Last updated: 9 October 2026. First edition: the email you get, the visitors log, the deck reading chart, the Share your Profile numbers, and the Require email to view switch.
When an investor opens your SeedForge link, the Share your Profile page shows the link they used, their visits, total time and how deep they read. Visitors stay anonymous unless the link asks for an email, so give each investor their own link. SeedForge can also email you about each view and show how far investors read your deck, free.
The rest of this page walks through each of those views in the order you will meet them, explains what each number can and cannot tell you, and ends with a short guide to acting on what you see. Every product detail describes SeedForge as it works in production on 9 October 2026. If you have not built a profile yet, how SeedForge turns your pitch deck into a profile investors read covers that first step.
What do you see when an investor opens your SeedForge link?
Whatever tool you use to share a deck, three things decide what you can learn afterwards: whether each investor gets their own link, whether the link asks for an email, and whether reading is recorded page by page. On SeedForge you get five things, all on the Share your Profile page (in the left menu under Profile & Proof) or in your inbox:
An email about the view, if you switched it on. You pick Instant, Daily digest or Off under your link at the top of Share your Profile.
A row in the visitors log. Each visitor, the link they used, their visits, last visit, total time and how deep they read.
The deck reading chart. How far investors read your deck, the average seconds spent on each page, and a marker where most readers stop.
The last 30 days in numbers. Visits, people, average time on the profile, how many came back for a second look, and a chart of visits per day.
Where visitors spend their time. The split between the header, the deck, the description, the team and the pitch recording (the recording of your optional AI Session, if you show it).
Here is how that compares with the two ways most decks still travel.
What you want to know | A deck attached to an email | An email with a read-tracking pixel | A SeedForge profile link |
|---|---|---|---|
Did they open it? | You wait for a reply | An "open", which a privacy feature in the mail app can trigger or hide | A visit on the link you sent them |
Who opened it? | Unknown | The address you emailed | The link it came through, plus the email when the link asks for one |
How far did they read? | Unknown | Unknown | How deep they read, and how far through your deck, page by page |
Did they come back? | Unknown | Sometimes, if the mail app reports it | Visits and last visit per visitor; second looks in the 30-day numbers |
What happens when you update the deck? | They still hold the old file | They still hold the old file | The link shows your current profile |
Price | Free | Depends on the tool | Free |
To see it for yourself, build a free profile at seedforge.com and create one link per investor. The rest of this page takes each row of that table in turn.
How do you create a separate link for each investor?
Every signal on this page depends on one habit: a separate link for each investor. The help centre guide to sharing your profile has the screens; the steps are short.
Open sharing. Expand Profile & Proof in the left menu, then click Share your Profile.
Create a named link. Click Create link and name it for the investor or fund you are sending it to.
Choose what this investor sees. Open Link Privacy Settings and pick the sections and individual documents this link shows.
Copy and send. Click Copy link next to the link and send it to that investor.
Preview shows exactly what that investor will see. Each link has its own on and off toggle, and the trash icon deletes it, so ending one investor's access leaves every other link working.
Can you see who viewed your pitch deck on SeedForge?
You see the link each visit came through, so when every investor has their own link, a visit points to the person you sent it to. A visitor shows by email only if they typed one, which happens when the link has Require email to view turned on. Everyone else shows as Anonymous visitor.
What does the investor see on their side?
The investor gets a single page. Your headline facts come first, the deck is readable right there in the page, and your description and team follow. Each link shows up to four sections that you switch on or off for that link: Fundraising, Pitch Recording, Documents and Team, plus whether the deck can be downloaded. You can open an example SeedForge profile to see the exact page an investor gets.
What the investor never sees is the material made for you alone. Your feedback, which reads your deck argument by argument and shows where an investor is likely to push, stays on your Feedback page. Only you see it. The visitors log, the deck reading chart and every number on this page are yours too.
How does SeedForge tell you an investor has opened your link?
Under your link at the top of Share your Profile sits a setting called Email me when an investor views. It has three options:
Instant: an email each time an investor views your profile.
Daily digest: one email a day that gathers the views.
Off: no emails; the views still appear on Share your Profile.
Which one suits you depends on how many links are out. In the first days after you send a batch of links, Instant tells you the moment a link is opened, which is useful when you are deciding who to follow up with. Once dozens of links are live, the digest keeps your inbox calm.
One limit matters here. Most visitors stay anonymous unless a link asks for an email, so the email tells you a link was opened, and the link tells you who you sent it to. It will not hand you a name for every visit. That is why the per-investor link from the steps above matters. If you send one shared link to twenty funds, a visit tells you that the link was opened, and nothing more. If you send twenty links, each visit points to the person you sent that link to. The help centre article on how SeedForge knows which investor viewed your profile explains the attribution in detail.
What does the visitors log on Share your Profile show?
