You can have a sharp deck, a clever product idea, a few pilots in place, and still lose investors because your website feels early, messy, or confusing.
Most investors will not read every slide again before a call. They will type your company name into a search bar, tap the first result, and skim your homepage on their phone between meetings. In those ten seconds they form a rough opinion about your clarity, your maturity, and whether your story feels serious or risky.
At the same time, that same homepage needs to help early users understand what you do, why you exist, and what they can do next. You are asking one screen to support fundraising, sales, hiring, and sometimes even press.
From what we see at Webgamma with pre seed and seed teams in SaaS, climate tech, and similar industries, the site often lags behind the product and the deck. It is that hacked first version the founder pushed live two years ago. And it quietly pulls everything down.
In this guide, we will look at how to design a startup website that does two jobs at once. It should give investors confidence and give users a clear path to value. The ideas here come from real projects where investors quoted website copy back to founders, and also from painful moments where the site made a good company look much weaker than it really was.
What Investors Actually Look For On Your Site
When an investor lands on your homepage, they are not doing a detailed UX review. They are looking for fast signals. In practice we keep seeing the same three things drive their reactions.
Clarity above the fold
The first screen is where most of the judgment happens.
If your hero line and subheading instantly tell a specific person what you do and what outcome you help them reach, you are already ahead of many teams. That is when you hear comments like:
“I like how you frame it as X for Y, that is exactly how I would explain it to someone.”
We have seen investors open calls with that kind of sentence. They had two minutes in a taxi, skimmed the homepage, and your framing stuck.
On the other hand, if the first screen sounds like this:
“We are a platform that unlocks innovation for businesses of all sizes” you are in trouble. No one knows what you do, who you serve, or why it matters now.
Simple checks for the first screen:
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Can a stranger understand who you serve and what problem you solve in three seconds
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Do you state a clear outcome, not only a list of features or buzzwords
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Do you show at least one concrete visual of the product or the result
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Is your primary call to action obvious at a glance
If you cannot answer yes to these, an investor will feel that confusion as well.
Proof that this is real, not only slides
Investors want to see that there is something happening beyond the pitch deck.
They scan your homepage for proof such as:
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Named customers, even if they are small or in pilot mode
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Recognizable logos from programs, accelerators, or funds
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Clear numbers that show activity, such as “facilities monitored” or “reports generated per month”
These do not need to be huge vanity metrics. Specific and honest is enough. We have watched founders underestimate a simple line like “Already supporting three industrial sites in Quebec” until they hear an investor say “Good to see you already work with A and B.”
Without these signals, you look like you are still at idea stage even when you are not.
Team and credibility
At very early stages, investors put most of their weight on the team. That is not news, but many sites hide or rush that section.
If you bury the team in the footer or skip it completely, investors will ask basic questions during the call that the site could have answered. They will wonder who is behind the company, what they have done before, and whether they know the domain.
A simple, effective team section usually has:
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Names and roles for founders and key leaders
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Short bios that highlight relevant experience or domain expertise
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Optional links to professional profiles, if you are comfortable adding them
It does not need to feel like a long corporate page. It just needs to make someone think “these people know what they are talking about, they have seen this field from the inside.”
The worst case we see is when the deck feels mature and the public site still looks like a rushed student project. One investor comment that comes up is something close to “if I had only seen the website, I would have passed.”
What Early Users Need From The Same Page
Now the tension. You want investors to trust you, but you cannot write a site only for investors. Real users still have to understand what you do and why it helps them.
The good news is that investor needs and user needs overlap more than people think. Both groups want clarity, proof, and a path to action. The difference is in emphasis.
For SaaS products
For SaaS, visitors expect the site to act almost like a light product tour and decision helper.
They usually want:
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A clear outcome focused promise. For example “Help operations teams predict and prevent outages” instead of “A powerful operations platform.”
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A quick sense of how the product fits into their day. Screens that look like real workflows, not vague illustrations.
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A clear next step that respects their time. Some teams can start a free trial. Others expect to request a demo.
Social proof for SaaS is often more about quantity and speed. People look for:
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Company logos that feel similar to their own
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Short result lines such as “cut weekly reporting time from five hours to one”
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Integration badges that show the product will fit into their stack
Here your main risk is drowning visitors in a feature dump. If the homepage turns into a list of every button and option you ever built, you push both users and investors away.
For climate tech, SaaS, Fintech and similar fields
Climate tech, and any product that touches infrastructure, regulation, or long implementation cycles, follows a different rhythm.
Visitors there often need:
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Context about the system you work in. Are you touching grid, industry, buildings, mobility.
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A clear connection to environmental and financial outcomes. Emissions, energy, waste, risk.
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Reassurance that this can work in the real world with real constraints.
