Before you raise, your website needs to do four things. It needs to say what you do and who it’s for in one sentence. It needs to show that the business is real. It needs to work properly on a phone. And it needs to tell the same story as your deck.
That’s it. It doesn’t need a blog, fifteen pages, scroll animations or a custom platform. Most pre-seed and seed startups overthink the website in the wrong places and underthink it in the places that matter.
Here’s how we’d approach it.
Will investors actually look at your website?
Yes. Usually within a minute of reading your intro email, and often on a phone between meetings.
It isn’t due diligence. Nobody is going to fund you because of your homepage. It’s a credibility check, and the questions running through their head are simple: is this real, do I understand it, and do these people look like they can execute?
A website can’t win you a round. It can quietly lose you the second meeting. A vague headline, a broken mobile menu or a team page that still lists someone who left last year all send the same signal: this team doesn’t sweat the details.
Pass the one-sentence test
Your homepage headline should say what you do and who it’s for. Plainly.
“Reimagining the future of work” fails. It could be anything. “Payroll for hospitality businesses that run on shift workers” passes. An investor can read it once and repeat it to their partners on Monday.
If you can’t write that sentence yet, that’s not a website problem. It’s a positioning problem, and it’s worth fixing before you pitch anyone, because it’ll show up in the deck too.
Underneath the headline, answer the next two questions a reader has: what problem does this solve, and why now? A short paragraph each is enough.
Show that the business is real
Early-stage investors are betting on people and evidence. Your site should give them a bit of both.
- Show the product. Real screenshots or a 60 second walkthrough beat any illustration. If you’re pre-product, show the prototype, or explain the problem so sharply that the reader feels it.
- Use numbers you’re happy to make public. Users, waitlist size, pilots, revenue milestones. If they’re not ready for the open web, leave them for the deck, but don’t fill the gap with vague claims.
- Only show customer or partner logos you have permission to use. Investors do check, and a logo you can’t back up is worse than no logo.
- Put the founders on the site. Names, photos, a line on why you’re the right people, and a link to LinkedIn. Faceless startups are harder to trust.
Make sure it works on a phone
This is the one founders skip, because they build and review the site on a laptop.
Open it on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Does it load in a couple of seconds? Can you read the headline without zooming? Does the menu open? Does the contact form submit?
A site that falls over on mobile looks unfinished, and unfinished is the last impression you want while you’re asking someone for money. If it’s slow, the cause is often cheap hosting or a page builder loaded with plugins rather than anything complicated. Both are fixable in days, not months.
Keep the website and the deck telling the same story
Startups pivot. The website rarely keeps up.
We regularly see founders pitching one proposition while their site still describes the previous one. Different customer, different language, sometimes a different company name. An investor who reads both notices straight away, and it raises the question of which version is true.
Every time the deck changes in a meaningful way, check the homepage, the about page and the team page against it. Same positioning, same headline numbers, same team.
Get the boring details right
These won’t impress anyone. Getting them wrong will.
- Company details in the footer. UK limited companies are legally required to show their registered name, company number, place of registration and registered office address on their website. Investors look you up on Companies House, so make it easy and make sure the details match.
- A privacy policy and a cookie banner that actually works.
- An email address on your own domain. A Gmail address on a funded-looking startup is a small but real credibility hit.
- A contact route that reaches a person. Test it yourself.
- A valid SSL certificate, so browsers don’t flag the site as “not secure”.
What you can safely skip before you raise
Most of the things founders spend time and money on at this stage can wait.
- A blog. Unless you’ll publish consistently, an empty news page with one post from eight months ago does more harm than having no blog at all.
- A search marketing campaign. SEO and PPC are worth doing once you’ve got a proposition and a funnel worth scaling. Until then, make sure the site is technically sound and indexable, and leave it there. When the time comes, we refer that work to our partners Seeded Digital and Leapfrog Internet Marketing, and look after the website side ourselves.
- A custom-built platform for the marketing site. Your product might need bespoke engineering. Your marketing site almost certainly doesn’t. A well-built WordPress site, or even a tidy site builder, is enough.
- Lots of pages. Home, product, about and team, contact, and the legal pages. Five pages done properly beat fifteen done in a hurry.
- Animation and visual effects. They slow the site down on mobile and rarely survive the next rebrand.
Should you build it yourself or bring someone in?
A founder-built site is fine if it passes everything above. Plenty of strong companies raised on a homepage someone put together over a weekend.
Bring someone in when one of these is true:
- You’re spending founder hours fighting a site builder instead of talking to customers.
- The site actively undersells a product that’s better than it looks.
- You’re about to spend raised money on acquisition. At that point the website stops being a business card and becomes the thing that converts paid traffic, and a weak one wastes budget fast.
If you do bring someone in, ask the questions in our guide to hiring a web design agency before you sign anything. And if cash is the blocker rather than intent, it’s worth knowing that some studios, ourselves included, work with a small number of startups each year in exchange for equity rather than a fee. That’s what Yazaroo Ventures is for, and it’s deliberately selective: no more than two new partners a year.
A pre-raise website checklist
Run through this the week before you start sending decks:
- The homepage headline says what you do and who it’s for in one sentence.
- The problem and the “why now” are answered just below it.
- There are real product screenshots, a demo or a prototype.
- Any numbers on the site match the numbers in the deck.
- The founders are named, pictured and linked to LinkedIn.
- The site loads quickly and works properly on a phone over mobile data.
- The positioning matches the current deck, not last year’s.
- Company name, number and registered office are in the footer and match Companies House.
- There’s a privacy policy, a working cookie banner and a valid SSL certificate.
- The contact form and email address both reach a real person.
None of this is expensive or difficult. It’s mostly attention. Which is exactly what an investor is checking for when they open your website: whether you’re the kind of founder who pays attention.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your site before you raise, get in touch. We’ll tell you plainly what needs fixing and what doesn’t.