The visitors log is the table at the bottom of Share your Profile. Each row is one visitor and shows:
Visitor: the email they gave, or Anonymous visitor when they gave none.
Link: which of your links they used.
Visits: how many times they opened it.
Last visit: when they were last there.
Total time: how long they spent across all visits.
Depth: how deep they read, with labels such as Quick scan, Summary or Engaged.
The All links menu narrows the log to a single link, and you can choose the period you want to look at. An email shows exactly as the visitor typed it, and a working fund email usually tells you the firm by itself.
The log is where the per-investor link pays off. Picture three rows. One investor opened the link once for under a minute: a Quick scan. A second spent eleven minutes and reached Engaged. A third came back four times over a week. Those are three different conversations, and without the log they would all look the same: silence in your inbox.
How far did investors read your deck?
The deck reading chart answers the question founders ask most about a deck: where do people stop? It shows the average seconds investors spend on each page of your deck, with a marker where most readers stop. If your deck has gone through versions, you pick one version at a time, so a new deck's numbers never blur into the old one's.
Expect the curve to fall. Reading research has said so for years. Jakob Nielsen at Nielsen Norman Group studied 45,237 page views from 25 people's ordinary web use and found that on an average visit people read at most 28% of the words on a page, and about 20% is more likely. Each extra 100 words bought only 4.4 more seconds of viewing time. An eyetracking study published in 2018 by Therese Fessenden at Nielsen Norman Group, with 120 participants, found that 57% of viewing time went to the part of the page visible without scrolling, and 74% to the first two screenfuls.
Those studies looked at web pages in general, so treat them as a rough guide to how attention behaves. A deck is read the same way: the opening pages get most of the time, and the later pages earn attention only if the early ones did their job. So read your chart with that in mind. A gentle decline is normal. A cliff is information. If most readers stop at page 3, page 3 is usually the one to rework, because that is where the argument stopped pulling them forward. What investors actually look at on each slide is a good companion when you rework a page.
What do the numbers on Share your Profile mean?
At the top of Share your Profile sit the last 30 days in numbers:
Number | What it counts | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
Visits | Every opening of any of your links | Volume. Rises when you send links, falls when you stop |
People | Distinct visitors behind those visits | Reach. Compare it with how many links you sent |
Avg. time on profile | Average time per visitor | Attention. Low time with high visits means people skim |
Came back for a second look | Visitors who returned | Interest that survived a first read |
Visits per day | A daily chart for the same period | Timing. Shows which sends were opened, and when |
Below them, where visitors spend their time splits that attention across the header, the deck, the description, the team and the pitch recording. That split deserves attention, because research on what early-stage investors respond to points at one section in particular. In a randomized experiment on AngelList by Bernstein, Korteweg and Laws, published in the Journal of Finance in 2017, nearly 17,000 emails went to 4,500 active early-stage investors. The average investor responded strongly to information about the founding team, and not to traction or existing lead investors. If your team section draws little time, check that it says what each founder did before, in plain words.
Next to Share your Profile sits Investor's Feedback, the qualitative side: what investors responded to most, the arguments and risks they reacted to, and recommended next steps. Some of its sections appear only once enough investors have spent time on your profile. Both pages are free.
Should a link ask for an email before it opens?
Each link has a switch called Require email to view. A link asks for an email only if you turn on Require email to view, which is off by default.
Turning it on gets you an email address. A visitor on that link types an email before the profile opens, and the email shows in your visitors log. A fund email usually identifies the investor and the firm.
Leaving it off keeps the first read easy. Every field you put in front of a reader costs you some readers. The Baymard Institute found that 18% of US online shoppers who abandoned an order (leaving aside those just browsing) left because the site wanted them to create an account. Shopping and investing differ, so read that as an analogy: a request for details at the door turns some people away.
A practical middle path:
Off for links you send to a named investor. You already know who that link belongs to, because you created it for them.
On for links that may travel further: a link you post in an accelerator portal, hand to an intro-maker, or expect to be forwarded inside a fund.
Why does reading data tell you more than a silent inbox?
You sent the deck and nothing came back. Did they read it and pass, never open it, or forward it to the partner who decides? Silence answers none of those questions, and it is the most common outcome. In a field experiment written up by Stanford Graduate School of Business, Will Gornall and Ilya Strebulaev sent 80,000 cold pitch emails to about 28,000 venture capitalists and angels in late 2018. More than 3,000 of those emails received an interested reply, such as a proposed meeting, a call or a request for more information. The start-ups were fictitious and the pitches cold, so warm, tailored outreach should do better. The shape still holds: a reply tells you only about the few who wrote back.
Email read tracking fills that gap badly. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection "stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user" and helps users "prevent senders from knowing when they open an email," in Apple's words when it announced the feature in June 2021. In July 2026 Apple clients accounted for 62.26% of the opens in Litmus's data, calculated from over 1 billion opens, and Litmus notes that opens from Mail Privacy Protection users "are not considered reliable opens." An open flag also says nothing about the deck itself.