Social proof looks different here. It is less about number of logos and more about who those logos are. Utilities, industrial clients, government programs, or serious accelerators carry more weight than a long list of small unknown names.
For product sections, you do not need to show every screen. It is more useful to show:
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Where in the process your solution sits
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What changes for the teams that use it
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How it interacts with existing tools, standards, or assets
Investors in climate tech are often looking for that same story. How does this change the current system without ignoring regulations and real risks.
One Story Across Deck And Website
Many teams treat their website and their deck like two separate planets. One is designed for pitches, the other sort of grew on its own.
From the outside, that looks like two different companies.
Our approach at Webgamma is to treat both as two views of one story. Format changes. Narrative does not.
A simple shared structure that works for both assets looks like this:
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Problem
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Your solution
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How it works at a high level
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Proof and traction
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Team and partners
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Next step
Sometimes we start with a messaging workshop. Founders, product, and sometimes sales sit together and answer a few hard questions.
- Who is the main audience over the next year.
- What specific problem are we claiming as ours.
- What promise are we making if someone adopts this.
- Why are we the team that should build this.
- What proof do we have, even if it is early.
From this, we create a simple narrative spine. Then we express that spine in two ways. One version lives in the deck, one version shapes the homepage and key subpages.
In other cases, the deck already exists and is decent, but the website fell behind. There, we pull the clearest parts from the deck, clean the language, and rebuild the homepage story around those elements. When we finish, we often go back and adjust the deck to match the new, sharper wording on the site.
The test is very simple. Someone reads the deck on a Tuesday. On Wednesday they look up the company site. If it feels like the same conversation, the alignment is good. If it feels like an entirely different company, there is work left.
A Practical Homepage Outline For Pre Seed And Seed
You do not need a complex information architecture at this stage. You need a homepage that tells a simple, confident story.
Here is a structure we use very often as a starting point. You can adapt it to your product and market.
Hero
One sentence that describes who you help and what outcome you create.
One supporting sentence that adds a bit of context.
One main call to action that matches your real priority for the next period.
For example:
- “Demand forecasting for industrial maintenance teams.”
- “Predict failures, schedule interventions earlier, and cut unplanned downtime without adding more dashboards to your day.”
- “Book a short demo.”
Problem and current way
Next, you explain the problem in simple language. You can describe how teams handle it today, where the friction appears, and why this matters now. Two or three short paragraphs is enough.
Your product and how it changes the situation
Here you bring in the product. Not as a dense feature list, but as a clear shift from the previous way to the new way.
You can structure this as small “from to” blocks:
- From manual spreadsheets to live connected data.
- From reactive firefighting to scheduled, predictable work.
- From scattered tools to one shared source of truth for the team.
Show screens or visuals that support each shift. The goal is to help both investors and users picture what life looks like on the other side.
Proof and traction
This is where you show that everything above is not hypothetical.
You can include:
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A band of customer or partner logos
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One short set of numbers that matter in your field
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One or two mini case stories
A mini case does not need to be long. It can follow this pattern.
“Industrial client in X sector. They used to do Y. We helped them implement Z. The result was this clear change over this period.”
Team and backers
Now you bring the focus back to the people behind the product.
You present your core team, a short note on relevant experience, and any backers you want to show. This helps answer the question “why should this team be the one to solve this problem.”
Clear next step
Finally, you repeat your main call to action and optionally offer a softer next step.
You might have:
“Book a demo” as the main button.
“See how it works” or “Read customer stories” as a secondary action.
The important thing is that there is no doubt in the visitor’s mind about what you would be happy for them to do next.
Choosing One Main Call To Action
Founders often want the homepage to do four jobs at once. Attract users, impress investors, hire talent, and answer journalists.
You can support all of these over time. But if you try to design one page to do all of them equally, you end up with a crowded mess and confused visitors.
A better approach is to choose one primary success for the next six to nine months.
Ask yourself:
- What matters most right now for this company to survive and grow.
- What percentage of visitors will realistically come from investor intros, versus campaigns, versus organic search.
- What action from each of those visitors would make you say “this visit was worth it.”
Based on those answers:
If most traffic during this period comes from investor emails and introductions, your main call to action can be something like “Request an overview” or “Book a short intro call.” You can still have product and feature content, but your visual focus is on that investor path.
If most traffic comes from paid campaigns or launch platforms, your primary action might be “Start trial” or “Get access.” Investors who land on the same page can still find your team and traction sections, and some will appreciate seeing a clear user journey in action.
Secondary actions can exist, but they should be visually softer. Careers can live in the top navigation. Press contacts can live in the footer. A deck download can be a subtle link in the founder section. The main action should not have to fight for attention.
