Businesses need adequate financing at every point in time for all their processes to run smoothly. However, most of the funding that a business needs to maximize its growth does not often come from business profits, personal coffers, or financial assistance from families and friends.
That is why you need to convey your ideas to potential sponsors. These sponsors or investors invest their money into your business with the expectation of a positive yield. The funding helps materialize whatever future business plans you have.
You will not get investors to put their money into your business if you do not have a solid business plan. Instead of just conveying your ideas in a drab manner; you have to convince financiers that your plans and projections are worth investing inside. Make them feel excited about the partnership.
There are several steps you need to take to get financiers to fund your business. All the steps and tips you need to know about creating a winning pitch deck will be discussed in this article. The pitch deck is the tool you use to capture the interest of potential investors.
In this article, you will learn everything about pitch deck from its definition to insightful pitch deck examples you can learn from. You will also learn about what is included in a pitch deck presentation, the do’s and don’ts of pitch decks, and how to create a pitch deck in three simple ways.
Let’s get started.
What is a Pitch Deck?
A pitch deck is a concise presentation (in the form of slides) that business owners create to boost the growth of their establishments. It refers to a collection of slides to express an overview of business plans. The display gives clients a wrap-up of business plans, products and services, and operations.
Pitch deck, also known as investor pitch deck, helps prospective sponsors to learn more about your business. The presentation in slides makes it more fun, and the clients won’t go through the stress of reading generic texts.
Many business owners or sales executives make the mistake of thinking that the primary goal of the pitch deck is to acquire finance. The primary goal is not to acquire finance but to intrigue them and make them fix a time for an official partnership meeting. Acquiring finance is the end goal.
Getting financing is not a one-step procedure. It involves a series of steps in which the pitch deck presentation is the first. Of course, you have to give valid reasons why the investors should entrust their money to your business.
The pitch deck presentation is an effective business communication tool for meetings with potential clients, sponsors, and investors. This way, you can have an audio-visual appointment, resulting in a better understanding of the motive with fewer talks.
You can either host your pitch deck presentations in a physical or virtual space. If you choose the virtual space, there are tons of conference call services and web and video conferencing platforms you can choose from. They include RingCentral, Zoom, Zoho Meeting, ClickMeeting, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and other RingCentral alternatives.
Slides are what help you convey the compelling story of your business to your clients or investors. You need to use slides to help you achieve the desired results. Software packages like PowerPoint, Visme, Keynote, Prezi can help you craft a convincing presentation.
To gain the attention of your target audience, you can design two different pitch decks. The first will contain more text. The second will concentrate on visuals. People are always attracted to visual information; this will enable them to focus more on what you have to offer.
What’s Included in a Pitch Deck Presentation?
The pitch deck is a conversion tool to get your business funded. However, the sad reality is that some companies can create a pitch deck presentation and still not get sponsors. Why?
For your pitch deck to have a high conversion rate, it must have the following qualities.
- Concise
- Convincing
- Easy to implement
A good pitch deck must not have more than 19 slides. Apart from being a general rule of thumb for pitch deck presentations, having more than 19 slides can make your presentation boring and uneasy for investors to follow through.
However, there are good pitch deck presentations that have more than 19 slides. Ideally, you should work towards finding that sweet point slide length where you have enough space to drive interest in your idea and do not bore your audience.
The information in every slide must be compelling and contain no fluffs and fillers. Ensure the information is easy to act on when studied.
There are so many opinions on the internet and in the business world about what the ideal pitch deck must contain. Simply from looking at examples of successful startup pitch decks, it is easy to see patterns on what a successful pitch deck must absolutely contain.
Here are the 10 compulsory key slides that every business and organization should have in their pitch deck presentation, irrespective of their industry, target audience, or offer.
Let’s take a look at these 10 key slides in detail.
Slide 1: Introduction
The first slide of your pitch deck is the most crucial of all your slides. For a presentation to have a high conversion rate, there must be a brief intro at the beginning to hint at what the whole thing centers on.
This slide is a crucial one; it is what determines the state of mind of the client. Are they getting excited? Are they already fed up? Do they want to know more?
The introduction is your chance to give a great first impression. If you fail to do it right here, you can lose the investor. Prioritize making the first slide as powerful as possible. Many investors or financiers are impatient and use the first few slides to judge your business.
Ensure you keep the first slide or introduction slide short and sweet. It is the slide where you can tell people about who you are and the reason why you are here.
You can also use the introduction slide to communicate the value proposition of your business. Ideally, your value proposition should be a single phrase or sentence long.
Examples of the perfect business value proposition include:
“We Make Happy Meals for Infants.”
“The Smartest Way to Get Around” – Uber
“The Experience IS the Product” – Apple iPhone
“Be More Productive at Work with Less Effort” – Slack
When you use a good value proposition, your audience will be eager to listen to the rest of your presentation.
How to Make Your Introduction Catchy
- Make Your Introduction Simple, Short, and Engaging: The introduction slide is where you introduce yourself, your business, and the reason why you are talking to the audience. Don’t say unnecessary things here because you will probably bore the reader and set a bad template for the rest of the presentation. Make sure your expressions are as simple as possible and avoid complex grammar. Of course, you won’t have them look up the dictionary every minute to get your point. Make your tone conversational too.
- Briefly Talk about Your Business: Communicate what your business is about in simple sentences. Business owners feel they get sponsors interested by saying more than they should. The truth is that, at this stage, they want to get a glimpse of what you do. For instance, if you cook meals and deliver to the aged people, you can tell them, ‘We make meals and deliver fast to the aged in their homes.’ With that simple sentence, you have communicated that you can deliver meals as fast as possible to the aged (the ones that can’t cook themselves) in homes.
- Propose the Value of Your Business. You can present your business with a high value by making a valid comparison with a popular company. For example, if you sell email marketing services for small businesses, you can make comparisons with established email marketing software services such as HubSpot, MailChimp, GetResponse, Convertkit, AWeber, and MailChimp alternatives.
- Provide Ways the Investors Can Reach Out. This vital point shows that you are anticipating a positive response after they go through the slides. Update your contact information, like your phone number and your email, so that investors can reach out and fix a meeting. If possible, give your phone number to build strong personal relationships.
At the end of your introduction, the audience should know:
- You and Your Business
- Your Mission
- Ways to Reach Out to You
Everything about your intro should be top-notch and quality. The texts should be well organized and clear, avoiding the use of complex grammars. If you have to introduce visuals at any point, it should be a high-resolution image. The logo of the company must be legible and presentable too.

Slide 2: The Problem
The purpose of meeting with your investors is to solve a problem that finance can solve. Why must a pitch deck have a problem slide?
Investors fund businesses because they see a problem and feel they can find a solution to it. Entrepreneurship, at large, is all about solving problems. It would help if you had your laid-out plans on dealing with the problem, and that is what you will display in your slides when meeting the sponsors.
If your super business idea does not solve any actual problem, your pitch deck presentation is going to be a huge disaster.
In the problem slide, you highlight the market’s problems and the relevance of your solution to their welfare. You should do your market research to find out this problem or gap that your target audience faces and the market is not addressing.
A good problem slide will reflect two or three problems your audience faces that your product or service solves. It does this without being long and boring.
If your business idea does not solve the problem, then you should not source for funds yet. Financing can only work out when acted on good and yieldable plans. You should find a problem affecting your target audience, draft a strategy that can solve the problem, and make plans known to the financier.
A good problem slide will highlight numerous problems that your product can solve. Avoid being too verbose while explaining your offer. Ensure you keep your texts centered on the issues affecting your target audience. This way, the clients don’t get confused while trying to understand your point.
The problem slide is to explain what, why, and how you and your team will achieve the results. The problem must be a pressing need that the market currently lacks the solution to draw their attention or an improvement on the existing solution.
For example, some older people can’t run around the busy cities to get food to eat. Some are too old to get into the kitchen and prepare something to eat; others are even bedridden without any human help. As a catering establishment, that is a problem that you can identify and bring up ideas to solve.
One thing you should be very careful about is the length of the texts on each slide. Learn to convey your ideas with fewer words.
While introducing the problem slide, it is advisable to make your audience emotionally attached to your story. That emotional connection increases the flow from you, the speaker, to the audience. It makes the rest of the presentation relatable.
Ensure you do not let out the solution to the problem entirely in this slide. I will discuss that in the next slide.
Slide 3: The Solution
After going through the problem slide, there must be an agreement between you and your audience that there is a problem to solve. This slide is where you make known your solutions to the problem. Providing immediate solutions to the issue shows how prepared you are for the presentation.
While stating the solutions, explain the strategies you and your team will utilize in making the plan work. Convince them that their contribution will hasten the whole process and generate desired results with little time.
Try as much as possible to make your solutions realistic and achievable. If your solution is a concrete product, introduce it during the presentation, let them hold and feel it. Nothing drives home your point than a visible test or trial.
Make your solution slide as brief and straightforward as possible. Long texts bore readers, especially the ones you are trying to convince into buying your idea.
For instance, a solution to the scenario I painted in the previous slide is something like this: You are to convince the investors that delivering the food to them at their doorstep is one of the best ways to help. Tell them how you plan to partner with Uber and other logistic companies to provide the food as fast as possible when they make orders. Tell them how this can encourage longevity (by reducing the stress of running around to get food).
In this case, you highlighted a problem and provided an immediate solution. You are also able to show the importance of your offer to the target audience.
You can summarize your intentions in a sentence boldly written and identifiable. Then, you can go on with a detailed explanation (brief one).
A good way of convincing your clients to buy your idea is to provide numerous solutions to the problems. Pick the best option and state why you chose that option. It shows the client that you have done thorough market research, and you have the best solution to that problem.
Instead of hammering on the uniqueness of your solutions, describe the proficiency of what you have and why you believe it is the best thing to do. The truth is that almost all possible solutions to the problem have been heard before. What makes the difference is how you implement yours.
Avoid monopolizing the solutions you have. In essence, avoid the phrase ‘we are the only ones capable of doing this.’ The investors you are talking to have probably related with countless businesses before yours, which also offered similar solutions to the common problem.
Your goal is to show the unique steps in providing your solution and why yours is beyond normalcy.

