- When you're building out your pitch deck
for your Series A round,
there's gonna be a lot of things that carries over
from your seed round.
Your messaging, your problem, your solution,
at least hopefully, unless you've pivoted,
but in your Series A pitch deck,
you're gonna have to have three slides
that are wildly different,
that really speak to the new gravity
and the scale of the business,
so you can prove that you're ready for a Series A.
And in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through those three key slides.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody, welcome to Unstoppable,
I'm TK and on this channel, I help SaaS founders like you,
accelerate your path to the next stage of growth
with an unstoppable strategy.
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Three episodes a week on growing SaaS businesses.
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that way you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode with the TK Energy.
And if you're already part of my SaaS,
Go-To-Market coaching program
if you're part of this community, welcome back,
truly great to see you over here.
All right, so I remember when I was raising
my Series A for ToutApp, my last SaaS business,
I was building out the pitch deck,
and everything just felt different.
The seed round was a lot easier.
The seed round was all about, all right,
we have a product, it's email productivity,
bunch of people can use it.
We have revenues as slowly started coming through inbound,
give us money, super easy.
But a time we were raising the Series A,
we were in marketplaces,
we were going after a much bigger term,
we were going after enterprise sales people specifically.
We had marketplaces, we had inbound,
we were starting to do outbound
with a self service business, a sales driven business,
we had significant revenues,
we were going after the Series A.
There's a lot of stuff that came together.
And you could just feel the weight of that,
you had to communicate that story in the right way.
And I had to raise my hand I had to say,
"You know what, I gotta get help on this
'cause this feels wildly different."
And I'm glad I did, because that's why it worked out,
that's where we're able to raise our Series A
and go on and raise our Series B.
So in this video,
I'm gona walk you through what I learned
so that you can get through it fast,
I'm gonna walk you through the three slides
that you absolutely must have in your Series A pitch deck.
So if you're excited, you can go and smash that like button
and let's go to Ansible number one, slide number one.
The first one is,
and I learned this, I did a prior video
about what it takes to be Series A ready.
I hit up some of my most favorite Series A investors,
I hit up Ben Horowitz, I hit up Nakul Mandan,
I hit up Greg Gretsch, you can check that video out here.
You don't have to go right now, I'll link to it below,
but you should watch it after this
since you are getting ready to raise to Series A.
But what they said was, what mattered the most to them
for Series A readiness, was consistency and revenue.
That was it.
The consistency and the metrics,
starting to see that, okay they're getting closer
to a real business.
It doesn't have to be perfect,
it doesn't have to be amazing growth,
but consistency was key.
So the first slide you really wanna dig into
for your Series A, is your traction slide,
which makes sense, you need to have that in your seed deck.
But what you really need to be able to show,
is that there's some level of consistency,
whether it's in terms of number of users,
or some atomic unit that is consistently going up
or revenues, revenues being the biggest one.
And what you wanna show,
is that there's consistency month after month.
Investors, especially Series A,
they don't wanna see spikes going up and down
unless you can really explain it.
So you really wanna show that look, month over month,
we've consistently had growth in this big unit
that we've been focused on in the seed round.
Ideally it's revenue,
because 70% plus of companies that raises Series A today,
actually already have revenue.
So if you don't have revenues yet,
Series A might actually be hard for you,
especially in B2B SaaS, which is what I focus on.
So, what you wanna be able to show in this traction slide,
is consistency in the revenue ideally,
and also you need to be able to talk to
and explain how you're doing it.
Investors don't just wanna see the consistency,
they also wanna understand that
you understand what's going on.
It's not some fluke, it's not some crazy thing,
you understand how you're generating demand,
what your go-to-market machine looks like,
or your ICP looks like,
all the things that we talked about in this channel,
on how to build, right?
So you wanna show that in this slide,
in this traction slide.
Key things here, show that big metric,
show that it's consistently going up,
and show how you're getting it,
or at least explain and talk to how you're getting it.
That's the first slide that's super important
and ends up being a lot more media in the Series A side.
Switch to Series B, then it's gonna be multiple slides
on your go-to-market and that gets really fun.
The second slide that's super important,
is not quite a slide,
but it's it's a core message
that's gonna be thought about and asked about
severally through the whole presentation that you're doing.
And that's essentially your ask slide
and really the question of, how much are you raising?
VCs will almost always ask you,
and it's almost always a trick question.
They wanna understand like how you're thinking
about the fundraise, are you expecting a certain evaluation?
As a first time founder,
the one thing I didn't understand was,
essentially I was selling a piece of my company
and we were trying to figure out a price.
Like forget the fact whether it's worthy or not,
whether this right idea or not,
but ultimately, it's a sales conversation,
you're selling a piece of your company.
And so the investor's like,
"All right, how much does this cost?
I want to know if I can afford it,
I wonder if I can write that size check
based on my fund size,
I wanna know if the valuation expectations are reasonable.
And then I want to know if this is a worthy enough product
to buy, essentially", right?
One of the things you're really gonna have to get ahead of,
is understanding how much you're gonna be raising.
So you know, on average, a series A is about $9 million,
I read that recently, I think it was a YC article.
And you know, I've seen higher,
but ultimately, here's a rule of thumb,
if for a Series A,
an investor is gonna want 20% of the company, on average,
so you want 20%.
