VCs are now spending an average of 2 minutes and 18 seconds on startup fundraising pitch decks according to a recent report released by DocSend. 

With so much content out in the world, it’s no wonder that our attention spans are decreasing, it’s why it’s more critical than ever to be value-led and concise when it comes to pitching.

So how do you stand out from the pack and keep hold of an investors attention long enough to seal the deal? A new service from Dropbox DocSend may be able to help.

The DocSend Fundraising Network (DFN) was setup in 2020 during the time of Covid lockdown to answer the question; ‘who’s writing checks still?’

I sat down with Michelle Fahlbusch, from the Startups Partnership team at DocSend to learn more about what the DFN does for accelerators, studios and founders alike.

“Fundraising is a continually evolving process so we established a service where founders can submit their pitch deck to be assessed by a human (no bots involved here) on our team. The caveat here is that it has to be submitted via a DocSend link, so they technically don’t have to be a customer yet, but they do have to start a free trial.”

“After activating the trial, the founder sends their pitch deck to pitchdeck@docsend.com and our team then take look at it and offer feedback. To date we’ve seen over 100,000 decks.” 

“Let’s say it’s a B2B software company. Our team will say, okay, on page three, successful decks have embedded a demo video right after their problem page. Or, successful decks typically have 55 words per slide. These are some enhancements you can make to your deck. The feedback is going to be very specific per deck, but it’s always going to be based on the most recent metrics and statistics that we have.”

“If the founder would like, we can then feature their deck on a repository that our investor partners have access to. If they see something they like, they can request intros to those founders.”

“We get probably between five to 10 intro requests per week from investors looking for founders. It’s a win-win for everybody. Our pitch deck analysis team says, hey, founder X, investor Y wants to talk to you. Are you comfortable with that?”

“We want to meet founders where they’re at. Especially right now, there’s a lot of unknown. There’s a lot of pressure. We’re right there with Morrow in wanting to just help founders be successful.”