Slide 4: The Market Size and Opportunity
The slide that comes after the solution slide is the market size slide. The market size of your establishment determines if you win the heart of your financiers. If the size of your market is small and there are no huge opportunities there, you will struggle to attract quality investors.
Many investors don’t want to partner with small-scale businesses because they feel that their gain would be small and the risk too high for such a small return. The primary aim of getting funding from investors is to use their money to earn more. These potential investors want a business that can multiply their contributions 10x within a space of 6-7 years.
If the market size of your business is highly appreciable, it would interest investors to fund you. Do your research on the potential of market growth in your field and back it up with correct numbers where necessary.
A good market size slide will map out the market growth of the business over the years of operation. You can also hint at your business plans for the future and how you intend to achieve them.
Make your potential sponsors see the proficiency of your product. Like every human, investors are moved when there are testimonies to back up their plans and proposals. Show them how you have been able to grow your project over the years and how it has affected your market’s growth.
A good market size slide will tell the investors that you are the person for the job. With a productive market size slide, you will show investors opportunities associated with the plans, the options you have made use of, and the ones you are utilizing at the moment.
If your business is a new one and you barely have data to create a market slide, it might be challenging to produce a reasonable market size slide; but there is a solution.
What you need to do is to study other businesses in your niche. Create analogies from their market and introduce your ideas alongside them.
An excellent example of a company that used this strategy is Uber. While creating a pitch deck, they illustrated the market size of their competitor, the taxi market. However, they introduced the service they wanted to render to the masses, which is slightly different from the ones in existence.
The strategy worked and Uber got investors which helped it with funds it used to become a worldwide brand. Today, Uber is dominating every other private establishment in the transportation sector.

Slide 5: The Product or Service
The product or service slide is where you show off the product you sell or the service you offer. This slide is similar to the solution slide.
In this slide, you take the extra step of talking about what will provide the solution to the foreseen problem. Some pitch decks combine the two (the solution and the product or service slide) in one or even talk about one and leave out the other to avoid repetition.
If it is a physical product, include beautiful and high-resolution images of your product in the slide. If it is a multi-functional product, you can upload different angles of the photos of your product, showing the functions.
For complex products that you can fully explain their function in a 3D display, you can highlight a cutaway view and explain the essential parts. If your product is an application or an online website with tools, you can add screenshots of the app’s usage or the website. The screenshots can highlight the unique and outstanding features of the app.
For example, if your product is a website builder for small businesses like Wix and Squarespace, you can take screenshots of how it builds high-quality business websites.
If it is a domain registrar such as Bluehost, GoDaddy, SiteGround, and other Bluehost alternatives, you can repeat the same process as above. Take screenshots of how it provides quality web hosting services for users and include them in the product or service slide. These are brilliant examples of you showing what you have to offer.
Your presentation in this slide should show that your product is competitive enough to challenge the big leagues of your market. In essence, your slide should tell how your product works, how it looks, and the satisfaction attached to its use.
If it’s a physical product, you can bring it to the presentation for the audience to feel it. For businesses that offer services, you can upload photos of your workers while at work. For instance, if you head a logistics company, you can upload photos of your riders making deliveries to your client’s homes.

As an add-on, you can do a video of the Display the video on your slide. Don’t make long videos; a maximum of 60 seconds length is okay. Remember that you are still trying to convince them to fund your business model.

Slide 6: Traction
Everything that has to do with financial investments needs assurance. Investors want to relax their minds that they are not losing their money to some random Ponzi scheme. One of the slides that help reinforce their confidence in your business model is the traction slide.
The traction slide is where you show the investors everything about the growth of your business over the years. It is also where you show evidence that your business will be more successful.
You would be dealing primarily with numbers in the traction slide. Let them know the number of sales you have made and how massive your profits have been on an annual basis.
Tell them about the minor and major goals you have achieved and the ones you plan to accomplish in the coming years. This information will convince the investors that they are on the right track. It will also help them decide to release their funds to be a part of the bigger picture.
Most business owners represent their numerical values on a chart. The chart enables them to display a lot with a small space. What they could have created a long table of numerous rows and columns for, can be done easily with a simple bar chart or histogram chart.
Clients can get a quicker grasp of the business or startup’s current achievements with charts as opposed to tables. Show the essential figures when creating the slide.
The traction slide is an important one to include in your pitch deck presentation. To the financiers, it reduces the doubts they have about your business. They want to see proof that your business is worth investing in. They want to see evidence that your business model canvas is highly profitable.
Be mindful of the texts on this slide, the use of numbers can be a trap to stuff your slide. Conciseness is vital irrespective of whatever you are presenting.
Investors and financiers want to see the assurance that they are getting a high return on investment.

Slide 7: The Team
The team slide is to introduce your team to the investors. A famous saying goes, ‘show me your friend, and I will tell you who you are’.
These financiers want to see the people you are working with. They want to know the drive of these people, their commitment, passion, and why they are essential to your business. The team slide builds confidence in your team members.
This slide will be a bit comprehensive because you will have to introduce each key member according to their roles. Under each member’s identity, state the member’s achievements, educational background, the quota he/she has contributed, the work experience, and the titles.
You can also explain why they are vital to your mission and business plans. Also, talk about their virtues and the positive effect on your business is essential.
Ensure the information about your team members is in short sentences. Don’t elaborate unnecessarily. You are to attract your audience’s attention, not tell them the life stories of people.
Keep the display cohesive, list according to the rankings from top to bottom. It makes the slide easy to comprehend. Highlight the specific thing (maybe the title) about a member in a conspicuous color.
Photos will make your slide enjoyable. Add the pictures of your members along with their descriptions. You can also categorize the illustrations based on department. It narrows down the search for a member on the slide.
If a client has to refer back to a member’s description, he/she can go straight to the section the member is in, if they have been appropriately categorized. It will be better than running your eyes around a large screen looking for a name.
The descriptions on the slide should be limited to the core members only. Externals and advisors should be left out. The team slide can introduce a few things about the founders of the business and the common goals they share. Some financiers care to know how the whole thing started.

Slide 8: Competition
There is hardly a business without competitors or rivals. Whatever idea you have to solve a problem, other people also have that same idea to solve that same problem. Competition occurs when both businesses try to convince the same target audience to buy into their concept.
The competition slide is to show the clients who your current rivals in the game are. List all your competitors for the audience to know you have done good research on your part. Describe how good they are and what they don’t handle well.
Tell them how the competitors have been performing over the years and why you are different from them. Inform them about what made your business grow so big to compete with your top rivals.
From your speculations, tell them your position in the market among your competitors. It can wow the clients and increase their interest in your business model.
You can top up the information on the slide with the things you offer that your competitors don’t. It gives you an edge on winning the heart of potential investors. Even the features you commonly offer with your rivals; show them how uniquely you do yours and how it has influenced your business growth.
Avoid painting your rivals badly in any way. Do not use the opportunity to tell lies about your competitors. If your investors find out you are telling lies in your presentation, you have ruined any chance of acquiring the needed financial support.
Bringing your competitors down doesn’t take you up, instead, it shows you as too ambitious to possible investors. You have to watch the tone you use in this slide. Avoid sounding condescending; it is imperative.
You can introduce unique graphs to compare the products of you and your competitors in your presentation.

Slide 9: Financials
The financial slide is one of the few slides clients spend most of their time on. You have to make the most of it to give them another reason to fund your business plans. The financial slide will include your financial projections, cash flow statements, balance sheet and income statement, and other important information.
Just like the traction slide shows everything you have acquired over the years, this slide shows your business’ future growth plan. Use this slide to show them what your company should achieve in the next three years (unless asked otherwise) using your business plans.
Tell them about your financial projections, business models, operations, and others in detail. The past achievements are proof that they can partner with you. Use it to prepare their minds on what they are to expect from your business in the future
You should also make use of bar and pie charts, histograms, etc. here. It makes your expressions compact and defined. Don’t just create charts with plain-colored arcs and bars. Make the charts colorful, it gives more meaning and beauty to the slide.
Colors make charts and pictorial representations easily understandable and conspicuous. Colorful charts make your presentation attractive, unlike a long spreadsheet full of figures and numerical signs.
The information you provide in this slide is changeable as you move on. It is almost impossible to accurately determine where the business will be in the next five years. But financiers expect you to map out a business plan and have what it takes to achieve what you have outlined. That is what the idea of pitch deck presentation is all about.
You can also share your plans on how you want to channel the distribution of money provided and how you intend to reach your target income goals.
The financial slide can hint the investors on the strength of your company and how long your relevance in the market will be. If you just started your company, you can skip this slide and include just the traction slide.
Be realistic with your information, don’t cook up unrealistic things to impress the audience. You might not be able to hit the point you want to during the given time if you do not manage your time well. Being realistic will make you not far away from what you envisioned.

Slide 10: Investment and Use of Funds
The previous slides have been about you introducing your business as an entrepreneur. This slide is where you tell the financiers what you need from them.
You must make sure this slide answers the questions:
- How much do you need?
- How do you want to use the funds?
- What do you want to achieve with the funds?.
There are a lot of ways to go about this, however, not all are effective. A lot of entrepreneurs get it wrong on this slide. Don’t just ask for a certain amount of money, state what you want to use the money. Highlight your financial plan for them to know what their money is funding.
When you back up your requests with valid reasons, it builds their trust and confidence in you. Also, they would take your plans more seriously.
Ensure you are specific with your requests; let your clients know exactly what you want. Don’t waste time by going through corners, be direct. It gives the investors an impression that you have done your calculations and analysis very well. Also, it tells them that you didn’t just come to call any amount of money because you feel you have convinced them.
Make your requests real. Don’t ruin all you have planned by aiming higher than you need. Remember, they have heard your plans and projections. They can tell if you are trying to be over-demanding.
Most entrepreneurs with successful pitch decks used a pie chart or bar chart to state the distribution of money. This way, investors have an insight into the execution of funds.
Let the investors know your expectations when you are funded. Tell them the heights you will reach. They have to see if they are capable of adding more money in the future.

