Who is the Series A Playbook hub for?

Founders and CFOs at £1M+ ARR who are 6-12 months out from a Series A raise (or in a live process) and want the evidence base partners actually underwrite, rather than another generic fundraising guide. Strongest fit for ICP-2 (institutional scale-up founders).

What is the 47-Question Institutional Diligence Corpus?

A structured list of the questions every tier-1 fund will run a Series A through — clustered by Opagio 12 driver, with the answer artefact each one expects. The hub's anchor asset and the single most-linkable resource on the site for Series A founders.

How is this different from a generic fundraising blog?

Each cluster is grounded in evidence — sector benchmarks, cohort math, comp-set discipline — rather than narrative advice. The hub assumes the reader knows the basics and wants the structured operating manual.

Where should I start if I have not raised before?

Run the Round Readiness Diagnostic first to surface which of the 12 drivers are above and below sector median. Then read the diligence-checklist cluster, then the data-room cluster. The diagnostic takes eight minutes; the two clusters take about twenty.

How early should I start preparing?

Twelve months before the round is the structured answer. Six months is workable. Three months is reactive. The clusters in this hub are sequenced for a 12-month preparation arc, but each is independently actionable.

How does the hub relate to the Round Readiness Diagnostic?

The diagnostic is the entry point — it scores your business against the Opagio 12 and routes you to the cluster that addresses your weakest driver first. The hub assumes you have already run the diagnostic or will do so as you read.

Will this work for non-UK founders?

The frameworks (the 47 questions, the data-room structure, the cohort discipline) are jurisdiction-neutral. Sector benchmarks and valuation comps are UK-primary in this release; US and EU comparables are on the Round Ready roadmap.

Is the diligence-corpus actually 47 questions?

Yes. It is structured as 47 questions across the Opagio 12 drivers plus financial, legal, and team. Every question is the question a partner will ask — not a question that sounds important.

Content Hub

The Series A Playbook

The complete, evidence-based operating manual for turning warm intros into Series A term sheets — without losing a year to diligence that drags. Ten assets that work together: a 47-question diligence corpus, a 23-tab data room, the cohort analysis partners open first, and the timeline that sequences it all. Designed to be read in any order; sequenced for a 12-month preparation arc when read straight through.

Run the Round Readiness Diagnostic Start with the 47 questions

Most Series A advice is positional, not operational. "Build a great deck." "Find a warm intro." "Tell a compelling story." All true; none of it gets a fund partner from "interesting" to "let's send a term sheet". The gap between those two states is filled with evidence — structured, defensible, instantly retrievable, and sequenced in a way that a two-hour partner meeting can underwrite without further discovery. This hub is the structured operating manual for that gap.

47 questions every tier-1 fund will run a Series A through — clustered against the Opagio 12

23 tabs the data-room structure institutional partners expect to open

10 assets curated from Pillar 1 — Series A Readiness — and the Valuation Lab

Key Takeaway: Partner meetings are a narrative exercise. Diligence is an evidence exercise. Founders lose Series As in the gap between them — not because the business is wrong, but because the artefacts that defend the business are not assembled and sequenced before the partner asks for them.

Who this hub is for

Founders and CEOs at £1M+ ARR

Six to twelve months from a Series A raise, or in a live process
Post-product-market-fit, with named institutional logos in the prior round
Building toward category-leadership or international expansion
Strongest fit for the institutional scale-up founder archetype

CFOs and Heads of Finance

Preparing the diligence pack for a Series A round
Owning the data room, the cohort tab, and the metrics tree
Forwardable across the senior team — every cluster is CFO-readable
The cross-pillar reference is the CFO Stack

Not sure where to start? Take the diagnostic — eight minutes against The Opagio 12, and the gap list tells you which cluster is most worth opening first.

What lives here — the architecture

The ten assets in this hub are not isolated articles. They are the components of a single artefact: a Series A operating manual. Each addresses a specific failure mode — the diligence drag, the cohort pushback, the lowball offer, the technical-DD surprise — that founders encounter under round pressure. The architecture maps to the way partners actually run a process.

The diligence corpus

Mirrors the question stack a tier-1 partner team builds during evaluation. The reference list founders forward to peers preparing the same round.

The data room

Mirrors the structure institutional partners expect to open. Twenty-three tabs built by a CFO who has raised four Series As.

The cohort analysis

Mirrors the single tab partners go to first when forming the multiple. Specificity beats summary.

The metrics, the deck, the timeline

Each is built to the partner's mental model — not the founder's preferred narrative arc. Together they form the operating manual.

Example: A founder at £2.4M ARR has a perfectly good business and a perfectly good narrative. Their Series A drags 91 days because the data room arrives in tranches, every question generates a new file, and the partner team cannot build the mental model fast enough to underwrite. The architecture in this hub is designed to compress that 91 days back toward the institutional median of 47.

The 10 assets

Each row below is a route on opag.io or a forward-reference to a product surface. The "Where it lives" column is the actionable destination; the "Why it matters" column is the partner-facing rationale.

#	Asset	Where it lives	Why it matters
1	The 47-Question Institutional Diligence Corpus	/series-a-readiness/diligence-checklist	The reference list founders link to when preparing — and the artefact partners benchmark answers against
2	Series A Data Room — the 23 tabs	/series-a-readiness/data-room	The structure institutional partners expect to open. Built by a CFO who has raised four Series As
3	The cohort analysis partners open first	/series-a-readiness/cohort-analysis	The single tab that closes or kills the round. Specificity beats summary
4	Series A unit economics — the denominator problem	/series-a-readiness/unit-economics	The technical discipline behind LTV, CAC, payback and burn multiple at the institutional bar
5	Series A valuation benchmarks by sector, 2024-25	/series-a-readiness/valuation-benchmarks	The structured view of what your sector cleared at — and what the multiple cone looks like
6	What metrics you actually need for a Series A	/series-a-readiness/metrics-bar	The institutional bar partners measure against — distinct from the seed-stage bar
7	Why Series A rounds do not close (and the fixes)	/series-a-readiness/rejection-reasons	The structured failure-mode list, sequenced by frequency
8	How to respond to a lowball term sheet	/valuation/lowball-response	From the Valuation Lab. The five-step response sequence when a 40% under-ask lands
9	Building the Series A board before the round	/series-a-readiness/board-composition	The governance architecture that signals readiness — and the failure modes that signal otherwise
10	Series A timeline — T-12, T-6, T-3, T-0	/series-a-readiness/timeline	The structured calendar — what to do twelve months out, six months out, three months out, and at close

The anchor asset

The 47-Question Institutional Diligence Corpus is the hub's primary destination — the single resource that earns links from operator communities and that founders forward to peers preparing the same round. It is structured as 47 questions clustered against the Opagio 12™ value drivers, with the answer artefact each question expects. Open. Free. No gate. Designed to be the reference link founders cite when their peers ask "what do investors actually ask?".

The corpus is the first asset to read in this hub. Run the Round Readiness Diagnostic first — eight minutes — to surface which of the 12 drivers are above and below sector median. Then open the corpus. The clusters where you score below median are the ones to populate first.

Not sure where to start?

Eight minutes against The Opagio 12. The diagnostic surfaces the drivers that sit above and below sector median, classifies your funded state, and routes you to the highest-relevance asset first.

Take the diagnostic →

Open the diligence corpus

Forty-seven questions. Twelve drivers. The reference artefact partners benchmark your answers against.

Open the 47-Question Diligence Corpus Run the diagnostic first