Hey OpenVC founder here! Thanks for trying the Fundability test :)
The test is not out of 100 points. The idea is to place you against other companies raising at the same time. If you have no revenue and everyone else has revenue, you will rank lower because at the end of the day, it's a competition.
As a general rule, investors invest if (a) you have track record or (b) you have traction i.e. users and/or revenue. If you have neither, look at grants, accelerators, and family and friends instead. And your own money, ofc.
I know it's counter-intuitive for many. Aren't VCs supposed to take risks and put the first check in?
That's not how VCs think. They will see 5,000 decks a year and invest in 5, so they just pick the strongest projects at a given point in time.
Not denying your efforts and potential, but there's just another project that looks better on paper: more proven team, more traction. It's all relative.
We just launched a new way for investors to find startups to invest in.
Completely free for both sides.
How it works:
- Founder signs up and enters company details
- Top deals are anonymized and listed on an open page
- Investor can browse deals and request intros
- If founder accepts, then the details are revealed to the investor
We beta tested with 50 investors and generated 50 qualified calls from 200 "request" clicks, all with zero human intervention from us.
I was surprised this didn't already exist. Seems simple enough, but it could create a new deal flow channel on top of warm intros and cold emails.
- I use the email to announce my upcoming product to potential users. It's also a free product and also a product for tech founders so it seems fair to me. If I cannot communicate with my users, then it's hard to build something.
- 67 decks = 1210 slides. You are the 3rd person to point this out so maybe my English is wrong. For me, 1 deck is a whole presentation that includes many slides. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The slides are from decks that are publicly available on Slideshare.
The data (company name, year, funding stage, slide category...) is manually added by me with a lot of Google search.
The download includes 67 decks which corresponds to 1,210 slides.
It is true that in the download email, I also announce my next product, which is also free and also for entrepreneurs. So this seems fair to me - but happy to reconsider my position on that.
One more thing that I see in good pitch decks: an intro slide about the "Context" or "Change" that is driving the startup. There was a good Medium post about it - will try to find it.
The test is not out of 100 points. The idea is to place you against other companies raising at the same time. If you have no revenue and everyone else has revenue, you will rank lower because at the end of the day, it's a competition.
As a general rule, investors invest if (a) you have track record or (b) you have traction i.e. users and/or revenue. If you have neither, look at grants, accelerators, and family and friends instead. And your own money, ofc.
I know it's counter-intuitive for many. Aren't VCs supposed to take risks and put the first check in?
That's not how VCs think. They will see 5,000 decks a year and invest in 5, so they just pick the strongest projects at a given point in time.
Not denying your efforts and potential, but there's just another project that looks better on paper: more proven team, more traction. It's all relative.
On that topic, check out these 2 graphs that apply to your case: https://x.com/StephNass/status/1859447351187787826
For a longer read with some maths, this post by Jonah Probell is eye opening: https://www.openvc.app/blog/seed-stage-is-about-picking-winn...