These are the essential slides you need in your pitch deck presentation. Some specific businesses might require extra slides to introduce new things. Ensure there is cohesion among your slides, that is, one slide should lead to the next.
The next section will expose you to the things you should do and the ones you should avoid when creating your slides or presenting the contents on the pitch deck.
Do’s and Don’ts of Pitch Decks
While trying to create a perfect pitch deck presentation, there are some things you have to embrace and other things you have to avoid.
Do’s When Presenting
1. Engage your Audience
While passing your information, engage your clients with narratives to express the problem, your solution to it, and how you want to go about it. Tell them how your plans will affect them.
Don’t just read out everything like you are reading an English comprehension passage in front of a class. Ensure you carry the audience along as you explain the information on each slide.
Engaging the audience will get them to focus on you and follow the presentation from the start to the end. Also, engagement builds interests. They get more interested when they understand every bit of what you say.
Imagine you have to read this article without having examples to buttress my point? It can be daunting and tiresome. Tell short related stories in between your presentation to keep the conversation alive.
2. Strike a Balance Between Elaboration and Conciseness
As important as your content is, so is the way you present it to your audience. The style of presentation had made some entrepreneurs lose out on significant investments, even when they had the best plans and business models in possession.
How do your slides appear when creating your presentation? Do you over-deliver or under-deliver? Do you give out more or less than you should?
You need to strike a balance between saying too much and explaining yourself better. Don’t cite instances unnecessarily.
If you have expressed yourself well on a slide, move on to the next slide without wasting much time. However, if you feel a narrative will do better in communicating your points, make it short, cohesive and relevant.
Don’ts When Presenting
1. Don’t Base Your Presentation on Pure Statistics
A presentation full of statistics will look like an account officer reading the company’s financial report to the managing director. Can you imagine how boring that is? Yes, it is tiring.
Back up every stat you provide with a coherent narrative. Don’t just focus on the statistics hoping that you are amusing the investors with 6-7 figures on the chart. Of course, you are, but narratives and life examples make it better.
Many people believe that you only need to engage your audience on slide one during the introduction. The truth is that you need to engage throughout the presentation, from the intro to the conclusion.
Statistics are vital but are not the only significant feature of a pitch deck presentation.
2. Don’t Stare At the Slides While Presenting
Staring at the slides while presenting is a bad posture and shows a lack of confidence. Ensure your presentation is a conversational one, don’t just stay glued to the slides while presenting. It is an inappropriate posture or body language for someone trying to win the heart of a group of people.
While presenting, move your eyes from the slides to the audience and vice versa at regular intervals. Doing this ensures that you engage them as your pitch deck presentation runs. Turning every minute to read from the slides can reduce the tempo and also bore the listeners.
When you address them without staring at the slides, it builds your confidence and reassures the audience that you know what you are saying. Also, it can clear doubts of improper preparation beforehand.
These financiers can also read what is on the slides. The essence of the presentation is for you to engage them.
Do’s When Designing Your Slides
1. Reduce the Texts On Each Slide
When creating a pitch deck presentation, it is not advisable to choke your slides with texts. Make sure you can pass across the necessary information with little texts. Use lots of visuals like pictures, charts, screenshots, and short clips, to explain your plans in detail. Remember, long texts bore readers.
Likewise, while designing, strike a balance between elaboration and conciseness. It will help you a lot in engaging your audience throughout the presentation.
Also, use large font sizes and visible colors on the palette. It reduces the texts on each slide and makes your work legible.
2. Use Bullets to Introduce Critical Points
An excellent way to avoid stuffing your audience with texts is by bulletin. Use bullets on your slides, it organizes your work.
Don’t just pack paragraphs together on the slides to present. In slides where you have to list things for your audience, don’t separate them with commas. Instead, separate them with bullets to reduce the texts and give your workspace.
Stuffy slides are complex for the audience to comprehend. Your presentation has a short time frame, you wouldn’t want to spend the whole time reading out long and boring paragraphs to the audience.
Cut them short with bullet points and make your presentation more enjoyable for you and your audience.
3. Add Your Contact Info
Imagine you meet a long-lost friend, exchange pleasantries, and fix a date to meet again, but you do not exchange contact details. There is a high possibility that you might not see each other for a long time and that the meeting will not hold. It is the same scenario when you don’t include your contact details in your presentation.
Ensure you add your contact information at the end of the presentation slides so that your clients can always reach out after that meeting. Some clients probably have to bother with questions after the presentation; they need your contact info to reach out.
Furthermore, you can add a photo of yourself before the contact information. It gives your business a ‘face’ that financiers can look up to when they need certain information.
One last thing, whatever contact details you use in your pitch deck presentation must be available all the time. Investors can quickly lose interest when they can not get a response on time, considering that you have competitors.
Don’ts When Designing Your Slides
1. Avoid Adding Too Many Team Associates
In the team slide, where you have to introduce your team, introduce only the core members. Adding too many members can fill up the whole screen and leave the audience perplexed.
As you introduce your business plans and various backup data supporting your business idea, investors also want to know the main person captaining the ship.
Too many team members can make the mistake one for the other, especially when you have to add photos of each member alongside its description. For precision, the core members should not be more than seven. Anything above that is excessive.
How to Create a Pitch Deck in 3 Simple Steps
Knowing what a pitch deck presentation should entail is not enough, you need to know how to put them together.
Creating a pitch deck is easy if you have the necessary tools and templates. You can use free or paid pitch deck presentation templates to get one done quickly.
Some websites offer to create pitch decks for users such as Visme. Your pitch deck will be ready in a few minutes. Save yourself the stress of creating slides from scratch, you can pick from the templates available on the application. These templates are ready-made to suit different interests.
If you don’t want to use a pitch deck website tool, you can create your slides from scratch. It can take your time, but you are sure to have what you want.
Another option is to hire the services of a freelance graphic designer in the event you do not have the graphic design skills needed to design killer pitch deck presentation slides. You can find these freelance graphic designers on freelance job websites such as Upwork, Fiverr, Guru, and Freelancer.
Here are the three steps you need to create the best pitch deck that appeals to investors and financiers.
Step 1: Choose a Pitch Deck Template
Templates are ready-made copies that you can use instead of creating from your pitch deck from scratch. There are lots of Pitch deck tools such as Google Slides, Visme, Canva, and Slidebean that help users create and design pitch decks. These tools provide tons of useful templates for users.
The first thing you need to do is to pick a template from the hundreds at your disposal. Avoid picking a template because you like it, you have to look for the one that suits your business model and contents. That is why there are different templates for different types of businesses.
In some cases, you might not find a perfect template for your business. The next best thing you can do is pick the closest you can get and modify it.
If you are not using a pitch deck tool, you can create your pitch deck presentation slides from scratch. You can use any graphic design software or the simple Microsoft PowerPoint to create your pitch deck from scratch.
Step 2: Customize your Pitch Deck Story
When you choose the template that fits into your business model, you can edit and customize it for better results. The template you pick is probably not the exact thing you want; that’s why the edit option is available.
Most pitch deck software has editing tools to help you reshape your template to your actual desire. These tools are so diverse that you probably won’t use them all before creating something attractive.
You can change anything you want to fit your style. Some apps even have the drag-and-drop function to ease your editing. With these tools, someone without foreknowledge of editing or presentation can even create something beautiful.
You can change font sizes and styles, texts and background colors, images and themes, and motion style of slides. You can add bitmap images from external sources to make the boring texts lively to read.
Furthermore, you can add animations, links, short video clips, and many more to beautify each slide. You can add, remove, replace, or rearrange slides the way you want.
This whole process won’t take up a lot of your time if you use the right tools. It is immensely beneficial for you to do everything necessary to put out a perfect body of work. The pitch deck layout contributes to your chances of securing the funds.
Step 3: Download and Share with Investors
After customizing your pitch deck to a perfect taste, you can download it to your device. You can even share it online across different media using a link.
Pitch deck applications offer you a wealth of format options for download. You can download your pitch deck as an image to display the slides, side by side. Also, you can download it as a PDF format, or better still, as a PowerPoint file.
Another thing you can do with the finished pitch deck is that you can create a private link to share the pitch deck with specific people via mail.
There is the option of uploading it on the web to be available for people on search results on Google and other search engines. You can also put the presentation on the company’s official website for the core members to access.
Insightful Pitch Deck Examples You Can Learn From
The process of creating a good pitch deck can be tiring. You need the inspiration to help you escape that dreadful fear stage and hit the right entrepreneurial mindset. Will my pitch deck presentation be a success or a failure?
There is no better way to escape the imposter syndrome that every entrepreneur faces than to get inspiration from companies who had successful pitch deck presentations. What is better than reverse-engineering the pitch deck presentation that successful companies like Facebook, CoinBase, Square, Uber, and Airbnb used to attract investors?
Here are some insightful pitch deck examples you can learn from.
1. Buffer
Amount Raised: $500,000


Buffer is one of those awesome pitch decks that although does not hold much visual appeal but still won the hearts of investors. How did they achieve this? They had the captivating numbers to capture the mind of financiers.
2. Cubeit
Amount Raised: Seed – $3,000,000


Cubeit is an app that helps users to get unique content from anywhere. The company developed a simple, short, and compelling story for a pitch deck presentation. The presentation got them about $3 million from clients, and that was how they got to where they are today.
3. Contently
Amount Raised: $9,000,000 | 2014


Contently is an American technology company that is based in New York City. They create software that helps companies and brands connect to freelance writers, videographers, editors, graphic designers, social media marketers, etc.
This widely-known company created a pitch deck to show investors what plans they have for the future. They got an amount of $9 million from financiers.
4. Frontapp
Amount Raised: $10,000,000 | 2016


Frontapp is a company that handles the communication channels of its users. They manage their social media accounts, live chats, SMS, email address, etc. They created a pitch deck and focused on the critical numbers that are crucial to the business at that point. The pitch deck generated a sum of $10 million, and the rest is history.
5. Airbnb
Amount Raised: $600,000 | 2009


Airbnb is a digital marketplace for people to discover places for different purposes. They can book these places through their mobile phones, tablets, computers, etc. It could be a suite for relaxation, a penthouse for vacation, or a room to spend the night.
The platform connects people across over 180 countries. Airbnb, as we know it today, was once a group of people with ideas and no funds. They tried a pitch deck and made over $500,000 from investors.
6. Uber
Amount Raised: 14 rounds – $11.5 bill


Uber is a global transportation company that conveys users from their current location to their choice of destination with the help of online orders. It has its headquarters in California, United States of America.
The online cab company has undoubtedly made transportation easy over the years of operation. Not many people could jump into traffic all day. Uber saw this and decided to make things easy. They made a pitch deck from the start and raised close to $12 billion. Today, Uber operates in over 600 cities in the world.
7. Crew (fromely Ooomf)
Amount Raised: $10,000,000 | 2015


