This 14-Slide Pitch Deck Helped Content Startup Contently Land $9 Million

Mashable/YouTubeShane Snow, co-founder of Contently

Contently helps freelance writers find work. It recently raised a $9 million Series B round of financing from Lightbank, ff Venture Capital, and Consigliere Brand Capital. It has raised $12 million to date.

Co-founder Shane Snow says the fundraising process took two months, but his team networked for a number of months with investors before the round was raised. His advice to other entrepreneurs who are trying to raise money is to focus on telling a story with your pitch deck.

"The story is the most important part [of your pitch]," Snow told Business Insider via email. "We laid out our deck in a way that allowed us to tell a narrative. We started with the context of the market and what was happening and why it was big, which led to the challenge the market was seeing, then we built a little suspense, showed what others had said about how we'd solved the problem, and then dove deep into the solution and our world takeover plans."

Snow's team left the more boring details for an appendix and kept its pitch to Contently's high-level vision. "The idea is this presentation is to gauge whether the investor buys the premise, and then future conversations would be deep dives into our financials, etc," says Snow.

Snow shared the winning pitch deck with Business Insider, minus some financial information.