The Angel Investment Pitch Walkthrough: A Founder's Field-by-Field Guide to Filling Out a Fundraising Profile
Most fundraising advice focuses on the deck. The deck matters. But if you are raising on an angel network, an online syndicate, or any of the platforms that intermediate between founders and thousands of individual investors, the deck is not what the investor sees first. The pitch profile is — the structured page of fields, dropdowns, and short-answer boxes that the platform makes you fill out before your deck is ever downloaded.
This guide walks that profile field by field, drawn from the Angel Investment Network's own step-by-step walkthrough. The point is not the specific platform. The point is that the profile is a document in its own right, and the founders who take it seriously get materially more investor interest than the founders who paste the same text into every box.
When the walkthrough was first published, 9.6% of entrepreneurs on the platform opened it. That 9.6% got far more investor interest than the other 90%. Today 61% of active founders use it. If you are not putting the same care into the profile fields that you put into the deck, you are competing against a smarter distribution than you think.
The pitch title is the first thing an investor scanning the platform will read. On a paid account you can use your company name. On a free account it must be anonymous.
Do not name a free-tier pitch "Exciting SaaS Opportunity." Name it something that tells the investor what the business does in five words. "AI Copilot for Insurance Adjusters" beats "Disruptive InsurTech Platform" every time. Specificity outperforms hype in the scan feed.
Your registered legal name, for the platform's records. This is not shown publicly. Use the exact name from your certificate of incorporation — not the trading name — so that if an investor commits, the paperwork can be issued without a name mismatch.
If you have a website, link it. Investors treat a live site as tangible evidence that the business exists. If you do not have a site yet, do not fake one — build a one-page holding site with your logo, one paragraph of positioning, and a way to be contacted. It takes an hour and it converts.
These fields drive the platform's matching engine. Investors filter their inbound feed by industry, stage, and geography. If you pick "Other" because your business does not fit neatly, you disappear from every filtered search. Pick the closest match. You can explain the nuance later.
If you have raised anything — from yourself, from friends and family, from angels, from a previous round — put the number in. It signals that someone else has already validated the idea with their own money. Leaving this blank when you have raised looks like a mistake. Leaving it blank when you have not is fine.
This field is mandatory. It is also where founders make the most damaging early mistake: they name a round size that is either implausibly small (signaling low ambition) or implausibly large (signaling detachment from the market). The right number is the amount that gets you to the next meaningful milestone with 18 months of runway. Show your math elsewhere in the profile.
Set this at a level that makes the round mechanically closeable. If you are raising £250K and set the minimum at £1K, you need 250 investors. If you set it at £25K, you need ten. The higher the minimum, the fewer signatures you need, but the smaller the pool of investors who can commit. Most first-time founders set this too low.
SAFE, convertible note, priced equity, or debt. Pick one and be honest about it. Investors sort by structure and will screen out mismatches. Do not say "flexible" — that reads as "I have not decided" or "I have not spoken to a lawyer."
This is the single most-read text on your profile. It appears next to your title in every search result and in every investor email digest. Write it, rewrite it, then rewrite it again. It should answer three things: what you do, who you do it for, and what makes it different. Nothing else.
A working template: "We help [audience] do [specific job] using [distinctive mechanism]." Fill in the blanks. Cut everything else.
Investors want to feel the pain before they hear the cure. Describe the problem from the customer's point of view, in the customer's language. Quantify it if you can — hours lost, dollars wasted, deals missed. If the problem sounds abstract or optional, the rest of the pitch has to fight uphill.
Describe what your product actually does, not what category it is in. "AI-powered platform" is not a solution. "A Chrome extension that auto-fills insurance-claim forms from a photo of the accident" is. Investors reward concreteness.
Show a top-down market size backed by a real source and a bottom-up sanity check. Do not multiply population by adoption by ARPU to produce a fifty-billion-dollar TAM. Investors have seen that spreadsheet a thousand times and they discount it by ninety percent.
The stronger move is to name a real, analogous market and estimate what share you can plausibly take. "The US small-business payroll market is $45B; capturing 0.5% is a $225M business" is more credible than any bottoms-up chart.
How do you make money, from whom, at what price, and at what margin. If you are pre-revenue, explain the model you intend to prove. If you are post-revenue, show the unit economics. Investors do not need audited numbers here; they need to know you have thought about it.
Whatever is most impressive — revenue, users, retention, letters of intent, a lighthouse customer, a waiting list. Show the number and the growth rate. If you have no traction, show the qualitative signals: pilots, design partners, expert endorsements. Never lie or inflate; a diligence call will surface the truth.
Name three real competitors and honestly explain how you are different. Do not draw the comparison matrix where every competitor has an "X" and you have a "✓" in every row. Investors do not believe it and it makes you look naive.
Two to four lines per key team member. Name, role, prior company or credential, and the one sentence that explains why this specific person is the right person for this specific job in this specific company. Pedigree is table stakes; unfair founder-market fit is the story.
Where the money goes, at the category level. Product, engineering, sales, marketing, general and administrative. Investors do not need a line-item budget; they need to know that you understand your own burn.
Most platforms let you upload a simplified financial model. Upload one. Even a one-tab spreadsheet showing 24 months of projected revenue, headcount, and cash burn is far better than nothing. Investors who are seriously interested will ask for the full model; investors who are casually scanning will download the summary you posted.
Show your assumptions on the model itself. A model without visible assumptions is a black box. A model with visible assumptions invites conversation.
Upload the deck, the one-page executive summary, and — if you have them — the demo video and any customer reference letters. Do not password-protect the deck at this stage; you are trying to reduce friction to the read.
Name the files sensibly. "CompanyInvestorDeckv27FINALFINAL.pdf" is not a professional filename. "Acme — Seed Deck — March 2026.pdf" is.
This is the most underused field on the entire profile. Investors have the same questions on every pitch: what stage are you, what is your runway, how much have you raised, when do you close, who has already committed, what is the minimum. Answer them up front and you cut the length of the average first email exchange by half.
The deck is the artifact investors download after they have already decided you are worth ten minutes. The profile is what makes them decide. Treat every field as a small persuasion — because 61% of the founders you are competing against are doing exactly that, and the other 39% are wondering why nobody replies to their outreach.