Crew is another technology company that connects individuals and agencies with freelance designers, content creators, media accounts managers, etc. Crew has worked with big companies like Eventbrite, Tinder, Dropbox, etc.
Crew’s founder used a simple but powerful pitch deck to communicate his ideas to the public. He didn’t have to say too much, went straight to the point, and raised $10 million.
8. WeWork
Amount Raised: Series D – $335,000,000


WeWork is an American company that is headquartered in New York City. The company provides workspaces for freelancers, entrepreneurs, small and large-scale businesses, enterprises, etc. It was founded in the year 2010.
They have been able to develop lots of workspaces and still want to build more. During the start, they created a pitch deck, showing the right things investors needed to see. Today, they are dominating their market.
9. Dwolla
Amount Raised: $30,000,000


Dwolla is an American e-commerce company that provides a medium for online payments and mobile payments. It was founded in 2008. Dwolla helps users to send and receive funds from each other. It is located in Iowa.
Despite the massive and tight competition in the online payment system world, Dwolla still holds its stance. They are not the most successful, but they could attract financiers to the online payments industry with captivating ideas. They raised about $30 million from investors.
10. The Daily Hundred
Amount Raised: $1,000,000


The Daily Hundred is an app that gives businesses the chance to compensate customers by encouraging product endorsements and micro-level brand advertisements. It produced this alluring pitch deck that not many investors could ignore.
This pitch deck covered everything about the business, from the past operations to the plans. They made $1 million from the presentation that year.
11. Mixpanel
Amount Raised: $65,000,000 | 2014


Mixpanel is an advanced platform available on the web and mobiles. They help businesses and enterprises grow by making them understand their users. Also, the company uses its products to track people’s behavior.
They created their pitch deck by focusing the contents on incredible numbers. Mixpanel also showed investors the reasons why they are different from their competitors in the game. Note, they didn’t shame their rivals; they only highlighted some differences between them in their favor.
12. LinkedIn
Amount Raised: $10,000,000 | 2004


Virtually everyone operating a mobile must have heard of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a networking app where people get business connections, seek jobs, recruit remote workers, and find clients.
This app also helps businesses to expand networks across countries. It was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in California. Over the years, users have been able to acquire knowledge and skills and even get business opportunities. LinkedIn was able to raise about $10 million from investors.
13. Foursquare
Amount Raised: $1,350,000 | 2009


Foursquare is a search-and-discover mobile app that satisfies user’s quest to find visiting places. They provide personalized search results for users.
What the mobile application does is to recommend close places that you can see based on your current location. Also, they scan your browsing history data and orders to give you a clear choice. Interesting, isn’t it? The operation is not an easy-to-explain one. For their pitch deck, they focused on explaining how the app renders its services.
14. Ad pushup
Amount Raised: Angel Round – $635,000


Ad pushup specializes in optimizing people’s websites to increase the views rate and conversion rate of Ads. They also maximize the number of clicks without disturbing the visitors’ user experience.
The company focused on the traction slide in their pitch deck presentation. This traction slide was peculiar to what they were introducing to their audience. They raised about $600k from financiers. You can impress your audience with great numbers.
15. WealthSimple
Amount Raised: Seed – $1,900,000


WealthSimple is a new kind of financial counselor that is brilliant, diplomatic, human, and affordable. They help users eliminate the guesswork from future investments. With this, users are on the right track financially.
The company also helps users achieve new financial goals. They are one of the premiers of digital financial advising. Also, WealthSimple has been able to explain the concept of the application to people (in a layman’s way) with the help of a pitch deck.
16. Manpacks
Amount Raised: $500,000


Manpacks is a digital service that delivers men’s accessories, including grooming products, underwear, etc. These products are from popular brands like Gillette, PACT, Champion, Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton, etc.
The company was able to get some traction over the years due to its friendly customer service experience. This method won the hearts of many investors, and they raised $500,000.
17. Snapchat
Amount Raised: Series C – $50,000,000


Snapchat is everywhere today. Almost everyone has the Snapchat app on their mobile. The app allows users to make videos and pictures with different filters and themes. It operates as a social media application.
When Snapchat came, despite the social media apps dominating the market like Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat could still create its space from that world with its unique features. Snapchat proved its ability to dominate a part of social life by understanding the market. They raised $50 million from a pitch deck presentation.
18. Podozi
Amount Raised: $120,000


Podozi is a beauty tech that helps users find the right beauty products for people of different colors. It is an online e-commerce platform based in Nigeria. The platform helps customers discover authentic and reliable beauty brands from all over the world. Also, customers enjoy new shopping experiences all the time.
During the pitch deck presentation, they acquired many photos of their target audience (women of color) to show them. It made it easy for the audience to understand their intentions in no time, and they got funded from different sources.
Podozi showed their target audience the working partnership they already had with big brands in their pitch deck presentation. It helped them attract funds from investors.
19. Linio
Amount Raised: Venture – $79,000,000


Linio is like a business directory. It is an e-commerce company that offers various products online, ranging from gadgets and electronics to personal accessories.
The company was founded in 2012 in Mexico. Today, they work in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, etc. Linio connects online retail services to the South-American markets.
20. Kompyte
Amount Raised: $500,000


Kompyte is an intelligence website tool designed to reply to strategies used by its users’ rivals. The tool aims to study the techniques that competitors use and quickly respond to them.
Using high-resolution photos, Kompyte explained the concept of their services smoothly and shortly. In this case, visuals did the most work here.
21. Launchrock
Amount Raised: $800,000


Launchrock is a digital platform that allows users to create advertisement pages for their products and services with special tools. It helps its users compensate other people for advertising their products through different social media networks and email.
It was launched in 2011 in Philadelphia, United States of America. Launchrock used a short and straightforward pitch deck for its fundraising activities.
22. Castle
Amount Raised: Angel Round – $270,000


Castle helps landlords and landladies to manage their rental homes. It finds tenants, secures the rent dues, and oversees the affairs of the houses, helping reduce the burdens of property owners. The software was able to develop a solution that is quite different from what is dominating the market over the years. It enabled them to seize the attention of the audience right from the pitch deck presentation.
23. Intercom
Amount Raised: $600,000


Intercom is an American software company that provides a messaging channel for business. It is a platform that makes it easier for businesses to communicate with their new and existing customers personally.
You can use the platform to communicate through different social media accounts and email addresses. This famous company did not start big, the owners could craft a top-notch pitch deck that assisted the fundraising.
24. Pendo
Amount Raised: $20,000,000


Pendo is a company that provides a digital platform for businesses and organizations to upgrade the product usage experience.
With this platform, companies can track customers’ reviews and impressions, get feedback and provide solutions to their problems, all within one application.
Pendo created a pitch deck and raised $20 million! The pitch deck painted a future that is unavoidable for everyone and provided the necessary solution to the problems in the market.
25. Mandaê
Amount Raised: $4,230,000 till date – deck used to raise $200,000


Mandaê is a mobile app that helps Brazilians ship their goods. The company collaborates with postal services and other exclusive transporters that are not available for everybody (an add-on for Brazilians).
They created a powerful pitch deck that introduced the perfect solutions to inevitable problems, a strong team ready to solve the issues, and great numbers to back up their plans. They raised about $200,000 from prospective investors and materialized the beautiful plans they had.
26. Gaia Design
Amount Raised: $2,850,000


