By the LinkDrop team.
The short answer
Send each investor their own link to the deck, not the file. You see who opened it, which slides they stayed on and for how long, and who has not opened it yet. When you fix a slide, the same links show the new version.
This page follows one invented founder through one week. The people and companies are made up; what the product does is real.
The task
Rhea Castillo runs Tallyfern, a two-person company that makes booking software for veterinary clinics. She is raising a seed round. On Monday she wants to send her deck to three investors:
- Sam Okoye at Fernwick Capital
- Ines Marlow at Harlow Bay Partners
- Theo Lindqvist at Stonemere Ventures
The deck is 14 slides: the problem, the product, traction on slide 4, the team on slide 9, and the financials on slides 11 and 12. She built it in her slides app and exported it as a PDF. LinkDrop shares PDFs; it does not make them.
Before: the deck as an attachment
Last time Rhea attached the PDF to three emails. Then she waited. An attachment cannot tell you whether it was opened, let alone which slide the partner stopped on. When she found a wrong number on slide 11, she sent a "corrected version" email, and every investor had two decks in their inbox. For more on that trade-off, see email attachments compared with links.
With LinkDrop
One link per investor
Rhea clicks Upload in the sidebar, drops the PDF on the page and clicks Upload & create link. The document starts with a Default link. She does not send that one.
On the document's Links page she clicks New link three times. Each link gets a Label with the firm and the partner, such as "Harlow Bay – Ines". The label is private; investors never see it. She leaves Allow download off, which is the default for a new link. An investor who wants a copy can still ask for one, and Rhea approves or denies it.
She copies each link into her own email to that investor. Then, on the Links page, she opens each link's ⋯ menu and chooses Mark as sent, with Email and the time she sent it. From then on the row says how soon it was opened after she sent it.
Investors do not need an account. The link opens the deck in their browser, with Tallyfern's workspace name on the page so they know who sent it.
Who opened it, and what held them
On Monday afternoon LinkDrop emails Rhea that Ines's link was opened. The email names the link, so she knows whose it was without Ines signing in.
By Tuesday the document's Metrics page shows two readers, each with the link they came through and a badge:
- Harlow Bay – Ines: Read. She went through every slide, then came back the next morning.
- Fernwick – Sam: Started. He read up to the traction slide and stopped.
On the Links page, Theo's row says "Not opened yet" and how long ago she sent it.
Rhea clicks Ines's row to open her reader page. Time on each page shows where the minutes went: about four of them on pages 11 and 12, the financials, across two sessions. Longest page names page 12.
A few minutes after each visit ends, LinkDrop can also email a visit brief: a short account of what held the reader, written from the pages they stayed on, so it can say "the cash-flow projections" rather than "page 12". It may suggest a next step. Every Free workspace's first brief is on us; after that, briefs use credits.
The follow-up
Rhea does not send three identical nudges. She writes to Ines and offers to walk her through the model behind slides 11 and 12. She gives Sam a few days. Theo opens his link on Wednesday and spends most of his time on the team slide, so her note to him is about who is building the product.
None of this tells her what an investor thinks. It tells her where they spent their time, which is enough to make the next email specific.
A fix, on the same links
Getting ready for the call with Ines, Rhea finds that one figure in the revenue table on slide 11 is wrong. She fixes it in her slides app and exports a new PDF.
On the document page she clicks Upload new version, chooses Replace the current version and picks the file. The deck becomes version 2. All three links keep their address, settings and analytics, and anyone who opens them now sees the corrected slide. There is no second email and no second deck. The History page lists both versions and, using credits, summarizes what changed.
Letting an agent do the busywork
Rhea could have done the same from Claude Code or another AI client connected to LinkDrop. The agent uploads the PDF that is already on her computer, makes the links and reads the numbers back:
Share ./tallyfern-seed-deck.pdf with three investors: Sam at Fernwick, Ines at Harlow Bay and Theo at Stonemere. One link each, labelled with the firm and the name, no downloads. Give me the three links.
And on Tuesday:
Who has opened the Tallyfern deck so far, and which pages did each of them spend the most time on?
If you ask the agent to build the deck, it makes the PDF on your computer; LinkDrop only receives the finished file. See how to send a PDF from Claude Code.
Good practice
- Test while signed in. Opened from a private window, your own visit counts as an investor's.
- Name every link. Readers are anonymous unless they sign in or introduce themselves, so the label is how you know who it was. See how to track when someone opens a PDF.
- Add a password if a deck should not travel. It stops people who do not have it; a forwarded password still works.
- Disable a link when a firm passes. That link stops working at once, and the others keep working.
What LinkDrop does not do
It does not watermark pages, put an NDA in front of the deck, or run investor Q&A. It shares PDFs only: export your slides first, or connect Google Drive and have your agent share the deck from there; Google turns a Slides file into a PDF first. And it does not read minds: time on a slide is a signal, not an answer.
What the example needs
All of this works on the Free plan, which covers 10 shared documents and starts with 100 credits. Links are not a plan limit, so one deck can go to many investors. Analytics are the same on every plan; credits pay only for AI work such as summaries, compares and briefs. See Analytics, Versions and history and Pricing.
For the same idea on a smaller scale, see a contractor who sends a quote.