Positioning and a product story for a seed round
Strong technology, a pitch nobody could repeat back. We found the one sentence the company was actually for and rebuilt everything downstream of it.
The brief
Corva builds document-processing infrastructure for engineering teams. The technology was genuinely good and the deck described it in the founders' own vocabulary, so investors left the room unable to say what the company did. Two months from a raise is a bad time to discover that.
What was actually wrong
The team had built for four different buyers at once and refused to give any of them up, which left the pitch abstract enough to be uncontroversial and impossible to remember. Narrowing the story felt to them like narrowing the company.
How we worked
- 01
Interviewed the users, not the founders
Nine customer calls made the pattern obvious: one segment was pulling the product out of the team's hands and the other three had been sold to. That decided the positioning for us.
- 02
Wrote the one sentence first
Everything else, the deck, the site, the onboarding, was rewritten downstream of a single sentence the founders could say the same way twice.
- 03
Rebuilt the site as the proof
The new site leads with the workflow it replaces and puts a working demo above the fold, because the product is more convincing than any description of it.
- 04
Rehearsed against real objections
We ran the pitch back at the founders with the questions their own customer calls had surfaced, until the answers stopped being defensive.
What changed
The round closed. The more durable outcome is that the team now says no to the other three segments without a discussion, which is the part that shows up in the roadmap.
“We spent two years being interesting to everybody. Six weeks later we were obvious to one group of people, and that is the version investors funded.”
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