Gaia Design, a Mexican online store, sells beautiful furniture and home accessories at considerable prices. They make quality products that are available for every Mexican household.
The pitch deck might seem challenging to understand due to language barriers, but you can learn a lot from the pitch deck layout. Gaia Design was able to categorize the information into slides without stuffing each of them. Their target audience understood the messages, and they got funded with above $2.6 million.
Types of Pitches
The doors are shut, everyone’s assembled around the conference room table, notepads out, coffee in hand, waiting for your speech.
This is the time you’ve been planning for months now. The opportunity to raise funds for your project and start down the road to action …
Hold on, first, you have to pitch to the investors.
The harsh reality that sometimes hits startup founders is that they always need to pitch, I mean, always. If you want to lure investors, consumers, or just get people enthusiastic about your plan, you will be required to learn the art of pitching.
The skill of telling concisely what your startup does and passing the information in the right way, however, is not a simple task.
According to GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor), about 100 million startups are originating every year. That’s approximately 3 startups every second.
Before learning how to curate the message in the best way, startup founders need to understand that not all the startup pitches are identical. Knowing the various types of startup pitch becomes indispensable for long-term benefits.
As a founder, you won’t have much time to create and perfect your startup pitch, for this purpose, getting ahead of this task is crucial.
The answer here is that you study how to alter the messaging according to the circumstances you encounter. For instance, startup trials require a more diverse type of startup pitch than when you face someone at an exhibition.
Penetrating the messaging is essential, but the substance of the message is not the solitary thing to notice. Discovering how to pitch a startup is a process that anyone can master and, more significantly, everyone working for you should also know.
Every single employee, particularly in the initial days, should be a representative of your company. Make sure that everyone is on the same page and will promote your work as a founder.
Before discovering how to pitch and what’s necessary for a pitch, it’s vital to know the varieties of startup pitch you can present.
The messaging or the arrangement of your startup pitch don’t matter if you use it in an incongruous circumstance.
Types of Startup Pitch
Depending on who you are communicating with and the circumstances you are in, the information around product pitch should be modified. Below, we take a look at the most prevalent types.
1.) The Twitter Pitch
This sums up your complete idea in one awe-inspiring sentence. It has become obvious to devise a comparison with well-known organizations to promote this task for startup founders. For this reason, we frequently hear:
“It’s the Amazon of XYZ”
Despite this being still appropriate and powerful, I recommend you try to add something your innovation to it. In the last few years, startup founders have been exploiting the comparison method, so it’s great to come at it from an offbeat perspective.
When is the right time to Execute It?
This is most suitable for events where you meet completely new people and they don’t have an idea of your business.
An engaging, catchy line that describes in a few words your company, but doesn’t make the listener doze with futile data.
There shouldn’t be any question from the listener’s point of view other than “how does that work?” then you can go on and give a detailed explanation of the idea you have.
2.) What is a Seed Funding Pitch?
The first thing founders need to realize is that the seed funding pitch varies from other presentations. This will have an initial impact on the startup.
It is a short presentation that a founder or entrepreneur offers to possible investors, partners, and cofounders to give them a sense of the business plan at the beginning stage as well as the roadmap and strategies for the future.
The purpose of the pitch is to draw investors on board for seed funding, which will be the basis for the brand-new company.
There are so many things to keep in mind while preparing a seed funding deck. These involve specific things that should be part of your story and some that should be withdrawn at all costs.
Seed-stage investors are very selective about their time so your seed funding presentation should be brief but also have all the basic aspects that an investor would require.
3.) Pre-Read Pitch/Leave Behind Pitch
A well put together and comprehensive pre-meeting pitch deck is very challenging. Producing one as a send-ahead, where you won’t be available to give an idea, can be a whole different monstrous job.
Unfortunately, most investors want to see a deck before they meet you. And if you are fortunate enough to get an appointment without one, they’re still preferred to ask your pitch deck so they have some background setting for the conference.
below are the three top areas to cover in the pre-read pitch deck:
- Explain your problem
- Make your team stand out
- Unveil your product
4.) Demo Pitch
Demo pitch is loaded with heavy images and less text. So basically you have to make the images talking most of the time along with your oratory skills.
In short, make noise with pictures, not with words.
5.) Metrics Pitch
The metric pitch is all about numbers and the progress you have witnessed over the years.
The story you offer to investors is vital for your fundraising purposes. The financial metrics that succinctly and precisely explain your company’s traction and the business image will underpin this narrative, giving the backbone to maintaining your company up against the analysis of the fundraising process.
Understand your numbers and exhibit the most appropriate metrics to force investors to finance.
6.) Business Model Pitch
A business pitch deck is a portrayal that presents a summary of your business idea to your house members. Typically, you would offer a pitch deck to likely investors, business associates, board members, and customers.
The pitch deck requires you to describe your business model. After your likely investors recognize what your company does, the next thing they want to identify is how you get money.
The business model is a mixture of company stage and progress, product progress, income model, and product distribution models.
The business model has multiple elements. Don’t try to place all of the elements on the same slide. Multiple slides are much better to understand and easier to comprehend.
You can explain a revenue model with a pie chart on one slide, for instance, describe your product progress plan on another slide, and dedicate the third slide to the company stage.
7.) Elevator Pitch
This pitch is a brief description of your business. The intention is that this pitch should last as long as between 15 seconds and a couple of seconds. However, most times, your elevator pitch shouldn’t be more than 30 seconds.
This has become more important among startup founders, as VCs and angel investors get assaulted with startup pitches. The purpose is that once you have recognized your investor you get his or her concentration in as little as 30 seconds.
To curate a great elevator pitch, consider the following things into concern:
- Set the goal of your pitch – What do you want out of this pitch? Is it the next round of meetings? An evaluation? Think about this before creating your message.
- Describe concisely but clearly what you do – Can you be short and still communicate the core purpose of your startup?
- Describe your USP – Are you able to distinguish one or two key game-changers for your startup?
- Arouse the listener with one intriguing question
8.) Competitors Pitch
Probably the most important pitch in all of the pitch deck. The competition pitch deck is like playing with a two-edged sword. We all know it’s not easy and we can’t completely avoid it either.
Do the proper research before creating this slide as it is very important from an investor’s point of view. If you are avoiding it by saying, “there is no competition in your field,” then there is all the more reason for investors to suspect your idea.
9.) Investors Pitch
The investor pitch is somewhat comparable to how you show your startup at a competition, nevertheless, the dynamic of the communication is very diverse.
You need to involve the listener, make him or her engaged and be ready to get into particulars. But make sure you don’t go over 10 slides.
When communicating with investors, ensure you spend some time on problems, solutions (novel technology) and traction. This is THE PITCH that you have to get ready for. The people in front of you are the ones that can spend money to convert your idea into actuality.
Make sure you keep this slide with proper stats and numbers. Yes, it is tough to get clear estimates, but make it as logical as possible.
In the end, don’t make any mistakes with the competitors’ pitch. This is a do or die slide for you to get the funding.
So this is all about different types of pitch decks. As you have seen, every pitch is more or less as important as the other one. Realize the importance of each pitch and do the respective research related to the pitch and present it to the investors.
In the end, it is all about how easily you are presenting your pitch deck, and how easily it is reaching the audience, in this case, it is investors.
Make your pitch deck as easy as possible to understand for investors, but to make this happen you need to realize the difference between all the slides, and what kind of purpose it is serving in your pitch deck. If you are clear about this, then it is not a challenging task to impress the investors with your pitch deck.
Likes & Dislikes of an Investor
In a pitch deck presentation showing business, the USP factor isn’t always the foremost factor for a perfect pitch. The principal factor for every start-up is having a fabulous team that encourages business with enthusiasm and intensity. The other part is knowing the ‘why’ behind the concept.
Having a perfect pitch is vital for an investor. It will further define if the company gets sufficient fuel to kick start the company. It is noteworthy that throughout this presentation you should grab everyone’s attention. An ideal pitch would be more appealing to the viewers than dragging a rabbit out of a hat.
Every start-up should have its all-hands-on-deck before offering it to investors. Entrepreneurs need to have a well-defined method on how to sweep their investors off their feet.
The following are some of the things investors would like to hear from your pitch deck:
Likes
1.) The team
The team may not seem important in the first instance, but believe me, if the company goes through some crisis because of some wrongdoings or because of some wrong estimates, there should be people who can have the ability to recover the company with their skillset and attitude.
It’s not always about the idea that you have, but about the people that you have in your arsenal to cope with conflicts.
Hence, make sure that your team is good enough to handle all these issues before presenting your team to the investors.
2.) Always have a “why” on your pitch deck
It was never really relevant to have “what are you doing?” on your project. When you are introducing one product into the market, most probably, everyone knows what it is doing. Therefore, “what are you doing?” It hardly serves any purpose.
Even “how are you doing it?” hardly serve any purpose so omit that one as well.
The only thing that matters to customers is “why are you doing it?” If you notice updates on mobiles or apps, that’s usually what happens.
They will tell you “why is it a better version than the previous model?” Since they know what kind of purpose a mobile or a mobile app serves. They only want to know “why should they go for it?”
3.) Dedicate your idea to a Niche
There is talk in the pitch deck field that investors are leaning towards niche products. It might seem like a bad idea considering the user base, but when you think of niche products, more or less, they are going to be unique ideas that don’t exist in the market yet, which means you are going to have some user base even if it is a small user base.
That way, you know you won’t go bankrupt. The other fabulous aspect of niche products is that you can tap into other markets as well if there is scope for product expansion into other markets.
4.) Communicate your Idea
Every startup has an idea, but that is not important. What is important here is how you are communicating.
When you look at history there were so many people who came up with similar ideas, but some succeeded with their ideas, but some didn’t succeed even if the product is similar to the other product or even if sometimes better than their counterparts.
It is because the failed ones weren’t able to communicate with the customers, in the end, the result was a big disaster.
Always select a guy for the pitch deck who can communicate your ideas with the audience. Investors wouldn’t want to invest in an idea where the team has no one to communicate the idea with the audience.
Dislikes
1.) Overconfidence
There is nothing more dreadful than looking at the pitch deck of an overconfident person. It does not just create a bad impression, but it also makes you seem arrogant with your thoughts.
A person should be able to talk the talk and walk the walk. If you are the kind of person, who is just all bark and no bite, then you are not just giving yourself a bad reputation, but you are also spoiling the chances of your company.
Never act that way even if you are, at least, for your company’s sake.
2.) Not doing proper research about your market
Imagine yourself being an investor and trying to find a good profitable startup to invest in and get some money in return for your investment.
You come across a pitch where he didn’t do the proper research about the market, and he thinks that there is no competition for his product in the market. Now, would you be able to invest or not?
If you are a good investor, then you probably realize that it wasn’t a viable idea to invest. Even if there is no competition, you don’t know what will happen in the future.
Just for that sake, you should mention the estimates even if they are not 100% right approximations. It implies that you are a practical person.
3.) Proper Evaluation
