Pitch decks are the bread and butter of both founders and investors. After fortunately (or maybe unfortunately?) going through hundreds of pitch decks I figured there's usually something common among the ones that stand out.
People talk about the importance of customizing resumes and cover letters but the $M raising pitch deck often goes unnoticed. A pitch to a customer should look different from that to an investor. It's important to have multiple different versions of your deck targeted towards these specific audiences. Take it one step further, customize it even more depending on the target investors you're pitching to. For e.g., sharing a pitch deck with a blockchain focused VC with 2-3 slides explaining the history and basics of blockchain would simply just be a waste of your slides and the investor's time.
A pitch deck is essentially just telling a story about something you've been building, make it an interesting one. Start with a clear, no nonsense cover slide explaining in 4-6 words what your company actually does. Then start with the problem, how big is the problem (market), how you solve that problem (product/services details), why you solve it better (competitive landscape), why customers think you solve it better (traction and testimonials), how you monetize these happy customers (rev model), how you plan to grow (roadmap), why you are the best to pull this off (team and existing investors), and why you wrote this story (fundraise ask). Anything else is usually not so important and can go to appendix.
Keep it short, silly! Rather than elaborating, I would recommend going through this article (check 1st comment) about how little time VCs spend on reading your pitch decks. Don't get us wrong, your story is interesting, we just are reading 50 others at the same time so our attention span is that of a puppy. Thus, keep your decks short at around 15-18 slides (20 if you're feeling rowdy). This will help cut down a lot of unnecessary details and focus on what's most important.
The best pitch decks usually have a great balance between the quantitative vs qualitative data. Supplement your key slides with facts, figures and stats but also have testimonials and social proof in there. How to put that data into perspective? 4 words - Less text, more visualization.
It's ridiculous how hygiene checks are so neglected. Look, we get it, you've worked double digit hours on this pitch deck along with building a company but maybe take a nap, wake up and give it a final read, you'd be surprised by the tiny, embarrassing typos and errors you may find. Make sure the platform you're using to share the deck doesn't mess up your font size and graphics, don't make the deck private and leave investors hanging for access and pls have clickable links wherever possible. Review, review, review!
<aside> 💡 To summarize, make it as easy as possible for investors to go over your pitch deck and ironically, they will go over it multiple times because they actually like you! And just to reiterate how short our attention spans are check this article out!
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