Prelude

Imagine you're the founder of PlantPower, an innovative plant-based protein startup. You've poured your heart and soul into developing delicious, sustainable products. Now it's time to secure funding to scale up and bring your vision to the masses.

You know a great pitch deck is critical for winning over investors. Get it right, and you could be the next big success story, wowing VCs with your captivating narrative and huge market opportunity. Get it wrong, and your email will quickly end up in the trash folder.

As you sit down to craft your slides, you think back to some famous pitch deck examples. Airbnb's legendary deck used a clear problem-solution framework and painted an ambitious future vision. LinkedIn hooked investors by highlighting their explosive early traction.

You're determined to create a deck that makes PlantPower irresistible. But what exactly goes into the perfect pitch? Let's break it down.

Lesson Overview

  • Learn the key elements of a compelling pitch deck
  • Discover proven strategies for telling your startup's story
  • Get tips for designing visually engaging slides that capture attention

What’s the purpose of a pitch deck?

A pitch deck is a brief presentation used by entrepreneurs to provide an overview of their business plan and performance to potential investors. Its purpose is to explain the business concept, showcase its potential, outline the strategy, and request funding, all in a concise and compelling manner.

What do investors look for in businesses when pitching?

Pitching your business and creating a pitch deck differs according to the specific stages of business. For this courses example, we are going to assume that you are an early stage startup. This matters because a multi million dollar business with tens or hundreds of employees will have a very different focus to a business that is pitching an idea.

According to David Bradshaw, an expert in startup financing, here are the top 7 points that are important for startup founders:

Passion: For the project and ambition of where it can go. In simple terms, what investors look for is evidence of the financial commitments and sacrifices already made by the entrepreneur.

Traction: There must be a proof of concept to show investors, which validates the commercial viability of the idea. This can be a crude MVP and not necessarily the final product.

Significant market size: More customers and/or frequency of purchasing is an important commercial distinction to emphasize. An investor will not be interested in funding a beautiful product that has a tiny market of available buyers.

Competitive advantage: When elaborating how you will be better than the incumbent, you must take time to dig deeper and not just say "because we will work harder." How do certain geographic, cultural, or strategic advantages play into your hand?

Team: It's important to show investors that there is not a concentration risk on one person and that a team has formed that is both complementary and efficient for delegating appropriate tasks.

Exit strategy: Have an idea of where your company can go to in the future. Balance naive and empty assertions of IPOing within three years with a more pragmatic approach to potential strategic partners. Give thought to your projections and consider the importance of elements such as unit economics.

X-factor: Investors look for intangibles, such as character, charisma, and ethics. Be natural and do not try to be something that you are not, but always be consistent with your behavior, as an erratic change can be a warning sign that loses the deal.

We need to always keep these points in mind when building our pitch decks.

What makes a great pitch deck?

The good news is that despite what you may see on the internet, pitch decks can follow a formula. While it certainly may help, you also do not need to spends thousands of dollars on graphic design, strategy conversations, and general fanciness. What speaks to people more is authenticity, knowledge, and passion. In fact, look at some of the examples in ‘further reading’ and you’ll see that most of the series A pitch decks look like a dogs breakfast. But they all have something in common - their messages are crystal clear.

Put yourself in the shoes of an investor: you see hundreds of pitch decks in a month, so you want to be able to make a decision about the prospective company FAST! That means as the person creating a pitch deck, you want to give your audience (the investor, in this case), the keys to the castle and the shortcut to get there: All thriller, no filler. Get to the point without the junk.

Here are some ‘guiding lights’ for your pitch deck creation:

Work out how to tell (not sell) your story to investors, customers, and your mum: Never pitch your business through the lens of a PowerPoint deck.

Wayne Hu, who has received millions in funding, says it best: Your PowerPoint is a tool that is in service of your story. Even if you do not realise it, you have a story. The challenge is that you can’t just dump your story into PowerPoint.