Investors would appreciate it if you evaluate your idea with a proper assessment of the market.
There is no need for your evaluation should be 100% correct about the market. At the same time, it shouldn’t be all about how magnificent the product is going to be in the market.
Prepare three scenarios for your product. One should be the best scenario, the second should be the medium scenario, and the last one should be the worst-case scenario.
So do a proper evaluation of your market.
4.) Mindset
Mindset is another aspect you need to be a little mindful of. It’s not about whether an investor likes it or not. It’s about you.
Having a settled mindset is very essential for a person, not just for an entrepreneur. Hence, speak with a clear mindset and clear clarity when you are pitching an idea.
Be open-minded only when it is needed, otherwise, be firm with your decision making no matter what happens.
Final Words
So those are some of the likes and dislikes of the investors. If you identify any of those dislikes in your pitch deck, in your team, or yourself, then discard those to provide a good pitch deck experience for your investor.
If you don’t have one or two likes of the investors in your team, pitch deck or in yourself, then add those to your arsenal to make it even stronger.
Startup Pitch Decks FAQ
The length of your pitch deck presentation is one question that business owners regularly ask. There is no rule guiding the size. But with the wealth of past experiences available on the internet, it is advisable to make your pitch deck as short as possible.
The minimum number of slides you should have is 10, while the maximum number is 20. You can exceed the maximum of 20 but it has to be because it is worth it.
Depending on the type of business you operate, the number of slides you want to use for your pitch deck will vary from another. Business owners with the assistant of professionals determine what each slide contains. Ideally, the pitch deck should be as brief as possible to avoid unnecessary information.
Although you want to maintain a few slides on your pitch deck, you must be very careful not to stuff each slide with contents. If 13 slides can explain everything about your business without stuffing the slides, go ahead to use 13. You don’t need to shrink the number of slides at the expense of the overall organization.
Also, irrespective of the number of slides you have, your presentation should not be more than 18-20 minutes. It would be best if you did everything needed within that time frame. If the audience wants you to stretch it, then it is okay.
What makes an effective pitch deck are a compelling story, conciseness, conversational tone, and engaging slides.
You must be brief with the contents of the slides and the presentation. Your aim for a pitch deck presentation is to introduce your business models and projections to financiers and get them interested in funding your ideas. Avoid boring them with information that is not needed at the moment.
While presenting, you must be able to tell a convincing narrative. It is what determines if the audience will yield to your requests. Your ultimate goal is to convince your audience to fund your business. You do this by showing them all the benefits associated with it. It makes the difference between you and other entrepreneurs.
Your tone while addressing the audience should be conversational. Don’t read out the contents on the slide like someone reading out a novel. Remember, you are trying to convince people. You must carry them along while explaining what you have on the slides.
Keep your slides engaging, one slide must link to the next. It makes your presentation organized and understandable.
Pitch deck is an idea you are trying to instill in an investor’s brain for money. In short, that is everything about the pitch deck in one line.
You can also say that in the following way:
“You are trading your ideas to get the benefits for you and your investor.”
More or less, most pitch decks have the following things in their pitch decks:
Cover page
Problem
Solution
Market Size
Team
Final quote
Above are some of the most essential aspects of a pitch deck.
The cost of buying a pitch deck depends on the professional approach. The prices of different pitch deck templates vary depending on the quality. Hiring a designer to build a pitch deck for you will also cost you some money. The more experienced the designer, the more it will cost.
You can opt to build a pitch deck yourself using free or paid pitch deck templates from websites such as Visme, it is fast and cheap that way. However, it might not be as perfect as what a professional graphic designer will create.
Before buying a pitch deck, do your research first. Compare the range of prices from different individuals and agencies.
According to SlideGenuis, the cost of a pitch deck can be split into three categories: the low-end pitch deck, mid-range presentation design, and the upper-end presentation services.
The low-end pitch deck costs between $1,000 to $3,000 and is suitable for those who want to revamp their existing pitch deck or create from scratch at a cheap price. At this price range, you can expect to get the bare quality.
The mid-range presentation design costs between $3,000 to $10,000 and the upper end presentation services cost $10,000 to $50,000. There is a huge difference between these two categories, the upper-end presentation services give you better appeal and a more refined corporate identity.
Although you can hire freelancer designs from Upwork and Fiverr at a much lower price, you will hardly find pitch deck experts but just designers who can do a good job.
Since your pitch deck is not just any design but one that has the potential to bring lots of capital for your business, investing in quality pitch deck services is worth it.
The financials in your pitch deck should include your present performances, plans, and projections. You can employ the use of bar and pie charts, histograms, tables, and other charts in a slide.
Your pitch deck should show the predictable monthly or annual gross and net profits. Show financials where the models you are proposing worked out as planned. Also, you can include your cash flow statement and financial projections.
This is definitely a tricky question. This slide depends on the individual. Everyone portrays their struggles differently.
If you ask most people about this question, mostly you get the answer as NO. In the context of the pitch deck, it has its pros and cons to it.
But all you have to look at is how your downfall is helping the product’s cause. Basically, without proper context, it looks pointless to include the slide.
And, it also suggests that you are just an unstable person, in general, with those failure stories. Never let anyone feel that you are a big failure. No one likes to invest in an unstable person’s idea. So, in a way, it gives a negative vibe to your pitch deck idea.
At the same time, the struggle can score some points in an investor’s view if you know how to portray it. As I mentioned above, it all depends on how you are putting it in a positive light. At the end of the day, how your struggles are helping your business idea to promote it in the market.
Sometimes, your struggle can be your strength because struggles indirectly say that you are a tough guy to beat. Even if tomorrow the company goes through a crisis, investors know that you are not a guy who will escape from the trouble.
So it is up to you to decide whether you can handle this slide or not in front of the investors.
It also depends on investors. Some investors show interest in hearing struggling stories, some don’t.
The pitch deck is about you!
With a pitch deck, you’re looking for your readers to opt-in to an idea, like a start-up or a marketing drive. You’ll have to persuade them of its potential, by communicating your narrative and showing signs that the concept is worth persevering.
The sales deck is about your prospects, not about you.
Sales decks are intended to persuade a prospect that they want your product/service to approach their aims. The pivotal point here is your prospects, not you.
Don’t throw a group of facts and figures showing how well you’re doing at them. They don’t care.
Here’s a set of specifications you can pursue to work on a sales deck that will make your prospects say YES to your offer.
1.) Never Pitch
Leave the pitch. It’s an obsolescent word expressing what salespeople used to do: randomly launching data and numbers to see what holds.
Prospects don’t care about your astonishing name, your satisfied customers or your big collection of honors. They worry about themselves and they bother about what you can do for them.
To discover what you can do for your prospects, you first have to get to understand them inside-out.
Complete your study. Ask questions, hear and discover.
2.) Tell the Narrative
Instead of pitching, tell a narrative.
Stories pierce people in a way data & numbers just don’t.
That’s the way we’re wired.
Stories are the most compelling way to stimulate a human brain and thus the best way to captivate readers.
3.) Initiate with WHY
People don’t think of what you do, they think of why you do it
It’s what Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers have in general. It’s the code to influencing and motivating by and through language.
We talk profusely about what we do. Then we move on to the how and eventually if we reach there, the why.
The thing is that what doesn’t do much for us. Our brain just doesn’t care about what.
Why, on the other hand, is more like the attention seekers. Like narratives, they entice the part of the brain that ignites sensations.
There’s a lot. Research has uncovered that the brains of storytellers and audiences can synchronise as the story uncovers.
This suggests you can cause feelings, thoughts, and passions into someone’s mind, just by narrating a story.
4.) Use the Fairy-Tale composition
You don’t have to be an expert at storytelling to tell a solid story.
One company that captured the sales narrative is Zuora. Their sales deck has been recognized as the most comprehensive sales deck of all time.
Step 1 – Start with a bang
Kick-off by building a tremendous sense of necessity for your readers.
Name a prominent transformation in the world. It’s a move that comes with huge stakes for your prospects and makes them doubt the state of their company within it.
This transformation has to be as undeniable as the mass destruction of planet earth in the hands of Thanos in the Infinity war movie. The Avengers had no alternative but to take action.
Your sales deck requires you to make it explicit that this is about to happen and that it is time for your hero-prospect to take some serious action.
Step 2 – Make it apparent there’ll be Conquerors & Failures
All candidates experience from loss aversion — they’ll rather counter losing by adhering to the status quo than striving to succeed by going for a move.
Tell your prospects that this huge shift is a tremendous chance to win big or lose poorly.
You’re depicting a black and white portrait here
Proceed with the transition and be a champion => Glittering future ahead
Disregard the transition and be a failure => Gloomy future ahead
Step 3 – Stimulate the Land of Milk and Honey
By now you reasonably feel motivated to roll all your aces on the table and tell them all about how big your product/service is.
The momentum is all yours now but walk carefully.
If you go all-in too hastily, your prospects will drop their attention and tune out.
Delay the concept of the happily-ever-after destiny that you can help them accomplish.
This Promised Land should be charming, yet challenging to approach. That’s where you come into the picture.
This fantasy world is not your product. It’s how life will be like after opting for your product/service. Your product/service is a mystical enabler of the awesome life.
Step 4 – Layout Features as Superpowers
Now it’s time to display your features as the prospect’s sidekick.
You’re the prospect’s Master – you’ll be giving him the superpowers to surmount the impediments that lay between him and the dreamland.
These superpowers come in the shape of a game-changer, some kind of enchanting tool that picks the chosen one – your prospect – aside from the rest.
Step 5 – Let your prospects know that you can make the story come true
By now the story is pretty obvious: if they work with you, you’ll take them to the dreamland.
People are not scared of paying money. What they are frightened of is being deceived.
Unleash those feelings by revealing what you can deliver.
The final part of your deck should be about testimony that demonstrates your expertise to take your prospects to the stars.
The most reliable way to do this is by explaining you did it before. A triumph story about how you improved comparable prospects to get to the Land of Milk and Honey.
I’m talking about customer recommendations. If you’re still lacking in those, demos are the second-best compelling way to establish yourself.
Step 6 – Outline the picture
Slides are the least you should think about.
If you can’t narrate a story that penetrates without slides, your story fails.
Think of your slides as visible reminders that improve your prospect’s image of the Land of Milk and Honey. Your deck should be what makes your narrative sing.
Pitch deck costs change differently across various platforms. People charge per hour, per slide, per pitch deck, etc.
It entirely depends on the kind of presentation, idea, research, number of slides, market reports, the experience of a candidate, skillset of the candidate, etc. There is no specific price for the pitch deck in the market. It usually varies between $250-$5000.
To be honest, you get what you pay for in the market.
In a way, you can say that it is a PowerPoint slide show, but the purpose of this PowerPoint is different from others. Yes, it is a PowerPoint slideshow, but it is not like every other PowerPoint slide show.
Here in this PowerPoint, you are selling an idea for money to an investor. For most PowerPoint slideshows that may not be the case.
Financial projections are hard to predict. Of course, at the same time, if you don’t know how the product is going to make an impact in the future, then it is pointless to ask for investment.
So, what should you do? You should have your financial projection that is for sure, but you need to make some balance between realistic, optimistic and unrealistic.
In all fairness, never be aggressive with your financial projections. We can’t take things for granted at any point in time.
