Investor One-Pager

The one-pager is a screening document. Its job is to earn a meeting, not close a deal — and the design constraint that makes it work is that everything has to fit on one page. If it doesn't fit, the founder is including too much. The skill forces ruthless cuts: the meeting is where you go deep. The page is where you create the appetite to take the meeting.

Structure follows the SNAP test — Scale of opportunity, Need (the problem), Answer (solution plus proof), People. An investor scanning for 30 seconds should grasp all four. The headline is the single most impressive number the founder has — revenue if it's there, growth rate if revenue is small, waitlist size or LOI value if pre-revenue. Empty metric rows never appear; if a metric isn't strong yet, it gets swapped for a leading indicator rather than padded with "TBD."

The format is opinionated. Bold and tables do the heavy lifting because investors scan, they don't read. Dense paragraphs get skipped. Problem and solution are 2-3 sentences each, maximum. The metrics table runs 4-6 rows — fewer feels thin, more becomes wallpaper. Team lines are one credential per founder, not a CV. The ask frames the raise as participation in upside: "raising £1.8M to capture a £500M market" reads differently than "looking for £1.8M in funding."

The skill won't lead with the product. Investors care about the size of the opportunity before they care about how it's being captured, and a one-pager that opens with technical features instead of market scale gets discarded faster than a vague mission statement. It also won't write a one-pager that requires domain knowledge to parse — if a generalist VC can't understand it in 30 seconds, it hasn't done its job. The deliverable is one page, scannable, and built around the single number that makes an investor want to spend an hour with you.