Your First Pitch Deck

The yearly value of all active subscriptions in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), counted as if every customer keeps paying at today's rate for the next twelve months.

Everything you spend to land one new paying customer in CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), fully loaded across ad budget, sales team comp, and the tools they run on.

The ledger that tracks who owns what in your company (every founder, employee, investor, SAFE holder, and option grant), usually expressed as percentages and share counts on a fully-diluted basis.

What happens to your ownership percentage when the company issues new shares: your slice of the pie shrinks, even as the pie itself gets bigger.

When a newcomer wins by attacking the cheap, ignored end of a market with a simpler good-enough product, then improves until it eats the incumbents from below.

The deep background check an investor or acquirer runs before a deal closes, going through your finances, contracts, cap table, code, and customer numbers to confirm the company is really what the pitch said it was.

A business loop where each turn feeds the next, so growth, quality, or cost gets a little better every cycle and eventually becomes unstoppable.

The share of each revenue dollar left after you pay the direct costs of delivering it (hosting, payment processing, customer support), reported as a percentage.

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): the tight slice of buyers (industry, size, role, pain, budget) where your product wins fast, loses rarely, and pays the most.

The total gross-margin dollars a customer is expected to leave behind across their entire relationship with you in LTV (Lifetime Value), shrinking as churn rises and stretching out as they stick around.

How much gross margin a customer eventually pays back compared to what they cost to acquire, where investors want at least 3:1 to believe the business model actually works.

The motion where you sell a small initial contract to one team inside a company, then grow the account over time by adding seats, products, and adjacent departments.

The investor who anchors a round by setting the valuation, writing the biggest check, and usually taking the board seat, with everyone else filling in around their terms.

The predictable subscription revenue your customers owe you this month in MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), with one-time fees and usage spikes stripped out so the number actually repeats.

The smallest, ugliest, most embarrassing version of your product that still lets you test whether anyone actually wants it.

The thing competitors can't easily copy that keeps your customers from leaving, whether that's scale, brand, network effects, switching costs, or proprietary data.

A dynamic where each additional user makes the product more valuable for every other user, so growth compounds and late competitors struggle to catch up.

PMF (Product-Market Fit): the moment your product stops needing to be pushed onto people and starts getting pulled out of your hands by a market that genuinely wants it.

How many months a new customer's gross-margin revenue takes to repay what you spent to acquire them, where efficient SaaS businesses usually clear it in under 18.

Your company's valuation immediately after the new investor money lands, equal to pre-money plus the amount raised in the round.

The earliest institutional round, usually $250K to $1M from angels, micro-VCs, or accelerators in exchange for 5% to 10% on a SAFE, raised before real product-market fit.

Your company's valuation immediately before new investor money lands in the round.

How many months you have left at the current pace before the bank account hits zero, assuming today's spend and revenue stay flat.

A short, founder-friendly contract (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) where an investor wires money now in exchange for shares at the next priced round, with no interest, no maturity date, and no debt to pay back.

SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market): the chunk of TAM your product, languages, distribution channels, and pricing can realistically serve right now.

SLG (Sales-Led Growth): the motion where a human sales team drives the buy through outbound prospecting, demos, multi-stakeholder evaluations, and negotiated contracts.

SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market): the slice of SAM you can actually win in the next three to five years given your team, capital, and competition.

The first institutional round, typically $1M to $5M from VCs and angels in exchange for 10% to 20% equity, used to chase product-market fit.

The first priced equity round, usually $5M to $20M raised after product-market fit, with full term sheets, board seats, and preferred stock instead of the lightweight paper of seed.

TAM (Total Addressable Market): the full annual revenue a product would earn if every possible buyer on Earth used it at the price you charge.

The short, mostly non-binding document laying out the headline terms of an investment (valuation, check size, board, preferences, vesting), signed before the lawyers start drafting the 100-page closing docs.

The ceiling valuation at which a SAFE or convertible note converts to equity, protecting the early investor's ownership if the next round prices much higher.

A deliberately narrow first product chosen because it cracks open a customer or market you could never win head-on, then lets you expand from inside.

The move where you enter a huge market through one narrow, undeniable use case, win trust and distribution there, then expand outward into adjacent use cases later.