Reading data answers a different question: across everyone who opened your links, where did attention go? Each investor meets your company for the first time, and the work that convinced the last fund does not travel to the next one, so the proof has to sit in the material, ready for every first read. If the deck reading chart shows most readers stopping at your market page, that is a pattern no single silence could show you. Fix the page, upload the new deck, and every link you have already sent shows the new version.
How does SeedForge fit into this?
On SeedForge, the profile is the proof layer and the reading data is how you find out whether the proof landed. Your deck and documents build the profile, the one link shows its current version to every investor you send it to, and Share your Profile then shows you, link by link, which parts of that proof investors actually read: the visit, the depth, the page where they stopped, the second look. Investors still make every judgment themselves; the profile simply arrives with the evidence laid out, so a first call can start from what they already read. The profile keeps working after the first send too. Each time you improve it, every live link carries the change, and when you complete it, your matched investor list unlocks free, with a drafted intro for each partner and the option to run outreach from your own LinkedIn.
Start here: upload your deck at seedforge.com, then create your first link for one investor.
How should you act on what you see? A checklist
Treat each signal as a clue to act on, and keep its limits in mind. This table pairs each one with a sensible next step.
Signal | What it tells you | What it leaves open | A sensible next step |
|---|---|---|---|
A visit within a day of sending | The link was opened | How closely it was read | Look at depth and time before you act |
Quick scan only | They looked briefly | Why they stopped | Check the deck reading chart for a cliff |
Engaged, long total time | They read with care | Their decision | Follow up within a few days with one new fact |
Came back for a second look | Interest survived the first read | Who else they showed it to | Offer a short call; send any update first |
No visit after a week | The link was not opened | Whether the email arrived | One polite nudge, then move on |
Most readers stop at the same page | That page loses people | The fix | Rework that page and upload the new deck |
Before you send:
[ ] Create one link per investor. Use the four steps above; it is what makes every row in the visitors log mean something.
[ ] Choose sections per link. Turn on Documents only where the investor will need them.
[ ] Decide on Require email to view. Off for named investors, on for links that will travel.
[ ] Pick your view emails. Instant during a sending week, Daily digest after.
[ ] Read your own profile once as a stranger. Open the example profile first, then yours, and ask what a reader learns in the first screen.
After you send:
[ ] Look at depth before time. Engaged means more than minutes alone.
[ ] Follow up on second looks. A return visit is the clearest interest the log can show.
[ ] Fix the cliff page. Upload the new deck; your links update with it.
[ ] Write follow-ups that add something. How to show investors you are ready without repeating yourself has the pattern, and what investors actually read in a first email helps with the note that carries the link.
[ ] Ask for direct input where you can. Reading data shows where attention went; getting investor feedback before you pitch covers how to hear why.
What is free, and what costs money?
Everything on this page is free: building the profile, creating and sharing links, the view emails, the visitors log, the deck reading chart, Share your Profile and Investor's Feedback. Your first 30-minute AI Session is free; additional sessions are $25 each. When your profile is complete, your matched investor list unlocks free. Outreach from your LinkedIn is free for the first 30 days; after that you pay only when an investor engages: $10 per call booked or warm intro offered.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if an investor opened my SeedForge link?
Open Share your Profile under Profile & Proof. The visitors log shows each visitor, the link they used, their visits, last visit, total time and how deep they read. You can also turn on Email me when an investor views and choose Instant or Daily digest, so each view reaches your inbox too.
Can I see the name of every investor who views my profile?
No. You see the link each visit came through, so when every investor gets their own link, a visit points to the person you sent it to. A visitor shows by email only if they gave one, and visitors who gave no email show as Anonymous visitor in the log.
How do I create a separate link for each investor?
Open Profile & Proof, then Share your Profile, and click Create link. Name the link for the investor or fund, choose its visible sections under Link Privacy Settings, then click Copy link and send it. Repeat for each investor, so every visit in your visitors log ties to one person.
Should I turn on Require email to view?
Leave it off for links you create for a named investor, because the link already tells you who it belongs to and an extra step can lose readers. Turn it on for links that may be forwarded or posted, so each new reader gives an email before the profile opens. It is off by default.
How far did investors read my deck?
The deck reading chart on the Share your Profile page shows it page by page: the average seconds investors spent on each page and a marker where most readers stop. You can pick one deck version at a time. A sharp drop at one page usually means that page needs work.
What does a founder see when I open their SeedForge link?
The founder sees a visit on the link they sent you, with your visits, last visit, total time and how deep you read. You appear by email only if you typed one, which happens when the founder turned on Require email to view. Otherwise you show as Anonymous visitor.