Anonymized snapshot — company name withheld under NDA.
Challenge
A construction-industry SaaS company came in with a rare mix for a Series A: profitable on an operating basis, $4.2M ARR, 128% net dollar retention, and a dominant position in a four-state region. The problem was the deck had been built for their board, not for outside investors.
Everything was there — cohorts, expansion, gross margin, CAC payback — but the story read like a quarterly update. Investors kept coming away understanding the numbers and missing the shape of the business. Specifically: they missed that the expansion motion inside each general contractor was the whole story, and that the land product was essentially a customer-acquisition vehicle for the multi-product platform.
The founder had taken first meetings with eleven funds. Three moved to partner meetings. None had put a term sheet on the table.
Approach
We ran week one as a re-positioning exercise. The founder-interview sessions pulled out the real pattern: every closed customer hit 1.8x expansion within eighteen months, and the expansion was across three adjacent product modules the company had quietly built over two years. The deck had been hiding that fact across four separate slides.
We rebuilt the story around a single claim: this is a multi-product platform disguised as a wedge product, and the platform is already working. Every downstream slide flowed from that.
Week two the design focused on two things that had been weak: a cohort visualization that showed expansion by product module, and a unit-economics slide that made the CAC-to-LTV story obvious in one look. The product section became three tightly annotated screens, one per module, with a fourth slide tying them together as the platform.
Week three we rehearsed the founder through two scenarios — the quick partner-meeting pitch and the slower data-room deep-dive — and built a five-slide expansion appendix for follow-up meetings.
Outcome
The founder re-engaged four funds with the new deck. Two moved to term sheets within thirty days. The Series A closed at $9M on a valuation 40% above the initial target, led by a category-focused fund with a construction-tech portfolio, with the follow-on allocation oversubscribed by two existing investors.
What changed in the deck
- Lead narrative reframed from "vertical SaaS with good retention" to "multi-product platform with a proven expansion motion."
- New cohort-by-module slide replaced a single-line ARR chart.
- Product section rebuilt as three annotated modules plus a unified platform view.
- Unit economics collapsed into one CAC-LTV slide with the payback curve rendered directly.
- The entire competitive-landscape section got cut. It was adding nothing the investor did not already know.
- A data-room sibling deck with deeper cohort cuts was delivered alongside the main deck.