The five things seed investors check
This is the checklist we run with pre-seed and seed founders before they send a deck.
| What they check | Passes | Fails |
|---|---|---|
| One-line pitch | Homepage headline matches the deck word for word | A different tagline, or buzzwords |
| Team | Named founders with photos, roles and LinkedIn profiles | No team page, first names only, stock photos |
| Product exists | Screenshots, a demo video, a waitlist count or named pilots | "Coming soon" with nothing behind it |
| Email domain | Founders email from the site's domain | Gmail, or a domain that doesn't match |
| Nothing broken | Every link, form and page works | Lorem ipsum, 404s, a form that goes nowhere |
Each fail gives an investor a reason to doubt something in your deck. None of the fixes needs a redesign.
We see how investors present themselves because we build websites for investment firms too: a global PropTech VC, built in Webflow from its design team's Figma files with 96% design fidelity, and a policy and investment firm whose existing site needed 209 technical SEO, structure and performance issues resolved. Both projects came down to the basics: consistent design, fast pages and nothing broken.
When investors look, and for how long
Your site gets checked at three points:
- Before a first call: what you do, who it's for and whether it fits their thesis.
- After the meeting: whether the deck's claims hold up from the outside. A site that contradicts the deck costs you credibility here.
- In diligence: customers, pricing, careers and legal pages.
DocSend's research found investors spend less than 3 minutes on a pitch deck. Funded pre-seed decks in 2020 got over four minutes; unfunded ones got 1 minute 30 seconds.
That data is about decks, not websites. Our read: if your deck gets minutes, plan for your homepage to get less. The headline and the team page do most of the work.
The team page carries the most weight
Paul Gompers, William Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev surveyed 885 VCs at 681 firms. In their results, 95% of VC firms named the management team as an important factor and 47% named it the most important. Business model came in at 83%, product at 74% and market at 68%.
That measures how VCs decide, not how they read websites. But your team page is where they check the team without you in the room. It needs:
- Full names and consistent, recent photos
- Roles, plus experience that fits the problem you're solving
- LinkedIn profiles that match the deck
- Advisors only if they'd take an investor's call about you
What to show when traction is thin
You don't need revenue on the site. You need proof the product is real and someone wants it.
- Product screens and a short demo video
- Named pilots or design partners, with their permission
- A real waitlist count
- Customer logos, only with permission
Keep revenue, burn, pipeline and anything a competitor shouldn't see in the deck or the data room.
One rule covers every public number: it matches the deck and stays current. A stale figure reads worse than none, because the investor now has to ask which one is true.
What makes a startup look early
These are the signals that make a company look like it isn't set up yet:
- A site on a free builder subdomain
- Founders emailing from Gmail
- Stock photos of handshakes and meeting rooms
- "Coming soon" pages with nothing behind them
- A homepage headline that differs from the deck
- An old copyright year in the footer
- Broken links, or a form with no privacy policy
- ChatGPT or Google describing you wrongly
You can fix most of these in a week. Work in this order:
- Rewrite the homepage headline to match the deck's one-liner.
- Build or fix the team page.
- Add product proof: screens, a demo, pilots you can name.
- Move founder email to your own domain.
- Crawl the site for broken links, 404s and placeholder copy.
- Ask ChatGPT and Google what your company does, then fix the pages that confuse them. Our guide to brand visibility in AI search covers how.
Pre-seed vs seed: what the site must prove
| Stage | What the site must prove | What can wait |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed | A clear one-liner, real founders, proof the product exists | Pricing, blog, careers |
| Seed | A small site that matches the deck, named pilots or first customers, a short demo | Press page, a full careers section |
At pre-seed, a single landing page can pass if it covers the five checks. We cover what that page needs in do you need a website before applying to Y Combinator. By Series A the checks change. Our Series A website and brand checklist lists them.
Fix what you have if the five checks are the only gaps. Rebuild when the fixes add up to new copy, new pages and a new look.
Our Raise kit starts from $12,000, with a typical timeline of 3 to 4 weeks: brand foundations, a 5 to 7 page Webflow website you can edit yourself and an investor deck of up to 15 slides. See how we build a website, brand and deck for pre-seed and seed. Prices are starting points. Your quote depends on scope, not your funding round.
Send us your site and your deck. We'll tell you which of the five checks it fails and what to fix first. Start with our Webflow design and development service or contact us.