Maybe they'll go up to 25%,
if like there's a little bit more risk involved,
and if it's a super competitive deal,
they'll go down to 15% of the company.
So because they're getting that percentage,
they already kinda know
you're gonna mean a certain ballpark
in terms of check size,
but they'll still ask you the question,
they'll ask you the question,
'cause they wanna understand
exactly how you're thinking about this fundraise,
and how much money you're expecting,
and how you're gonna use that money
to actually grow the company to get to the Series B stage.
It's really a test.
So a couple of things on this,
you wanna make sure you have an ask slide
to explain that your fundraising.
But when you're putting out how much you're raising,
always put a range,
put a range because sometimes investors have a limit
on what kind of check size they can write,
they have a limit
on what kind of validation sensitivities they have.
There's a whole bunch of things.
So what you wanna do, is you don't wanna box someone out,
you wanna say arrange like three to 5 million,
or five to 8 million, or eight to 10 million.
And you don't wanna go on a wide range,
that means that you can't form an opinion
but on relatively midline range
so that people understand that you've thought about this.
So that's the ask slide,
and they may asked him the beginning of the conversation,
they may ask you in the end,
they are asking the second maybe,
it will come up, so you wanna get ahead of it
and think through it.
Now, before I go to slide number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
If you're starting to see the power
in just these two things,
these two slides that are super important
in your pitch deck for your series A,
can I just get a yes, in the comments below?
Also smash that like button if you haven't already.
Also, if you're in the process
of building out your SaaS business,
going towards a series A, thinking about growth,
and also building out a pitch deck,
I invite you to download
my five point growth strategy guide.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video,
I'll also link to it below.
But let's go to the next slide.
So the next slide you wanna do,
is your use of funds slide.
This could also be your financial slide
or your growth projection slide,
whatever you wanna call it.
But there needs to be a slide
that shows how you're gonna grow the business.
And what investors wanna see,
there's a couple of things that are really going on here.
They wanna understand what the past performance looks like,
the health of the company.
They also wanna understand,
if you say you're raising a certain amount,
they want to see how you think
you're gonna actually put that money into play,
and they wanna see what the growth projection looks like
to see, well, will this person over the 12 to 18 months
that they're gonna spend this money,
get to a Series B level?
'Cause investors really trying to figure out,
is this a good thing?
If I put money into this,
are they gonna get to that next milestone?
Will they be able to raise again?
'Cause if those things can't happen,
then they lose their money, essentially, right?
So you need to have a use of fun slide or financial slide
or financial model slide
that really articulates like, look,
here's how we grow,
here's how our go-to-market machine works,
here's how we're gonna put in $1,
here's where you get $2 out of it,
or maybe $1.50, whatever it is,
and here's how we're gonna deploy that cash,
and here's how we're gonna ramp
to get to this next level of growth.
Now, I don't know about you,
but I wasn't the greatest in financial modeling.
So I raise my hand and ask for help.
And I encourage you to do that as well.
There's a whole group of people that are part time CFOs,
part time CPAs, there's experts in financial modeling
that can actually sit down with you,
and build out an Excel spreadsheet
of how you're gonna grow the business.
They'll reverse engineer your go-to-market machine,
they'll figure out what channels
require how much money, your CAC, your LTV,
and based on that, on how much you're raising,
they'll be able to help you think about
how you're gonna grow.
Do not try to fudge this, do not try to do this on your own,
don't take a masterclass on.
It's just not worth it get an expert,
because there's so many nuances that go into this.
And if you actually get this down,
and you really get a compelling financial model
and a slide that you show it,
honestly, like for the fundraising, it's great,
but also in terms of understanding
the levers in your business
on how are you gonna go to market,
how are you gonna drive that growth,
you understand a lot more as well.
It's super, super powerful.
So, those are the three most important slides.
Number one, I showed the attraction slide
with the consistency in revenue, get specific on that.
Number two, have the ask slide
and also just understand and signal
how much you're raising in a range.
And number three, have that financial slide
and really think about the growth levers
and show how you're gonna put the money into play,
and get to the point where you can go raise a Series B.
Those are the three biggest things
that you'll wanna address in your Series A pitch deck.
Now, these are the three most important slides,
if you're building out your full pitch deck,
and you wanna understand what all the other slides are,
I did another video on the 12 slides
that you need to have in your entire pitch deck.
It's a more broader overview.
So you can check that video out over here,
and also I'll link to it below.
Additionally,
there's a bunch of stuff that comes together, right?
In order to get to series A,
you need to get your product strategy right,
you need get your market strategy right,
you go-to-market strategy right, your funding strategy.
So all these things, I have a bunch of videos on,
so I've encapsulated it into my SaaS growth guide.
I encourage you to download, that's completely free,
it has all the resources you need
to really get that one page strategy,
and get all the stuff in order,
and links to all the key videos
that will help you figure this out.
So you can grab a copy of that,
by going to getunstoppable.com/strategy,
or just follow the link below.
All the videos I mentioned
will be linked below as well, all the resources for you.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button.
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be sure the subscribe button and that bell icon
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I dropped an episode
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If you're looking for help and growing your SaaS business,
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And we may be a fit, if there is a fit,
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Lastly remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business,
but when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, I'll see you the next episode.
(gentle music)