Craft your pitch deck around ‘that one thing that can really hook an investor’

Michelle Davey’s pitch to Jordan Nof of Tusk Venture Partners about Wheel, a startup focused on providing a full suite of virtual care solutions to clinicians, was front-loaded with early metrics. It may not be standard practice to start with the numbers, especially early on, but she explained to us why she chose that strategy — and Nof told us why it worked.

Davey and Nof joined us on a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live and went into detail on why Tusk was eager to finance Wheel, walking us through the startup’s Series A pitch deck and sharing which slides and bits clinched the deal.

Extra Crunch Live is a weekly virtual event series meant to help founders build better venture-backed businesses. We sit down with investors and the founders they finance to hear what brought them together, what they saw in each other and how they work together moving forward. We also host the Extra Crunch Live Pitch-Off, where founders in the audience can pitch their startups to our outstanding speakers.

Extra Crunch Live is accessible to everyone live on Wednesdays at noon PDT, but the on-demand content is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. You can check out the full ECL library here.

When to lead with traction

Davey emphasized the importance of not sticking to a rigid format for building a pitch deck. She said it’s important to instead focus on crafting your pitch around what makes you appealing and unique. That should be on the foreground and featured prominently.

For Wheel, that meant leading with traction, since the company had impressive uptake even early on. That remained true for their recent Series B raise, too.