investors to reach out.

Potch Deck Roadmap

Investor Reach out

If there’s one thing I learned from years of being an entrepreneur is that you can’t spray and pray. My strategy has been more network based. I have always been close to my university alumni and that was my starting point.

I sent out 25 emails to investors in my network and followed up twice. We got a 60% rejection rate and 40% call conversions. And then by the end of the week, we had our commitments sorted.

Now our goal is to raise the remaining £400K of our allocation and my strategy is investor referrals and personal outreach. We made a list of 500 investors matching personas of the investors who committed while also having a list of 1000+ angel investors.

If you’d like me to share our deck or investor list, comment on this post and repost it. And if you’re an investor and would like to invest in us, reach out to me either via LinkedIn or email me at anil@obsidianlaunch.co