We played on this "cathedral vs. bazaar" metaphor to set up narrative tension in the deck. This metaphor is used in open source a lot; basically, there are two kinds of models. Cathedrals are centrally designed, beautiful, and organized. Bazaars, on the other hand, are chaotic, collaborative, and bottoms-up. In general, the industry pendulum has swung hard toward this bazaar model. Any time a pendulum swings from one side to the other, it opens up new challenges. That sets up our problem statement.

Setting up a scare tactic and then flipping it on its head made for a really powerful narrative. Here, you can see we call back to the same framework we introduced in the problem statement, and solve it line by line.

At this point, we had a real product with 50+ customers. That was a huge proof point for us.

Roadmaps in seed decks are always a little rosy. We intentionally didn't put any dates or hard milestones in here, so that we had more room to experiment.

At the end, we had another slide with the financial ask, and broke down how we would use the funds. Every funding round should be as tightly linked as possible to the specific milestones for that capital.

Aaron White

Ariel Diaz

I created this deck to get funding for Blissfully after we built a successful alpha product. Building narrative tension and positioning ourselves in a gap in the market led to a successful seed round.

We played on this "cathedral vs. bazaar" metaphor

Seed Deck at Blissfully

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