Using Templates And No Code Tools Without Looking Generic
At pre seed and seed, there is no reason to spend months on a complex custom build for your marketing site. Shipping with tools like Webflow, Framer, or a similar stack is completely fine.
The risk is not the tool. The risk is lazy use of the tool.
We see two very different patterns.
Pattern one looks like this. A founder picks a good, minimal template. They remove a lot of the fluff sections. They invest real effort in the words. They make a few simple design decisions so spacing, color, and typography feel intentional. The result is a clean, focused site that feels confident, even if it is quite simple behind the scenes.
Pattern two is more common. A team takes a generic template, keeps every demo section, and drops in fragments of copy from old decks and documents. The page becomes a long scroll of “platform, innovation, solutions” with no clear hierarchy. It might look busy, but it does not help investors or users understand anything.
A simple way to stay in the first pattern:
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Choose a template built for clarity, not visual noise.
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Remove any sections that you do not have meaningful content for yet.
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Write or rewrite every headline in your own voice. Do not trust the demo filler text.
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Limit your visual language. A small color palette, one type system, consistent spacing.
That kind of site might not impress a front end award jury, but it will impress investors because it feels like you care about how you tell your story.
What To Track While You Are Raising
You do not need a complete analytics setup to know whether your site is helping or hurting during a raise.
A few simple signals already give useful direction.
How far people scroll on the homepage
If you have basic scroll tracking set up, look at how many visitors reach your proof and team sections. If most people drop off before they see either, you may have too much fluff before the real content, or your first screen may not be convincing enough to pull them further.
Interactions with your main call to action
Track how many visitors click on your primary action. If you are asking them to book a call, how many reach that form. If the numbers are very low, it can point to issues with the story, with trust, or with the offer itself.
Device mix and basic performance
Check what percentage of visits come from phones and tablets. During fundraising periods, you often see a large share of mobile traffic from investors checking the site on the move. If the mobile version is slow or broken, you are losing impressions in silence.
Qualitative feedback from conversations
Finally, listen to what people say on calls and in emails. Do investors use phrases from your homepage when they describe what you do. Do they reference a specific case or number. That is a good sign.
If you keep hearing that people “got confused at first” or that “the site does not say what the deck says,” treat that as direct feedback. You can adjust the site between meetings. The deck and product usually take longer to change.
A One Week Plan To Make Your Site More Investor Friendly
Imagine you have important investor meetings in two weeks. Your current site is not terrible, but you know it does not match the quality of your product.
With one focused week, you can make a noticeable difference.
Step 1: Fix the first screen and the opening story
Spend serious time rewriting your hero and subheading. Aim for one clear sentence on who you serve and one sentence on what changes for them.
Then check the section right under the hero. It should continue the story, not jump randomly into features. Use this space to explain the problem and your approach in simple terms. If you only changed these two things in a week, it would already improve the first impression a lot.
Step 2: Pull proof out of your head and into the page
Make a list of every pilot, customer, partner, program, grant, and advisor you are allowed to mention. Even if some feel small, they can still help.
Select a handful that best represent the market you want and the maturity you have. Add them as:
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A visible logo strip
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One small set of numbers
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One or two short proof stories
Resist the urge to overpolish these stories. Clear and honest beats vague and inflated.
Step 3: Clean the experience so nothing feels broken
Look at your site on two or three real devices and in a private window.
Fix obvious spacing issues. Remove links that lead to half finished pages. Make sure forms work and messages are clear. Adjust typography so you are not using five styles that fight each other.
You are not building a full design system in a week. You are removing distractions and signals that say “we do not care about details.”
If you complete these three steps with intention, your site will feel closer to where your company really is, not where it was when you first launched a rough page.
When It Makes Sense To Bring In A Design Partner
You can go very far with a simple template, a clear head, and a few late evenings. Especially at pre seed.
There are moments though where it is helpful to bring in a team that lives inside this world every day.
A design partner can:
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See the gaps between your deck, your site, and your product demo.
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Force clarity on positioning when everyone on the inside is a bit too close.
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Turn scattered proof into a simple narrative investors can follow.
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Build a homepage and a few key pages that support both investor trust and user conversion, instead of one at the expense of the other.
At Webgamma, this is often where we step in. A founder already has pilots, a decent deck, and funded roadmap, but the public face does not show that. Together we shape the story, decide what the site should do in the next period, and design a presence that matches the reality of the company.
Whether you work with us, another agency, or keep it internal for now, the goal does not change.
Your website should reduce doubt, not add it.
It should give investors a clear picture of who you are, not a fuzzy one from two years ago.
And it should give users a simple path to try, learn more, or talk to you, without fighting through jargon and clutter.
If your site can do that, your fundraising and user growth both get a quiet but real boost.
