We were brought on board by Kevin Lenehan, Founder and CEO of Fanzine, to design their investor pitch deck. This wasn’t just another deck. It was the make-or-break document for their next £1.6M EIS funding round.
Fanzine isn’t your average sports platform. It’s the fastest-growing mobile app for football fans in the UK, with over 3 million users gained entirely through organic growth. Think 41 white-labeled club apps, content across multiple platforms, and users spread across 185 countries. This deck needed to capture that story—and do it in a way that spoke directly to seasoned investors.
So, what did we actually do?
The Challenge
Kevin and his team came to us with all the ingredients—market traction, a proven product, and a serious growth roadmap. But they needed help packaging that story.
Their platform combines real-time content, social engagement, betting integration, and sports data—all delivered through a scalable tech infrastructure. Sounds great, right? But try boiling that down into a 15-slide investor narrative without losing the meat. That’s where we came in.
They weren’t looking for pretty slides. They needed clarity. They needed structure. They needed a design system that made the data land hard, and fast. And most importantly, they needed to speak investor—without sounding like a spreadsheet.
Our Approach
We started by mapping the key messages:
- What does Fanzine solve?
- How big is the opportunity?
- Why now?
- Why this team?
From there, we broke the content into digestible sections:
- The Problem – Fans jumping between scattered sources for content, stats, and betting insights.
- The Solution – Club-specific, one-stop-shop apps that combine everything fans want in real time.
- The Tech – A centralized codebase and trading system-style architecture that allows rapid deployment across new sports.
- Market Opportunity – 17.8 billion sports fans globally, with a strong push into Cricket, NBA, NFL, and more.
- Traction – 3M users, 41 products launched, and sky-high engagement and retention metrics.
- Business Model – Revenue from advertising, betting, merchandise, and affiliate partnerships.
- Financials & Forecasts – Projections showing 330% growth in company valuation and 270% user base expansion.
- Competitor Comparison – Clear advantages against giants like OneFootball and Hupu.
- Partnerships – Recent collaboration with UK Tote Group to monetize football betting.
- Use of Funds – How the £1.6M will fuel tech dev, marketing, hiring, and audience growth.
We didn’t stop at just organizing the content. We rebuilt the narrative for flow and logic, making sure every slide pushed the story forward. Each number had a reason to exist. Each visual supported the point. No fluff, no filler.
Design Execution
The deck was built in PowerPoint, but we treated it like a product. Every element was intentional—from color hierarchy to font sizing to iconography.
Here’s what we focused on:
- Investor-ready visuals – Clean, professional layout that mirrors startup pitch expectations but keeps it grounded in sports culture.
- Data-led design – Charts, infographics, and user behavior stats that actually mean something at a glance.
- User interface snapshots – We included app visuals and platform screenshots to prove the tech isn’t just theory—it’s live and performing.
- Retention + Engagement Metrics – Slide time, DAU, WAU, MAU breakdowns. All styled to let the numbers speak.
Most importantly, we resisted the urge to over-design. This wasn’t a pitch to fans—it was a pitch to investors. Our job was to make them care about growth, product defensibility, and financial upside.
What Made It Work
What Fanzine has is rare: tech that actually works, a real user base, and a market bigger than most people can wrap their heads around. We made sure that came through clearly.
Some wins we baked into the deck:
- Market scope – We showed how Fanzine was just scratching the surface of a multi-sport audience, with proven infrastructure to scale across Cricket, NBA, NFL, and more.
- Organic growth narrative – No ads. No celebrity endorsements. Just fans telling fans. That sticks with investors.
- Stickiness – With 6+ minute dwell times and 7x higher retention than the industry average, the user behavior did half the selling.
- M&A angle – We compared Fanzine’s valuation to recent media and sports tech acquisitions to position the investment as a future exit play.
The final result? A deck Kevin and his team were excited to share in investor meetings. It gave them the confidence to walk into rooms full of capital and walk out with serious interest.
Fanzine’s pitch deck was all about converting passion into proof. The platform already had fan love. They needed the investment to go bigger—and fast.
Our job was to build a deck that could hold its own under scrutiny. Something sharp enough for a VC meeting, but clear enough for a late-stage angel. The result was a story of scale, data, product, and momentum—all wrapped up in a presentation that made sense the second you looked at it.
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