The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Financial decision · 2011–2013
Buffer's no-name founders raised ~$500k seed on traction and a public deck
First-time founders contacted ~200 investors and closed a ~$500k seed from 18 angels, then published the whole deck in May 2013.
Buffer
What the business is
Buffer was a social-media sharing app competing in a space that looked crowded from the outside — investors named TweetDecks and Seesmics and 'dozens and dozens of apps doing the same thing' — and the company's public identity was radical transparency.
Starting capital：Roughly $500,000 seed round ($450k in Joel Gascoigne's own account) closed from 18 investors.
How it started
Both founders were first-timers with no big-name backers to put on a slide, and Buffer lived in a space that seemed crowded from the outside — TweetDeck, Seesmic and dozens of apps doing similar things. Investors were interested mainly because of Buffer's early traction, but every meeting then stalled on the same question: 'aren't there lots of other apps doing the same?' The deck was rebuilt around two slides: traction first, then a positioning slide simple enough to remove that confusion.
What happened
The founders ran fundraising as a ratio game, and it closed: roughly 200 investors contacted, about 50 meetings, and a $450k seed round from 18 investors. On 2013-05-08, after the round closed, Leo Widrich published the actual deck on OnStartups — a deliberate break from the Silicon Valley convention of keeping a live pitch deck secret until acquisition or failure — arguing that a real, recent deck is the most useful thing fledgling founders can study. The post's publisher, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, disclosed in a note that he was an angel investor in Buffer and that HubSpot's Social Inbox overlapped a little with Buffer's functionality.
How it ended up
By publication the round had closed and Buffer was operating as a live business whose founders credited the deck with raising the funds that built the company; the public post drew 139 points and 29 comments on Hacker News on 2013-05-08.
Background
Buffer's founders, Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich, were first-time founders with no big names to put on a slide. Their product was a social-media sharing app in a space that looked crowded from the outside — investors could name TweetDecks and Seesmics and 'dozens and dozens of apps doing the same thing.' Early traction made investors interested, but meeting after meeting stalled on the competition question, leaving people confused and uninterested.
The fix was a deck rebuilt around the two slides that worked: traction first — for first-time founders it was the only credible asset — and a competition slide rewritten to state Buffer's positioning without friction. Fundraising itself became a ratio game the founders called 'ratio thinking': about 200 investors contacted, roughly 50 meetings, and in the end a $450k seed round closed from 18 investors.
In May 2013, after the round closed, Leo Widrich published the actual deck on OnStartups, breaking the Silicon Valley convention that a live pitch deck stays secret until acquisition or failure. The post framed the deck as a case study — half a million is not a crazy amount, and a real deck from first-timers who just raised is more useful than a ten-year-old one — and drew 139 points and 29 comments on Hacker News.
What has to be true
- Both founders were first-timers with no big names, so the deck could not lean on credibility — investor interest came from early traction, and the traction slide had to carry the pitch.
- They treated outreach as a ratio game — about 200 investors contacted, ~50 meetings, 18 checks — so persistence plus volume, not warm intros, closed the round.
- The competition question created the most friction; rewriting that slide into a simple positioning removed the confusion that had been ending meetings.
- Publishing the real, recent deck was a deliberate transparency move, with an investor's stake disclosed in the same post — meant to help other first-time founders and build Buffer's trust brand.
What can be applied
Unknown founders should lead with traction and treat outreach as a numbers game (~200 contacts to 18 checks); find the slide that kills meetings — for Buffer, competition — and rewrite it.
Aftermath
As of 2013-05-08 Buffer had closed its ~$450–500k seed round from 18 investors and was operating as a live startup; the same week it published the deck publicly and joined the resulting Hacker News thread, with the founders around to answer questions about the fundraising process. The record here stops at that date: Buffer's later $3.5M 'middle way' round in 2014 and everything after are separate events with their own coverage, not part of this source.
Sources
- The Pitch Deck We Used To Raise $500,000 For Our Startup
- Hacker News: discussion of the Buffer pitch-deck post
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