Never fabricate your story

Authenticity wins and you will always get found out

Come prepared and speak with passion

If you have come this far in your business creation, you are passionate. Practice enough that you know your pitch deck in and out with your eyes closed. At this point, all you need to do is speak with Passion. For early stage startups, investors are mainly investing in you, your team, and your idea. This is especially true if you do not have a track record of business creation, or they are meeting you for the first time. First impressions last, and you need to make it count.

Average 10-30 words on each slide, and do not read off the deck.

You need the investors to be looking at you, and not the pitch deck. It should be there to support you.

Pitch Deck Template

Important‼ If you are building your own pitch deck, make sure you customise your pitch deck and don't just download a random template from the internet. Investors want something catered to your business. Templates will often get your business rejected by default.

IdeaFloat will generate a pitch deck for you with the below guidelines, but customise to your business.

We will use YouTube as our example, which is adapted from Wayne Hu’s video found here. It is important to note that most pitch decks adopt a relatively different approach that is suitable to their business, but this will give you a good grasp of where to start.

  1. Slide 1: 30 second elevator pitch.
    1. Square Example:

5 Steps in explaining Square’s product and the market opportunity, all in one.YouTube

  1. 1-3 sentences in plain English. Top: UVP
  2. Images: Example of product or functions
  1. Describe the problem you are solving succinctly

Describe your users pain points and how you intend to solve them. Get your investors excited that you are solving a huge problem

Here's Uber's example:

  1. Slide into your solution:

AirBnB's solution:

  1. Do a product demo
    1. Using a customer profile, walk through the use case for your product. Don’t be a technical nerd here - you do not need to explain every button and the backend. In YouTubes example, you’d show a simple walkthrough of video upload and display.
      1. If you do not have a working MVP, create a pre-recorded video of your product.
  2. Show the market size using TAM/SAM/SOM
    1. Luckily, we already know about TAM/SAM/SOM through our previous course. Walk investors through this in 1-2 minutes and set the vision for customer acquisition:
  1. For example, number of users fitting your specific target profile multiplied by demonstrated willingness to pay
  2. AirBnb’s market Share:
  1. [Optional] Why now?
    1. Why is this opportunity ripe for investment now, and not 5 years ago?
  2. Competition

Rank your competitors side by side showing a comparison of your features vs. your competitor features. Ultimately this should be in one of two formats. A row/column checkbox of features, or a 2x2 matrix where you pick key differentiators.

Ensure you highlight competitors, and do not hide any. Investors will (hopefully) do their own research before meeting you, and you should assume that they already know all of the quirks of the industry. Assume that they will call you out if you haven’t listed a competitor, or you haven’t done your research (worst case scenario!)

Here’s an example from DropBox:

  1. Business model:
    1. How you intend to make money from your product.
  1. Traction: User Acquisition
    1. Are you executing on your grand vision? If you are pre-launch, this slide should be
  1. Your traction should be a measurable metric that you track your business success against. It could be anything that is important for your business and will be important for investors, for example:
    1. Video Views
    2. Length of playtime
    3. Number of ads played
    4. It could also be based on feedback from pilot customers or beta users, foe example testimonials
  2. Here’s the traction from Moz slides:
  1. Team
    1. Create a SUCCINCT slide on the team. You are ideally already pitching in person. remember - each slide needs to be between 10-30 words total
  1. The team should describe your competitive advantage
    1. Unique Skillset
    2. Experience in the industry
    3. Unique story that gives you a competitive advantage over copycat businesses
    4. You understand your customer
  2. Here’s an example from ‘Square’:
  1. Last slide: The ask
  1. How much money are you raising
  2. How long the money will last
  3. What will it be used for & key revenue milestones
  1. This should be an aggressive but achievable version of your companies business plan 

Further Reading

If you are interested in learning more about Pitch Decks, these guides go into a great amount of detail.

Assignment

Have a crack of building your own!

Knowledge Check

If you can successfully answer these questions, you’re ready to move on to the next section:

  1. What are the 4 key elements of great pitch decks?
  2. How many slides should a typical deck contain, and how many words per slide?
  3. What common slides are included in most pitch decks?