Short answer: Before a first call, investors who have described their routine do a quick online check: your website, the founders’ LinkedIn profiles, the first page of Google and a startup database such as Crunchbase. One angel investor described doing it “in under 10 minutes”. No study measures how many investors do this, but the investors we quote below say they do, and they put the website at or near the start. That check shapes how the investor walks into the call. Your job is to make sure ten minutes on your site confirms the deck instead of raising questions.
This article walks through that check from the investor’s chair, then gives you a self-test to run on your own site the night before outreach.
What happens between your email and the first call
You send a short email or get a warm intro. The investor has a deck, or just a line about you, and a calendar full of meetings. Before saying yes, or before the call starts, they look you up.
The most detailed public description of this habit is from a 2018 Forbes article in which investors described what they check online before meeting founders. It is from 2018, so treat it as testimony, not data.
Nitesh Banta, an angel investor and formerly at General Catalyst, said: “Initially, I look at the website of the business. I want to understand how the owner positions the business” and “how far along the company is in terms of team development, customers and product.” Lauren Jupiter of AccelFoods said in the same piece: “One of the first things we do when considering making an investment in a company is to check out the company’s website.”
The deck does not get much time either. DocSend’s pitch deck research found investors spend “less than 3 minutes” on a deck. So the website is often where an investor goes to check whether the deck holds up.
The investor’s 10-minute route
Banta described a sequence: the company website, then the founders’ LinkedIn and personal sites, then “Crunchbase or Angel.co profiles”, then “Google news”. He said: “I am confident I can do initial online research in under 10 minutes,” and that before a first meeting “I will rarely get beyond the first page on Google or initial postings on social.”
That gives you the route to test:
- Your website. Positioning, product, customers, team.
- The founders’ LinkedIn. Sid Trivedi of Foundation Capital told DocSend: “Searching for the founders on LinkedIn is the first thing I do when I’m excited about the company.”
- Google page one. Whatever shows up for your company name and the founders’ names.
- Databases and registries. Crunchbase in Banta’s list. In Europe, investors can also check the company registry and match the legal entity to the name on your site.
The same DocSend post found that, out of “just under two and a half minutes” on a deck, “VCs spend about 46 seconds reviewing these slides”, meaning the team slide. That is close to a third of the deck time spent on who you are.
Question 1: can I tell what you do in one line?
Banta’s first goal is to understand how you position the business. If your homepage opens with a slogan that could belong to any company, the investor has to work out the positioning themselves, and they may get it wrong.
Test: read only your hero section. Does it say what the product does, for whom, and why that matters now? Aaron Harris of Y Combinator, writing about seed decks, said “founders should strive for clarity and concision.” The same applies to the first screen of your site.
Question 2: is it real?
Banta wants to see “how far along the company is in terms of team development, customers and product.” On a website, that means:
- Product. Real screenshots or a short demo, not only illustrations. Stock photos on a pre-revenue site make it look pre-product.
- Customers or pilots. Named where you have permission. A logo with a date says more than “trusted by leading companies”.
- Dates. A changelog, a news item, a recent hire. Dates show the company is moving.
Question 3: why this team?
A team section with names, roles and links to LinkedIn lets an investor do what Trivedi described in one click. Check that titles and dates on LinkedIn match the site and the deck. A co-founder listed on the deck but missing from the site, or a CTO whose LinkedIn shows a different current job, creates a question you will not hear asked.
Question 4: does it match the deck?
This is where many founders lose points without knowing it. The investor has the deck open in another tab. Compare:
- The product name, and how you describe the category.
- Every number: customers, pilots, team size, markets.
- The business model. If the deck says enterprise contracts and the site shows a self-serve price list, expect a question.
Don’t fix it by pasting the deck into the website, though. Emily Kramer, writing for First Round Review, put it this way: “VCs look for very different things in software than they do investments.” The site serves buyers and hires as well. It just has to tell the same story. If you are deciding which one to fix first after a round, we wrote about that in fix positioning, website or deck first.
Red flags that end the process quietly
Don’t expect an investor to email and ask why your site says “beta 2023”. They just move on. Signals to watch for:
- Stale dates. Last blog post two years ago, copyright from an old year, “coming soon” for a feature you demo in the deck.
- Contradictions with the deck. Different numbers, a different product name, a different target customer.
- No visible team. Or team photos with no names and no links.
- Dead links and broken pages, especially on mobile.
- A translated site. For European startups, an English site that reads like a translation of the local one signals that the international market is an afterthought.
- No legal entity. No company name or address anywhere, so the investor can’t match the site to a registry entry.
- Security questions with no answer, if you sell to larger companies. In a Vanta survey of 2,500 IT and security leaders, two-thirds said “that customers, investors and suppliers are increasingly looking for proof of security and compliance.” It is a vendor survey, but a short security page costs little.
What not to put on the site
- TAM slides. Market sizing belongs in the deck.
- Details of the raise. Round size and terms are for the conversation.
- The roadmap as if it were the product. If a feature doesn’t exist yet, say so or leave it out. An investor who finds out on the call stops trusting the rest of the page.
The pre-raise self-test
Run this the evening before you start outreach. Open your site in a private window on your phone, set a 10-minute timer, and pretend you have never heard of the company.
- Does the first screen say what you do and for whom, in one line?
- Can I see the real product (screenshots or a demo)?
- Are customers or pilots named, with dates, where you have permission?
- Does the team section name every founder and link to LinkedIn?
- Do LinkedIn titles and dates match the site and the deck?
- Is there at least one dated signal from the last few months (news, changelog, hiring)?
- Do the product name, numbers and business model match the deck?
- Is anything stale: an old “beta” label, old copyright, dead links?
- Search the company name and the founders’ names. Is Google page one what you want an investor to see?
- Is your Crunchbase profile (or equivalent) current, and does the company name match the registry?
If two or more answers make you wince, fix them before the first email goes out. For a deeper pass, our 60-minute brand audit and website redesign checklist go further, and branding for startups covers what level of brand fits each stage.
Where dp.vision fits
dp.vision is a senior brand, web and product studio for funded, founder-led B2B tech. One team takes a company from positioning and brand to the website, the deck and the product, scoped to a milestone in the next 4-16 weeks, often an upcoming raise. We are a permanent team of 20+ people based in Poznań and working remotely: a strategist and a dedicated team, with one contact person for you. AI speeds up the work; people make the decisions.
We can’t promise anyone a round. What we can do is make sure the site, the deck and the LinkedIn story say the same thing before investors look. Validate, from $2,500, works as a pre-raise check of positioning: customer interviews and a review of the evidence you already have, ending with the priority problem and a recommended next step. Launch, from $9,500, covers positioning, brand identity and the website; a deck can be scoped in, but it is not part of the Launch base. For scale, PaceSovereign and DailyMuse are example projects from $40,000 with the full scope, deck included: full branding, pitch deck, investor relations support and the product demo and MVP. If you work with funds, see how we work with VCs.