The situation varies over time, especially when we are projecting things after 5 years. You need to consider a lot of things into consideration, and most of them are dynamic in nature.
Dynamic things are always hard to predict. Hence, to be on the safer side, do some little research about marketing and its way of penetration in the market.
At the same time, never be too conservative about your product. This kind of conservativeness reveals that you are cynical about your product.
No one wants to invest in a company where the CEO is pessimistic about his product. So avoid this one, too, as much as possible.
1.) Talk about your spending
Investors are interested in how you are spending your money.
You should let them where your funding is going.
Which department is getting the biggest share?
How much money are you allotting to different departments?
How much does raw material cost?
What is the investment in marketing the product?
What are the spendings on overhead expenses?
Always estimate 3x your original estimation.
2.) Talk about your product and market
Single product cost
The market rate of the product
How many customers are there for your product?
What are your competitor’s customer numbers?
How are you going to enter the market?
What are the regions where you want your product to be introduced?
How many products do you want to introduce in the market?
3.) Talk about the estimation of your product
As I mentioned before, it is important to talk about financial projections in your pitch deck. When you are talking about the financial projections, talk about the following things:
Your product’s estimation right after the 6 months of introduction into the market.
What is your price after 6 months?
Your competitor’s price after 6 months.
How are you going to improve your product after 6 months?
What are the new features you are going to add to your product in 6 months?
What is your approach after 1 year?
Likewise, you have to estimate after 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, and 5 years as well, and what is your approach after every year.
The above things may not hold true after some time but do some research about the market and as well as about the product so you will get some idea about it.
Therefore, you can appropriate it up to some extent, if not for the whole period.
There are so many pitch decks out there that are very intriguing and compelling at the same time. I can’t list all of them, but I want to point out the 3 pitch decks which piqued my interest, and they are LinkedIn, Facebook and Uber.
Here are the 3 pitch decks:
LinkedIn
Facebook
Uber
We all know all these 3 are different industries with different niches. There are a few common things I have observed in all three of them, which piqued my interest, and why they are the best pitch decks among the others.
The first two pitch decks i.e., LinkedIn and Facebook already have some initial presence in the market before they pitch deck their ideas.
Hence, they are not entirely new to the market, the Uber pitch deck is entirely new to the market, but they have some competition to beat in the market.
So my way of dealing with this subject will be different in some areas because you cannot equate a startup with an already existing industry in the market, however, there are some commonalities between all of them, and also, I will try to dissect the difference between a startup and expansion pitch deck.
First up, the common things. The first common thing between all of them is how they can generate revenue.
1.) Revenue
Is it really significant? It is, but it is not that important that you can put this in the first slide.
So don’t talk about revenue in the first slide itself, though it is important.
Revenue is important because no investor will invest in something that is not giving any returns after some time. You can have it on later slides.
The second most common thing about all 3 pitch decks is how they can grab the opportunity in the market.
2.) Opportunity
The other important aspect is opportunity. Always remember, an opportunity is the most important thing to recognise in the market.
There are so many examples where a startup has entered the market when the market for that product is already saturated. Never enter the market without an opportunity.
The third most common thing is how they are highlighting their improvement to the already existing product in the market and explaining how it is a 2.0 version.
3.) 2.0 Version
Regardless of how small the improvement is, it is an improvement in the end, and you can sell it as a 2.0 version on the market. But keep in mind that there should be a significant improvement to the existing product.
The fourth most common thing about pitch deck is how they are ending their pitch deck with a solid final quote.
4.) Solid Final Quote
Always end your presentation with a solid final quote. Most people think the final quote doesn’t seem to have much significance on the pitch decks, but it does.
Just look at all the pitch decks, of course, apart from the Uber, the other two ended with a solid final quote, which makes a substantial impact on the audience when they are leaving.
And last but not least, the cover page. Though the cover page carries no weight on the pitch deck, you have to put it right on the first page itself. It is just basic common sense of what you are talking about.
5.) The variation between startup and expansion business
The key differentiator between the startup and expansion business is that you don’t need to talk about the product again since everyone knows about it already.
If you notice the Uber pitch deck, they have focused more on their product rather than expansion or anything else.
Keep this in mind when you pitch your deck as a startup. It is important to make them aware of your product before going into details like expansion and other stuff.
Finally, these are some of the things you can analyse by just having a glance at it, though it depends on the individual product, these are some of the basic stuff which they have talked about and why they have become so successful in getting the funds.
Creating a startup funding pitch is always tough. For one, we don’t have previous experience with the work, and the other is that this can be the first time creating a pitch deck.
Both can seem a bit challenging at first, and to make financial projections is even more difficult. Let’s get this straight, estimating financial projections is troublesome for anyone let alone if it is a startup or some expansion business. It is daunting no matter what.
There are so many factors to consider to project finance numbers on the charts. They are so difficult to predict, even for people, who have been in the business for so long.
It is really amateurish to expect some financial projections for startups. Instead, you can include things other than financial projections after 5 years for your startup funding.
The following are some of the financial things you can cover in your pitch deck:
Cost of raw material
Office rent
Labor costs
Advertising costs
Digital marketing costs, if any
Electricity bills
Phone bills
Investment costs for PCs, if needed
What is the price of the end product in the market?
Market estimates
How many people will buy it?
What is the profit you can get from each product?
These are some of the elements you can cover in your financial projections slide instead of financial projections after 5 years because it is very tough to calculate the financial projections, especially if it is entirely new to the market.
Most people think that the competitor’s slide is one of the tricky slides to include in your pitch deck if you are unsure about including it.
First things first, not including your competitors slide in your pitch deck tells the audience the following things:
You haven’t done your research part before coming to the pitch deck proposition.
You are unsure of your product.
You know that your competitors have an advantage over your product.
You are a negligent person.
It says a lot about yourself even though you are not that person. Hence, it is better to put the competitor’s slide in your pitch deck.
If you can add a few more competitors to your pitch deck, which are unknown to VCs, that can really impress the VCs.
Always keep in mind that following competitors’ strategies and their way of tackling business are very significant to your business success.
Even if you don’t follow them, they will make sure that they are following everyone’s strategies and strategies their plan according to it, and highlight your shortcomings. Furthermore, they will reveal how they are going to resolve your issue with their solution.
First things first, not including your competitors slide in your pitch deck tells you the following things apart from highlighting your shortcomings:
You haven’t done your research part before coming to the pitch deck proposition.
You are unsure of your product.
You know that your competitors have an advantage over your product.
You are a negligent person.
It says a lot about yourself even though you are not that person. To be on the safer side, it is better to put the competitor’s slide in your pitch deck.
If you can add a few more competitors to your pitch deck, which are unknown to VCs, that can really impress the VCs.
Always keep in mind that following competitors’ strategies and their way of tackling business are very significant to your business success.
Even if you don’t follow them, they will make sure that they are following everyone’s strategies and strategies according to it, and highlight your shortcomings. Furthermore, they will reveal how they are going to resolve your issue with their solution.
There is no explicit page count because every company and audience is varied, but usually speaking what you want is a deck that enables you to tell the company story immediately, precisely and cogently in 10–15 minutes.
That normally translates to 12–18 slides, with possibly a few more stashed in an appendix in case you want them during Q&A.
But there is much more to it than just page counts. Since you seem to be operating on a deck, let me share some advice on deck construction and design in case it is helpful to you.
Without uncertainty, the best investor displays use uniform building blocks, has the correct assembly and the elements are organised in a strategic flow.
There are so many companies in the market to get you a successful pitch deck that wins the hearts of investors.
As with every field, not every company is good. The only way to find out which company is offering good services is by finding which company is offering the most value to your pitch deck.
But you won’t know that unless you get their pitch deck in your hands. So to get an idea as to which company is offering the most value to the pitch decks, just go to their website and look at the information that they have provided about pitch decks, and what kind of intricacies are there in the pitch deck preparations.
You may have an idea about what the pitch deck is and the logistics behind it. With the kind of information the website is providing, you can gauge if the website knows a little bit about the pitch deck or not.
Why is it so important?
It may not seem important, but it is. If the website talks about every issue regarding pitch decks that kind of implies it has some experience in pitch deck products and knows a bit about pitch decks so you can assure yourself that you can’t go wrong with them.
But, is it everything?
Yes, I agree that just because one website has put everything about pitch deck doesn’t mean they can develop good pitch decks.
Yes, there is a chance that you can go wrong with them, too, but, at least, you can’t go all wrong with those kinds of websites so that was positive.
In the end, it is all about taking chances in life. Nothing comes easier in life, if it is, then it isn’t a good one.
Hence, go for possibilities that make some sense and logic to you, instead of just going for complete unknown things. Hopefully, this makes some sense.
Good Luck!
Though it is not a good idea to present your idea through an email, considering the time of investors, and how valuable it is for them, you have no room to make any mistakes while preparing a pitch deck.
The other thing is if there is any confusion with your pitch deck for investors, then it will be detrimental to your project idea. In short, avoid sending pitch decks through email unless it is essential.
When you are mailing, make the pitch deck as informational as you can. If you are presenting it in person, you can minimize the slide count, but if you are mailing then increase the slide count.
When I said, “increase the slide,” I meant as educational as it can be, not just for the sake of numbers.
Slides should talk for themselves without you being there. If you can make your slides talk for themselves, then there is a high possibility that you can talk further in your in-person meeting (remember, there will be multiple meetings before they say yes to your idea).
Anyhow, the following are some of the points you need to remember while preparing your pitch deck for email purposes:
Cover Page: Because your investor needs to know your company’s name. Investors might be getting other pitch decks, too. So make sure you keep your cover page to let them know who you are.
Problem: Though you don’t need to stress about this slide, you ensure that they understand the problem clearly.
Market Opportunity: Let them understand the market opportunity. For this slide, you need to do a lot of research, especially the stats and the figures in the market.
Solution: Explain how you are solving the stated problem. This slide doesn’t need to be extremely long but you explain enough to understand that the problem is being sorted out. If you think you want to include details then it is probably a bad idea to just screw up the whole concept. Some people won’t understand the technicalities of the problem in just slides so reserve it for an in-person meeting.
Approach: Approach is another slide where you can tell the investor how you are approaching the market with your strategy.
Competitive Landscape: Never forget to include this slide even in the slightest. It may not seem huge to you, but investors will not like it if you don’t include this slide because no product is competitive-free in the market unless it is super innovative and completely new to the market.
Financials: Financial projections can be a little harder to predict whether it is a startup or a business expansion, but make sure you do your proper research before stating the facts and stats of the market after 3 or 5 years. Investors will give some liberty in this slide about the facts and stats, but make sure they are logical instead of complete rubbish.
