This is part 3 of a 3-part series on First-time Fundraising. You can read the overview of this series here. Here are part 1 and part 2.
How do you create a compelling pitch deck?
(Quick disclaimer: This blog post is geared toward software startups raising pre-seed and seed rounds from angels or VC investors. If you’re running a growth stage consumer hardware startup, YMMV!)
To start, what’s the goal of an investor pitch deck?
(To be clear: we are not talking about a demo day deck; we’re talking about a deck that gets sent *to* investors and needs to stand alone without live narration.)
Decks have two goals:
To land a meeting, and
To increase investors’ conviction by providing critical information
You can spend months workshopping and obsessing over details, but if your deck is not helping you land meetings or close capital, either it’s not clear, or it’s not compelling.
(Another quick aside: there are tons of reasons why you might struggle to raise a round, many of which are out of your control. But your deck is in your control, so it's worth nailing!)
You probably know the “table stakes” of decks: 10-20 slides covering the problem, solution, team, traction, market, size, etc. For the sake of completion and in no particular order, your deck should include the following:
| Pitch deck slide | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Positioning statement | A snappy description of your company or product. Keep it under 10 words. Great positioning statements are concrete and memorable. Can be included on the title/cover slide. |
| Problem | 1-2 sentences describing the problem you’re solving. Remember to express this problem from the POV of the customer feeling the pain. Avoid abstract generalizations. |
| Solution | 1-2 sentences articulating your value proposition. Capture the benefit that you provide customers. This should correspond to the problem statement above. |
| Product description | A description (and maybe a graphic) that answers the question “What exactly is the product?” Try not to get bogged down by minute feature details. |
| Competition / differentiation | A presentation (often visual) of the competitive landscape, and a 1-2-sentence explanation of what your differentiated advantage is relative to others. Avoid feature-by-feature comparisons and instead focus on what you are doing that no one else is doing (and why your approach is better). |
| Business model | A brief overview of your (current and/or future) revenue streams, explaining how you make money. |
| Go-to-market strategy | An overview of your customer segment prioritization and approach to reaching customers. This should answer the question, “Who is your ideal customer, and how are you reaching them?” |
| Traction | A few highlights on the market validation you’ve achieved to date. May include revenue, customer logos, users, engagement, or other validation of market demand. Wherever possible, use charts showing growth/improvement over time as opposed to only point-in-time metrics. |
| Fundraising plan + milestones | The amount of money you are currently raising, the use of proceeds (i.e. what you will spend it on), and the milestones you will achieve with this raise (e.g. projected revenue targets, product milestones, assumptions validated). You may want to include financing history to date. If you do not yet have a lead investor with whom you’ve agreed upon terms, you do not have to include a desired valuation or cap. |
| Market size | Ideally a bottoms-up calculation of the amount of revenue you could generate if you had 100% market share. This number won’t be precise; feel free to include other data that can serve as a proxy/approximation, validating that the market is large enough for your business to potentially reach $100M+ in ARR within the next 5-7 years. |
| Team | An introduction to the founding & leadership team. Include names, LinkedIn profiles, and highlights of career accomplishments to date (particularly those relevant to your current startup). Photos optional. |
Depending on your business and story, you may want to include a few additional slides:
| Market timing / “Why now?” | Some information regarding a market shift that is critical to understanding the opportunity you’ve identified (e.g. the adoption of a new technology; a regulatory change; a shift in culture or consumer preferences). |
| How it works | A more detailed explanation of how the product works. Particularly relevant if the product is not intuitive, if the technology is novel, or if the use case is not obvious. |
| Mission / Vision statements | An (inspiring) articulation of your “North star”. Particularly relevant if you are building a moonshot business that requires a big leap of faith on behalf of investors. |
Most decks include these core elements. So where do they go wrong? Too many decks feel too much like a checklist, with no particular direction. Don’t forget that a deck is essentially an ad, and its goal is to intrigue. (I know, very dramatic for a PDF, but bear with me here!)
As mentioned earlier, a pitch deck needs to be as clear and compelling as possible. Said differently, a deck needs a clear narrative with strong momentum.
There are two elements to creating a clear narrative with strong momentum: substance (the information you are presenting) and style (the way you present it).
Let’s start with the first: substance. This is the story of your company. You need to decide what to include and what to leave out to craft the most intriguing possible story.
In shaping this narrative arc, it can be helpful to write a paragraph about your company that effectively captures your one-minute elevator pitch. Each sentence of this paragraph should be able to serve as the main idea of a slide in your deck. Each of these slides will correspond to one of the "table stakes" elements above. The order of these slides will vary depending on what is most compelling about your business.
If you’re not sure what to lead with, think through what the most exciting part of your business is. This may be traction (e.g. six months straight of 20% month-over-month growth) or the team (e.g. a diverse founding team with unmatched understanding of the customer pain point). Similarly, if you know that there are specific widespread objections that you’ll need to overcome (e.g. you’re in a very crowded space; there is an exceptionally high amount of previously failed attempts to solve the problem you’re tackling; you’re in the blood-testing business in a post-Theranos world), get ahead of the concern fairly early on in your narrative by articulating your competitive strength and differentiation.
Below are a few concrete examples of ways that founders have leveraged momentum in their narratives:
Highlighting a robust sales pipeline, suggesting visibility into upcoming revenue acceleration
Including a graph that ties impressive historical traction to exciting forward-looking projections (Note: this only works if your historical numbers have grown at an exciting clip, too; showing flat revenues for the past 6 months to date next to projections that next month you’ll start doubling every month won’t fly)
Referencing identified key hires, demonstrating that you’re in a strong position to execute once the round closes & that you are able to attract strong talent
Being profitable 😊 Profitability isn’t necessarily “momentum” in and of itself, but being in control of your company’s fate gives you leverage that can create the same FOMO that makes investors move faster
All in all, your story should start with a hook, provide additional context, and then lead the investor to forward-looking excitement. By the end, the investor should be thinking:
Hang on a second ...
They’ve figured something out
I don’t want to miss this
Now that you've figured out what your story will be, how do you actually display this in a pitch deck? This brings us to style.
While aesthetically pleasing design doesn’t hurt, the main goal of the deck is clarity. The biggest issue with decks is not that they’re not pretty; it’s that they don’t make sense. Often, they either have too much text or not nearly enough. The clearest decks have one main idea per slide, and each main idea is clearly stated via 1-2 complete sentences. (This is worth emphasizing: please use complete sentences!)
If design isn’t your forte, I’d recommend the following format:
Small tags identifying the slide type (e.g. “Problem”, “Solution”)
1-2 complete sentences stating the key point
These complete sentences, when pieced together across the entire deck, should create a comprehensible paragraph about your company
Supporting graphics/charts/images
If you’re looking for a good example, check out this one. It’s not exactly what I outlined above as it doesn’t have the little tags, but it’s pretty darn close. If you are interested in a more data-driven analysis of pitch decks, DocSend publishes interesting research on the topic.
Three final thoughts:
You will likely tweak (or maybe entirely change) this story throughout your fundraising process as you gather feedback on what is and isn’t resonating with investors.
You can separate your pitch deck into a “main” section and an appendix. In other words, you can leave some of the “table stakes” slides out of the core narrative & include them later for reference.
If you’re debating whether you should send the deck in your initial outreach email or not, send it! Save us all the extra back-and-forth.
If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to reach out to me via email at geri [at] laconia [dot] vc or on Twitter (@geri_kirilova). And, of course, if you are raising a pre-seed or seed round for a b2b software company, we are all ears via our pitch submission form 🙏
