How I'd grow Base Templates

Base Templates sells high-quality pitch decks and fundraising templates to help startups raise funds.

Founders can save a lot of time by using one of their professional templates instead of building everything from scratch.

But the real pain point that BT solves is the fact that many first time founders don’t know what to put into a pitch deck and they’re afraid of doing something wrong.

So in their positioning I’d emphasize the fact that these templates follow a proven structure VCs like.

A beautiful, editable template is a commodity that you can easily buy on Fiverr, but knowing exactly what investors want to see is not. 

That’s the real differentiator for Base Templates.

Base Templates should also back up the product credibility by placing the following elements above the fold:

- Credentials of the people who made the template
- Add positive comments from investors about the decks

I really like that they have an equivalent of a live demo button that lets you see all the slides before you buy.

In theory, someone could just look at it and manually recreate everything but founders who value their time wouldn’t do that.

In fact, their prices are accessible with the pitch deck template sold for $49.

This is great news for buyers, but a challenge for BT when it comes to increasing their LTV.

My first step would be upselling secondary products at checkout.

Email marketing could also work well; it’s easier to sell additional products to people who’ve already bought from you.

Sending buyers emails with a mix of startup funding content and promotions could give BT great results with low effort.

Pro tip: consider sponsoring newsletters to promote your product.

This is an underrated form of advertising as readers are engaged, and a recommendation from their favorite creator carries a lot of trust.

I’ve seen it generate a good ROI when the audience is a good fit.

Apparently, BT has good word-of-mouth, but they could improve it by offering incentives for founders to refer their peers.

For example, I’d create a refer-a-friend promotion where both the referred and the referee get a discounted price for decks.

They’re doing a really good job with SEO.

First they built a solid base of backlinks by launching a series of side projects living on the same domain that got picked up by relevant websites.

This allowed them to seriously grow their domain authority.

Then they created different landing pages (each one optimized for a specific keyword).

The content is really good, but the UX is great.

This winning combination allowed them to rank on the first page for multiple relevant terms.

The low-hanging fruit for them now is to check which pages aren’t ranking well and re-do them.

For example, the page targeting the term “pitch desk mistake” ranks on the 4th page after one year. Clearly, something’s not right.

I can tell that they can do better with a quick competitive analysis.

Looking at the SERP, there are websites with significantly lower domain authority ranking above them.

This means their current content isn’t satisfying the searcher's intent.

One area for huge improvement is social.

Right now they’re spreading themselves too thin trying to be everywhere… except where they really should be.

The social network where founders spend most of their time is Twitter.

They have a few options for generating buzz on Twitter:

- Repurpose their existing long form content into daily tips
- Publish weekly threads where they analyze successful startup decks
- Host a monthly giveaway to pick one founder and review their pitch deck

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