Lessons we learned from designing 30+ pitch decks
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This document provides lessons and recommendations for creating an effective pitch deck for seed funding. It recommends including key slides that tell the story of the startup, such as describing the problem being solved, product, market opportunity, competition, team, and traction. The pitch deck should clearly communicate the startup's vision through a compelling narrative rather than a disconnected set of slides. Details like fonts, images, and branding should be consistent to avoid distraction. The goal is to concisely yet memorably convey the startup story to investors.
Lessons we learned from designing 30+ pitch decks
- 1. Pitch Decks Lessons We Learned From Designing
- 2. Include The Right Type Of Content Different pitch decks serve different purposes, depending on your investment goal and where you are in your business journey. While a classical pitch deck structure like the one presented by Sequoia in their article on “Writing a Business Plan”, each investment stage requires a different structure.
- 3. If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Vision You have to be sure that your vision is specific to your niche and not too generic or broad, and that it’s a vision you’re striving to achieve (meaning you haven’t achieved it yet). Include The Right Type Of Content
- 4. Describe the pain of the customer (or the customer’s customer), as well as the negative consequences and emotions it triggers. If you can outline how the customer addresses the issue today and what are some limitations of those current alternatives, that’s even better. The problem If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content
- 5. Describe how your solution works, its features, the architecture, any proprietary code developed, or any intellectual properties. The Product If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content
- 6. Include market size estimates and declare your beachhead market. It would be great if you could also describe your ideal customer and show why this is a good time to act (explain why your solution was not possible a couple of years ago and why it cannot wait anymore, to create a sense of urgency). Market Opportunity If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content
- 7. Don’t stop at naming your competition, but describe how you intend to position yourself in relation to your competitors - what are your key differentiators and what makes your solution superior to all the other ones. Competition If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content
- 8. Team If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content Especially in an early-stage startup, investors are betting more on the team than on the product, because you may pivot your product in the future but you still have the same people running the company. One common mistake we see here is that founders usually just put a picture of each team member, list their name and position and that’s it. Unless you are very well known, that doesn’t say anything to investors.
- 9. Traction If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content It’s important to show numbers if you launched your product in any kind of way, especially in a series A deck. It’s not just about financials, this includes any other relevant metrics or forms of content: number of customers, client pipeline, a study case, client logos, testimonials, pilot projects, etc.
- 10. If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content Business Model How are you going to make money? You can include key revenue streams, revenue models, and type of service/product packages you offer, lifetime value of clients.
- 11. If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to get seed funding, make sure to include these key slides : Include The Right Type Of Content Fundraising Goal Include the fundraising amount you're looking for, use of proceeds and milestones/goals for the next 18 months.
- 12. Tell A Story Your whole deck should be built on an overarching story instead of looking like a group of disconnected slides put together with what investors want to see/hear. Having a compelling story can really help you stand out from other startups. Consider the fact that investors see so many decks, that they often lose interest or patience, which is why a good story will make you memorable.
- 13. Every slide is a part of your story that you want to get across. If you took all your slides and just read the headings, you should be reading the story of your startup. If you took out just one slide or changed the order of slides, then your story should not make as much sense. Tell A Story
- 14. We talked about different techniques to tell stories in your presentation in the Power of Storytelling. The best one is to make it personal. When describing your problem, start by talking about a personal experience, a frustration you’ve experienced, something that kept you up at night and how you came to the realization that you weren’t the only one with this problem. An effective persuasion technique is to tell the story in such a way that investors can relate to the problem you are describing (they might have faced the same issue). For example, in this deck describing a solution for fender benders and hit & runs, the founder started by talking about a personal experience that people can relate to it (it’s very frustrating to go to your parked car and see that it was damaged by another driver) before showing that it’s a larger problem. Tell A Story
- 15. Don’t Include Too Much Content Pitch decks are somewhat limitative. While they are a marketing document, in essence, they are not a 400-pages industry report. Most founders tend to stuff their deck with every fact and figure they have read over the previous 12 months.
- 16. This is the first interaction with investors. You don’t want to scare them, tire them or bombard them with so much information that they are not able to describe what your startup does or who you are. The urge to share every piece of information with investors is in every founder, the key is controlling it. This is where we come in; through our experience, we help guide founders to create the right structure for their story and communicate it clearly and effectively. The clearer you are in communicating startup’s vision and your business plans, the easier it will be for investors and VCs to focus their attention on your needs for a short amount of time. Keep your slides clean and concise and treat them like billboards. Don’t Include Too Much Content
- 17. The Importance Of Details Think of how many decks have been presented to these investors. They already know what to expect, how they want to see it and they can identify a misplaced idea, number or phrase almost instantly.
- 18. The Importance Of Details Overselling your headlines Language-wise, make sure to avoid the following: Using obvious phrases and industry clichés (if they see ‘disruptive’ one more time…) Overly complicated phrases (the need to include more content can be reflected here) Technical jargon that investors may not be familiar with Use your own language to tell your story.
- 19. Take your time designing the first two slides. Investors spend the most time on these. The title slide/presentation slide will be a key slide to make a first impression. We recommend that you focus on making the cover slide more visually appealing than the rest. The Importance Of Details As for the second slide, the Problem slide, it’s usually where the presentation lingers most and where investors get the best sense of your business
- 20. Keep your design consistent throughout the deck Don’t alternate more than two or three fonts, don’t switch color pallets mid-deck, don’t combine illustrations and photos, don’t abuse overlays. The Importance Of Details Stay away from red/green, brown/green, blue/black, blue/purple combinations. Instead, aim for a high contrast between background and text. Also, don’t use bright background colors that will strain your audience's eyes. These details can be very distracting for investors, robbing you of their attention.
- 21. Another key aspect is having a consistent design in terms of branding. Use the same colors, logo, fonts, type of imagery you normally use in your branding (on your website, collateral etc.). Pick a color scheme based on your logo. The Importance Of Details
- 22. Use high-quality visuals that fit the context. Use images that are relatable to your business and your target market, taking into consideration diversity as well (if you’re addressing the Hispanic market, images should have models from that demographic, not Caucasian). The Importance Of Details Don’t use cheesy stock photos like the one below.. If you're in need of quality graphics to build your presentation, we've made a list of visual resources website you can check out.
- 23. Most founders make the same mistakes. Common, easily-addressable mistakes, that are impossible to catch if you don’t have an objective second pair of eyes helping you to improve your pitch deck. Hopefully, these lessons will prove useful the next time you're working on a pitch deck and if you have any questions, we're happy to help.