Funding Requirements: Include the funding needed for your project and let them know what you are spending it on.
Management Team: If your management team is popular enough in the investors’ arena, then include them in your team slide. This might weigh a little bit more if they have some credibility in the market.
So these are all the basic slides you need for your pitch deck. Though it looks similar to the normal pitch deck, ensure that you make it as informational as possible.
Email your presentation only when it is absolutely necessary, otherwise, always go with an in-person meeting.
But if we look at the other spectrum of this presentation, it is very beneficial if you are not good at public speaking. The only thing you need to do is to ensure that the pitch deck is perfect with its information without giving no room for ambiguity.
But I would recommend a professional pitch deck designer for this kind of pitch deck since they have been in the business for so long and know how to get the message across to the investor.
1.) Advantages
i.) It Saves Time
The one good thing about pitching the deck upfront is that you can save time for both of you.
If investors are not interested in your idea, then they save their time and your time, too. Hence, that is a plus for both of you.
ii.) You can work on the Idea
Another aspect of after investors saying NO to your idea is that you can work on your idea even more.
Find the mistakes
Address the issue
Lookup for the solution
Coming up with a new pitch deck with a better presentation
iii.) It Advances the Meeting
Since investors already have one idea on your pitch deck, you can advance your meeting with other significant topics you want to talk about.
iv.) Allows you to discuss detailed information
You will have so much freedom to talk about everything in detail since the investors already know the pitch. You don’t miss important points, which you think are relevant to address at the meeting.
v.) Dodge Unnecessary points
There will be no room for unnecessary points like introduction, problem, and solution to reiterate it at the meeting point. You can simply focus on other points, instead.
2.) Disadvantages
There are cons to it, too. You gotta gauge the other side of points as well.
i.) Chance for Misinterpretation
If there is any scope for misinterpretation in the deck, then it is not a good sign for you. Investors won’t even try to have a meeting with you in the first place just to avoid the time waste.
ii.) Scope for a lengthy Presentation
Since there won’t be anyone to explain a few things, you’ve got to squeeze in as much information as you can on the pitch deck so that investors won’t feel the explaining part in the deck.
iii.) A chance for a boring presentation
The length of the presentation is already very high and additionally, there is no one to explain it further, which leaves the reader bored.
iv.) More Chances of being Ignored
Most of the time investors won’t even get the time to read it so there is a high chance of getting your pitch deck ignored, and won’t even make the cut for selection in the first place.
i.) Consistency is essential – Ensure your slides feel part of the very narrative. Practice using the same kind of pictures, fonts, and phrasing across all your slides.
ii.) Consider Topic Transitions – Consistency is important but you don’t want every slide to look similar. Append crafty variations as you move on to a different topic. These will work as visible cues on your audience’s notice.
iii.) More concise is powerful– Only put words that carry a persuasive purpose. If a word doesn’t speak anything for itself, it shouldn’t be on your slide.
iv.) Let pictures do the talking – Pictures say a lot more than words could ever tell. Utilize pictures that speak to the story you’re describing, without being too complicated. They should intensify the purpose.
v.) Use animation and effects cautiously – Resist the urge to apply animations. They’ll grab the concentration from your story. If you have to, go for subtle and useful.
Although it is a shock to many to discover this, when you are actively pitching and accumulating money, you should have two separate versions of your deck.
One that has lots of white space and comparatively fewer words that you use as a visual backdrop to a live presentation, and another one that has sufficient extra words that it can explain itself and make sense without you being there to describe it in case you require to email it to someone.
You don’t want to mail the white space one or present from the lengthy one. And you don’t want to try to get by on just one version. Both blunders are going to lead to poor results.
The single most relevant data to add to your deck is your contact info. On the cover page and the last page of the deck, you should list every single channel of getting in touch with you.
Put it at the very beginning. It sounds like a given, but some people don’t do this, either…
Going too much into the technical aspects is just one of the elements you should shun doing in your pitch deck. There are various things you should avoid doing:
1.) You shouldn’t wait too long to get to your key point
Attention spans are low. You don’t have the opportunity of developing a story, and then getting to the center of the story ten minutes in. Virtually everyone in the audience will have lost concern by then.
You have to get there rapidly, like in 7 seven seconds or less. That’s how quickly you have to perform.
Then…
2.) Keep it Short and Simple
You want to reduce the volume of text you have in your deck. Why? Well, most people don’t want to read text when they can get more data with a visual.
Then, and this may make you a little crazy, graphics are more visually captivating than text is. You want your deck to be enticing to your viewers. The larger text gives the sign that your business is too difficult to understand.
Then, while we are on the topic of graphics,…
3.) Don’t apply animation to your pitch deck
You remember the old proverb that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. That’s why you shouldn’t practice animation because the animation will not run at exactly the wrong time.
Instead, you can use in consecutive slides that give the impression of animation without the risk of something breaking.
Then…
4.) Don’t go for a fancy template on your pitch deck
You want the center of your deck to be your narrative, not the template. That’s why a rich template is not required. Plus you can spare money by hiring a designer too.
A plain white background is all you need.
Then, eventually…
5.) Don’t Keep Charts for Your Financials in Your Deck
I know it views great to have that number chart of your growth that resembles a baseball bat. Instead, you should have a regular proforma income statement that gives all the necessary financial data in one place.
You can just copy and paste from your monetary plan. Then you’ve made things effortless for likely investors to see precisely what’s going on financially with your company in one slide.
In the second question, the premise itself is wrong. Why? Since the 10-slide pitch deck is not sufficient to pitch your idea to the investors.
Yes, there are a few essentials to put on the pitch deck, but that is not enough, so make it a point that you, at least, try to put 15-20 slides, if not more.
It is very challenging for even investors to get an idea about your pitch in just 10 slides. Yes, it is important to keep your presentation simple and short, but 10 slides are too short to even pitch your idea. Therefore, delete the idea of having just 10 slides in your pitch deck.
Here are some of the essentials to have on your pitch deck:
Cover Page
Team
Problem
Market size
Solution
Existing Market
Highlighting competitor’s shortcomings
Competitor’s market
The future of the market with the product
Market estimates
Financial projections
Fund needed
Your expenses
Final quote about your product
You can see that the topics themselves are 14 to cover on the pitch deck, and what about the explanation? Hence, it is not a good idea to cover everything in just 10-slides. Even if you squeeze in everything in just 10 slides, that won’t look good on the pitch deck and makes it hard for everyone to understand, that includes you, too.
In short, avoid it ENTIRELY!
After your communication data, it should include the following points in a 12-18 slide deck that can be presented in 10-15 minutes, no more no less.
1.) Customer Difficulty
Summary of customer discomfort and how you fix it — approach & essential elements
2.) Product Summary
What is your approach, for whom and why is it propitious?
3.) Important Players
Originators, chief team members, and important advisors, with business knowledge and expertise
4.) Market Openings
Market capacity, growth aspects, segmentation
5.) Competitive Aspects
Competitive and competitive character sets, plus your sustainable competing privileges
6.) Go-To-Market Plan
How would you sell your product?
7.) Stage of Development
Product development, customer acquisition, partner relationships
8.) Severe Risks & Difficulties
What can go wrong and how you intend to accomplish it
9.) Financial Estimates
Best to show 5th-year mid-case, worst case and best case with essential appropriations
10.) Exit Options
Sections of likely buyers, rationales, the record of particular likely buyers and comparables with appraisal multiples
11.) Funding Demand
How much, what you will utilize it for, what breakthroughs you can hit
That’s it. Trying to do more than required is not going to make your pitch more compelling. It is only going to increase the possibility that you will not get through it.
Instead of working to pack too much data into your pitch, you should concentrate on covering all of the key details to guarantee you get to the subsequent meeting.
Pitch decks are the first thing you should go for to gather the money you want for a startup or any business expansion.
Pitch decks can look a bit menial and trivial if many people continue to live in denial by disregarding pitch decks. In fact, it is the first path to get your startup and business expansion going.
Without having a proper pitch deck, it is nearly impossible to narrate your story to investors.
Remember, a well begun is half done. Therefore, don’t give investors any chance to not invest in your idea.
Here are a few questions that you should ask yourself before making a pitch deck:
Why are you doing it?
Why is it needed in the market?
Is there any chance that this product gets going in the market?
How big is it in the current situation of the market?
What is your solution?
How are you going to approach the market?
Who are your competitors in the market?
What is their percentage in the market?
What makes a customer choose your product over the others?
What are the profits/losses (if any) that they are going to witness after 1 year?
What are the profits they are going to witness after 5 years?
How viable are these financial projections?
What kind of investments are you looking for?
How much money do you need for the investment?
What are you going to spend it on?
What is your team?
What has been your progression over the years, if any?
What is your tagline to end the pitch deck?
All these questions are very much needed for the successful pitch deck. If you have answers to all these questions, you are not only going to get the funds from investors but also get the returns after the introduction of your product in the market.
Always ask yourself these questions before making pitch decks for startups or even for business expansion.
Pitch decks are the main pillar for any startup/business expansion to get the investments so we need to be mindful of everything in the pitch deck. If we are creating any pitch deck, it’s important to realize what we are going to talk about.
The arrangement of the pitch deck is one of the first things we need to have an idea of.
For instance, the following are some of the basic needs of the pitch deck:
The structure of the flow
How many slides?
What are you going to talk about?
How big is the issue in the market?
The statistics of the problem
How many people are facing this issue?
What is your approach to the issue?
How are you going to solve it?
What are the alternative solutions to this issue in the market?
How is your solution going to stand out among the competitors?
What are the numbers for competitors in the market?
How are you going to seize competitor customers with your approach, if possible?
How much capital do you need for startup/business development?
What has been your company’s progress over the years, if any?
The company’s projection after 5 years
What is your team?
Who is dealing with which department in your team?
This is some of the basic stuff you need to furnish in your pitch deck. But make sure you make between 14-20 slides for your pitch deck, nothing less, nothing more.
Although it depends on the individual pitch decks, you need to keep in mind that the higher number of slides can only drag the pitch deck idea and make it annoying to the audience.
Remember, you gotta grab the audience’s attention in the first 7 seconds itself. That’s when the possibility of your pitch deck idea will get into the brains of the audience.
Okay, that’s about the basic need, but, what should the deck consist of?
Ready to Communicate Your Business Idea in Your Pitch Deck?
The pitch deck presentation is one of the best ways to introduce your business plans to potential investors. Over the years, many startups have used pitch decks to get funds from financiers for their businesses.
Many of these companies have grown to become giants in their fields. They are hardly recognizable from the companies that they were when they presented the pitch deck. Some good examples are Facebook, Square, Uber, WeWork, Airbnb, and Snapchat.
After reading this article, you are just about set to communicate your business idea into a pitch deck. The only factor delaying that is your action.
Perhaps you have tried communicating your business idea in your pitch deck with little success before. With the advantage of knowing the do’s, don’ts, and best practices of a pitch deck, what is included in the pitch deck, and insightful examples you can get inspiration from, you stand a better chance of securing the funding you need.
A pitch deck is a vital tool for getting funding from investors. How you create a pitch deck, the designs you use are just as important as the message you want to convey. Use high-quality and professional pitch deck designs even if it is going to cost you more.