When you browse a product online and add it to your cart, the retailer knows. They know how long you spent on the product page, which photos you zoomed in on, whether you read the reviews, and exactly when you abandoned the checkout. They use all of that to decide whether to follow up, what to say, and how to price future offers.
Now think about how a founder sends a pitch deck to an investor. They send a file. They wait. They have no idea if it was opened, skimmed, forwarded to a partner, or deleted on arrival. The entire process runs on silence and guesswork, and the founder is expected to make decisions about follow-ups, timing, and next steps without any of the data that would make those decisions easier.
This is a thought experiment. But it is also a practical question about what fundraising could look like if founders had the same information layer that any basic online store already takes for granted.
The information asymmetry at the heart of fundraising
The current fundraising process is structurally lopsided. Investors have significant information advantages over founders at almost every stage. They have seen hundreds of decks in a given sector. They know what a company at your stage typically looks like. They have pattern-matched your metrics, team composition, and market size against a database that founders do not have access to.
Founders, meanwhile, are pitching in a near-information vacuum. According to data from DocSend's annual fundraising report, the average seed-stage founder sends their deck to 58 investors before closing a round. They receive responses from a fraction of that number and have no way of knowing whether the non-responses mean "not interested", "too busy this week", "forwarded it to a partner", or "plan to reach back out next quarter".
In e-commerce, the seller has visibility into exactly this kind of behaviour. The buyer does not know the seller can see it, but the seller can shape their outreach based on it. That asymmetry runs in the other direction in fundraising.
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What e-commerce data would look like in a fundraising context
If you took the standard behavioural data layer that runs under any modern e-commerce platform and applied it to fundraising, the information available to a founder would look substantially different. Here is what that translation would actually mean in practice.
- Page-level attention data: In e-commerce, the seller knows which product photos got the most zoom and which descriptions were read versus skipped. In fundraising, this would mean knowing that an investor spent four minutes on your traction slide and thirty seconds on your team page. That is not just interesting; it is actionable.
- Return visit tracking: When a buyer adds something to their cart and comes back the next day, the seller knows. A founder should know when an investor opened a deck on Monday, came back Thursday, and forwarded it to someone else on Friday. That sequence tells you something about where you are in their decision process.
- Funnel drop-off visibility: E-commerce platforms know exactly where buyers leave the purchase flow. In fundraising terms, knowing that an investor opened your deck, read the first three slides, and stopped gives you very different follow-up data than knowing they read through to the financial projections on page eighteen.
- Multi-session and multi-viewer data: When a link gets opened by three different people at the same firm, a founder currently has no idea that happened. In e-commerce, when a product link gets shared, retailers can see the referral chain. That information would tell a founder that their deck is being discussed at a partner level without anyone saying so explicitly.
The follow-up problem this would solve
The single most common fundraising advice founders receive is to follow up persistently. Send a check-in. Keep them warm. Show you are serious. This advice exists almost entirely because founders are operating blind. When you have no signal about engagement, persistent outreach is the only available substitute.
The problem is that following up blindly has costs. Following up too soon after someone spent thirty seconds on your deck and closed it signals poor timing awareness. Following up a week after someone has read your deck three times and forwarded it signals missed momentum. Both errors are common because founders are guessing.
Persistence as a substitute for information is an expensive workaround. The founders who close rounds fastest are often not the most persistent; they are the most calibrated about when to push and when to wait.
With engagement data, follow-up becomes a different conversation. "I noticed you had a chance to review the deck; wanted to see if you had questions" lands differently when you know they spent fifteen minutes on it over two sessions versus when you have no idea whether they opened it at all.
What would need to change about investor behaviour
An e-commerce analogy has limits. Shoppers accept being tracked because the experience is built around it and they rarely think about it explicitly. Investors receive dozens of unsolicited pitches and may reasonably push back on the idea that their reading behaviour is being monitored.
This is already happening to some degree. Founders who share decks through tracking platforms can see investor engagement data. Some investors know this and are not bothered by it. Others prefer to receive decks as plain attachments specifically to avoid it. The norm is still being established.
The more interesting question is whether investors would benefit from a symmetric version of this. If an investor could see that a founder they met three months ago has since grown ARR by 40% and just closed a design partner, that information might be worth surfacing even if the investor is the one receiving the update rather than sending it.
What founders can do with this framing right now?
The full e-commerce data layer does not exist for fundraising, and some of it may never exist the same way. But the parts that are available are useful enough that not using them is a real disadvantage.
The practical steps available to founders today are worth taking seriously. They do not require any fundamental change in how investors operate.
- Share decks through a document tracking platform rather than as email attachments. This gives you open rates, time spent per page, and return visit data without requiring anything from the investor.
- Use engagement signals to prioritise follow-up: If three investors opened your deck in the same week and two of them spent significant time on it, those two get your attention first. Time and energy are finite.
- Track engagement across your whole outreach batch to find patterns: If every investor who looks at your deck drops off at the same slide, that slide is a problem. This is the conversion rate optimisation mindset applied to fundraising.
- Share a live link rather than a static file: A link can be updated if something changes after you send it. A PDF attachment cannot. Sending a tracked link means the investor always sees your most current materials, and you see their most current behaviour.
Pitchwise is built around this idea. You share your pitch deck through a Pitchwise link, and you get real-time data on how investors are engaging with it. The goal is to give founders some of the information layer that e-commerce sellers have had for years.
See how it works at pitchwise.se.
Frequently asked questions
How does the startup fundraising process work?
A founder typically prepares materials including a pitch deck and financial model, then reaches out to a list of target investors through warm introductions, cold outreach, or accelerator networks. Interested investors will request a meeting, conduct due diligence, and eventually decide whether to invest. According to DocSend data, the average seed-stage round requires outreach to more than 50 investors before closing and can take four to eight months from first contact to wire.
What do investors look at when evaluating a startup?
Investors typically evaluate team background and dynamics, market size and timing, evidence of traction such as revenue growth or user data, the defensibility of the product, and whether the terms of the raise make sense given the company's stage. According to First Round Capital's analysis of its own portfolio, the team is often the single most weighted variable at the seed stage, particularly for pre-revenue companies.
How do you know if an investor is interested?
The clearest signals are direct responses and meeting requests. Short of those, investors who ask specific questions about your metrics or request your financial model are typically more engaged than those who respond with generic encouragement. If you share your deck through a tracking platform, engagement data such as time spent and return visits can give you an earlier signal before any formal response.
What is the average time to close a funding round?
Seed rounds typically take between three and eight months from the first investor meeting to a signed term sheet, though this varies considerably by market conditions, how well-prepared the founder is, and whether they have warm introductions to investors. The process often accelerates significantly once there is a lead investor willing to set terms.
How many investors do founders usually pitch before closing?
According to DocSend's fundraising data, the median seed-stage founder pitches around 58 investors before closing. Founders with warmer networks or previous fundraising experience tend to pitch fewer. The number has also shifted upward in slower market conditions when investor conviction takes longer to build.
