Seed deck cut from 34 to 14 slides for a Darmstadt sensor start-up

Situation

An industrial-sensor software start-up in Darmstadt, spun out of the university, nine staff, about €480,000 in annual recurring revenue from eleven paying customers in machine building. The two founders were raising a €1.5 million seed round and had a first meeting with a Frankfurt venture fund in three weeks.

They had a story and the numbers. On paper they had a 34-slide deck in the university’s template, in German only, with the customer economics on slide 27 and no slide that said in one line what the company does. A fund associate reads a deck for about three minutes before deciding whether the partner sees it. This one did not survive three minutes.

Approach

The lower tier of this service takes an existing narrative and gives it a shape and a design. We kept the founders’ story and rebuilt the deck around it.

We started with a two-hour session in which the founders talked us through the 34 slides. From that we fixed the order: problem, product, proof, market, business model, team, the ask. The eleven customers and the €480,000 recurring revenue moved from slide 27 to slide 4, because a fund wants to see paying customers before it wants to see a market-size chart.

Then we cut. Fourteen slides in the main deck and a six-slide appendix for the questions that always come in the second meeting: pricing detail, sales pipeline, the twelve-month cash plan, and the current shareholding. Each slide carries its one message in its title, so that a reader who reads only the titles gets the whole story.

We designed the deck from scratch in the company’s colours and delivered it in English and German, because the fund’s investment committee works in English and the two Hessen family offices on the founders’ list work in German. We checked every number against the founders’ bookkeeping export and the cap table their lawyer maintains. Nothing in the deck is tax or legal advice, and the lawyer and the tax adviser (Steuerberater) reviewed the shareholding and any tax wording on their own ground.

Result

In this scenario the founders walked into the fund meeting with a deck an associate could read in three minutes and a partner in ten. Over the following six weeks the founders held eleven investor meetings from the same two files, and two term-sheet conversations opened, one with the Frankfurt fund and one with a family office in Hessen. The round closed at €1.5 million, at a valuation before the new money (pre-money) of about €6 million, four months after our delivery.

What it cost

The engagement cost €3,400 as a fixed price, quoted before the work started. That bought the two-hour narrative session, the 14-slide main deck and the six-slide appendix, custom design, both language versions as editable files, and one round of revisions after the first investor meeting. Delivery took two weeks. The work is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery.

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