Translate every major use of funds into an operating output.
- Marketing → acquisition capacity, CAC, customers, LTV and payback.
- Hiring → productive capacity, quota, deployment speed or product milestones.
- Product → a measurable capability or risk retired by a specific date.
Use-of-funds slides often look clean because they are easy to visualize. A pie chart creates the feeling of precision. But “35% sales and marketing” is an accounting category, not an investment mechanism.
The investor wants to know what changes because the check exists
The strongest version of the slide connects capital to the financial model. If you are funding a channel with known CAC, show the incremental capacity. If you are hiring enterprise sellers, show ramp time, quota assumptions and the number of productive reps funded. If product investment unlocks a regulated customer segment, show the milestone and revenue implication.
$5M raise. $4M into a proven growth engine. $100 CAC.
That immediately creates a line of underwriting questions around 40,000 potential customer acquisitions, LTV, retention, payback, gross margin and channel saturation. It is not a promise; it is a model the investor can interrogate.
Build the slide backwards from the next round
Ask: what must be true at the end of this financing for the company to be materially more valuable? Then connect spend categories to the operating milestones required to get there.
| Weak framing | Stronger framing |
|---|---|
| 40% marketing | Fund X months of proven acquisition capacity at defined CAC and payback assumptions. |
| 30% hiring | Add Y productive sellers / engineers with ramp dates and measurable output. |
| 30% product | Ship milestone Z that unlocks a customer segment, lowers churn or expands ARPU. |
The model and the use-of-funds slide should tell the same story
If the slide says growth is the priority but the model assumes growth without corresponding acquisition capacity, the story is disconnected. If the model shows a major hiring ramp but the raise does not fund it, the story is disconnected.
Make the use of funds mathematically defensible.
We pressure-test the GTM engine, acquisition economics, model assumptions and funded milestones together so the raise has a visible job.
Get My Growth & Diligence Review ↗Once the economics are coherent, the Investor Pipeline can put that story in front of investors aligned with the stage and thesis. More breakdowns live in our LinkedIn founder insights group.