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.
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.
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 CFOs at £1M+ ARR who are six to twelve months out from a Series A raise — or in a live process — and want the operating manual rather than another generic fundraising guide. The clusters assume you already know the basics (what a SAFE is, what NRR means, what a board observer is) and want the structured discipline that takes a credible business and prices it at the top of the round-size band.
Strongest fit for the institutional scale-up founder archetype — typically post-product-market-fit, with named institutional logos in the prior round, building toward the kind of Series A that funds either a category-leadership push or an international expansion. CFOs and Heads of Finance preparing the diligence pack derive equal value; the hub is structured to be CFO-forwardable end to end.
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. Read in sequence, they assemble into a structured preparation plan. Read individually, 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 data room mirrors the structure they expect to open. The cohort analysis mirrors the single tab they go to first when forming the multiple. The pitch deck mirrors what survives the second-meeting filter. The timeline mirrors the calendar they project against. Each asset is built to the partner's mental model, not the founder's preferred narrative arc.
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.
Where to start — recommended reading order
If you have not raised a Series A before, the sequence that compounds best is: start with the 47-question diligence corpus to scope what is being asked; move to the data-room structure to see how the answers organise; spend disproportionate time on the cohort-analysis cluster because that is the tab partners open first; then read the T-12 to T-0 timeline to project the work against the calendar.
If you are mid-process and a lowball offer has just landed, skip directly to the Valuation Lab cluster on how to respond to a lowball term sheet — it is included in this hub for that exact moment. Then circle back to the diligence-corpus and data-room clusters to repair the readability gap that produced the lowball in the first place.
For investor-state context — pre-institutional, Series A ready, Series A bridge, valuation-aggrieved — see Series A Readiness — Close the Evidence Gap for the curated state-specific landing.
Open the diligence corpus
Forty-seven questions. Twelve drivers. The reference artefact partners benchmark your answers against.