The business model slide is the pitch-deck slide explaining how the company makes money, used by investors to model whether the math works at scale. It covers pricing structure, customer types, average revenue per customer, gross margin, key unit economics (CAC, LTV, payback period), and the path from customer to revenue. It is the slide investors mentally model in real time during the pitch, and where founders who haven't done the unit economics work get caught.
The content of a strong business model slide: revenue model (subscription / usage / transactional / advertising / hybrid), pricing tier structure (named tiers with prices and target customer), average contract value or ARPU for consumer products, gross margin (...
Regulation D (Reg D) is the SEC framework that exempts most private securities offerings from public-registration requirements under the Securities Act of 1933. Codified in Rules 504, 506(b), and 506(c), the regulation covers essentially all venture financing rounds in the US through Rule 506(b) and Rule 506(c), allowing companies to raise unlimited capital from accredited investors without registering the offering with the SEC. It is the regulatory backbone that makes private startup financing possible, and one of the few SEC frameworks every startup founder needs at least passing familiarity with.
The three rules in Regulation D:
The choice between LLC and C-Corporation (typically Delaware C-corp) is the formation decision that determines whether a startup can raise venture capital. The decision also shapes how the company is taxed, what equity it can issue to employees, what investor-related tax benefits (like QSBS) are available, and how much administrative overhead it carries. It is one of the most-frequently-misunderstood decisions, with founders defaulting to LLC for simplicity without modeling the conversion cost if venture fundraising becomes a path.
The decision-driving comparison:
| Dimension | LLC | C-Corp |
|---|---|---|
| Federal taxation | Pass-through (profits/losses to members' personal returns) | Entity-level (corporation pays tax, dividends taxed again at ... |
Donation based crowdfunding is a fundraising model in which many small contributors give money to a person, cause, or project without expecting return. Contributions are typically processed online through platforms like GoFundMe, Fundly, or Mightycause, with no equity, repayment, or material rewards offered to backers. It is distinct from reward-based crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, where backers receive a product or perk), equity crowdfunding (Republic, Wefunder, where backers receive shares), and debt or lending-based crowdfunding (where backers are repaid with interest).
The model is dominated by charitable, personal-emergency, and community use cases, not startup financing. GoFundMe, the largest donatio...
Bootstrapping is the financing strategy of building a company without outside equity investment, funded by founder savings, customer revenue, and reinvested profit. It is a deliberate choice about how the company is financed, distinct from the resulting company type ([Bootstrap Startup]), and it sits at one end of the founder financing spectrum opposite institutional [Venture Capital].
In practice, bootstrapping draws on a stack of non-dilutive sources in roughly this order: founder cash and savings (typically the first $5K to $50K), revenue from paying customers (the largest source for any bootstrapped company that survives), reinvested profit (the engine of growth from year two onward), founder credit (cards and lines of cre...
Republic is an equity crowdfunding platform founded in 2016 by AngelList alumni that operates across multiple SEC frameworks (Regulation Crowdfunding, Regulation A+, Regulation D). Its broad asset-class portfolio includes traditional startups, cryptocurrency token offerings, video games (Game.fi and game-studio funding), real estate, and music-rights deals. It is distinguished from Wefunder and StartEngine by its diversification across asset categories beyond traditional equity startup crowdfunding. Republic has facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in capital across its various offerings since launch.
The platform's product lines:
Valuation is the estimated worth of a company at a specific moment, calculated through multiple methods. Methods include comparables analysis (looking at recent transactions of similar companies), discounted cash flow (modeling future cash flows back to present value), market-based pricing (what the marginal investor will pay), asset-based methods (for asset-heavy businesses), and for early-stage startups, venture-style heuristics anchored on round dynamics, growth-stage benchmarks, and qualitative assessments of team, market, and momentum. It is the number that shapes every fundraising conversation, every employee equity grant, every acquisition discussion, and every founder anxiety about whether they're being underpriced or over...
Wefunder is the largest equity crowdfunding platform operating under Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) by total raise volume. It has facilitated approximately $700 million in capital across thousands of startup offerings since founding in 2012 (predating the formal Reg CF rollout in 2016), with a portfolio that has included many Y Combinator alumni, B Corp companies, mission-aligned ventures, and consumer brands with passionate customer bases. Wefunder is itself structured as a public benefit corporation, reflecting the platform's emphasis on democratizing startup investment access.
The structural characteristics: Reg CF focus (most offerings are Reg CF; Wefunder also supports Reg A+ for larger raises). Standard offering size typica...
Kickstarter is the reward-based crowdfunding platform launched April 2009 that has facilitated over $7 billion in pledges across millions of successfully-funded projects. It operates on an all-or-nothing funding model where projects only collect funds if they meet their full goal within the campaign window, typically 30 days, with backers receiving products, perks, or experiences rather than equity in the project creator. The model is distinct from equity crowdfunding platforms like Wefunder and Republic. It is the canonical reference for the reward-based crowdfunding category and the platform that proved consumer products could be funded by their future customers before the product existed.
The structural mechanics: project cre...
An executive summary is a 1 to 3 page prose document summarizing a startup's business, market, financials, team, and capital ask for investors. It covers business model, traction, market opportunity, and the capital ask, more substantive than a one-pager and more concise than a full business plan. It's used as a companion artifact to a pitch deck for investors who prefer prose, as a leave-behind that captures more nuance than slides allow, and as a primary artifact in some institutional-investor processes (especially family offices, growth-equity firms, and corporate-venture groups). It is the format that bridges the visual-heavy pitch deck and the written depth of a business plan.
The structure of a typical investor execu...