6 Tips for Crafting a Compelling Pitch Deck to Raise Investment (with free e-book)
Are you an early stage (pre-seed to seed stage) founder who needs to raise investment?
If you are driven and committed to your business but are wondering how on earth you are going to convince someone with capital to invest in you then this article is exactly for you.
My name is Suraj Tirupati, Co-Founder of Startup Blueprint, and I’ve got a background working in Startups, VC, and Tech. I spent over a year looking at 300 to 400 pitch decks at a highly active VC firm in London, UK. I’ve condensed the insights I gained during that time into this summary blog post. This blog is a condensed version of a free e-book I’ve written. If you want to jump straight into the meat I suggest you download the e-book here.
With no further ado! Let’s get into key thinking points before you write your pitch deck:
1. Tell a Story
Investors need to be compelled to want to speak to you. Your pitch deck should read like a story- but not no Alice and Wonderland type story; a real logical and commercial story. Each slide should make coherent sense and the overall deck should communicate the commercial vision you have while also enticing investors to want to be apart of it.
2. Use Visual Imagery to Convery your Message
Do NOT overcrowd your slides with too much text. Maximum (and I mean absolute maximum) 100 words per slide. Most should be considerably shorter. Instead use intelligent diagrams, schematics, figures, and animations to bring to life complex ideas in concise ways.
3. One Idea Per Slide
I know you’re excited to get your message across and various aspects of the idea tie into one another but keep it simple. One idea per slide. No more. Instead of communicating it in 2 or 3 ways, make one bold statement that clearly gets your point across (I give examples per slide in the e-book).
4. Elaborate Each Slide to Yourself in 2–3 Paragraphs
This was insight from a founder we interviewed on our podcast who helps founders raise investment and “speak investor”. Your slides aren’t just a flashy PowerPoint. Each one should have detailed strategic insight behind it. Get a piece of paper, or word document, and type out 2–3 paragraphs elaborating and giving more detail behind the ideas of each slide. When it comes to pitching your deck, this will ultimately be what you say.
When you write, you cut out the waffle. You can clearly see what’s valuable and what’s crap.
5. Show, Don’t Tell
Consistently give facts and statistics to back up your claims. You may claim how big a problem is but put some figures and percentages behind; how MUCH money is spent on this problem? What PERCENTAGE of the market say they’re experiencing this? How MUCH improvement does your product actually bring? Give metrics that are easy to understand e.g. “We save X hours” or “We make the process N% faster”.
6. Know Your Business Inside and Out
A good pitch deck isn’t just good design. It’s the story behind your enterprise. Know exactly what problem you are solving, who you are solving it for, how wide (the market) the problem is, what current solutions are, where your solution is positioned, what behaviours in the market make it easy to bring your solution to the market etc. This is strategic thinking, not marketing speak.
The Slides
I’m not going to go into depth about each slide here — I’ve done that extensively in the e-book but I will name each slide you should include and a short summary of why and how you could frame it:
Problem — what is the problem you are solving? A good story starts with a problem and goes on to describe how it gets solved.
Solution — what is the theoretical solution that will make the big bad problem go away?
Product — enter your product! The practical implementation of the previously mentioned theoretical solution. Why is your product better than others and what makes it defensible?
Market — OK so we’ve got a problem, a solution, and a product that applies the solution. But how big is the problem felt? Give statistics and numbers to back up your claims. Learn the difference between the terms TAM, SAM, and SOM. Clue: investors care most about the SOM in the early stages.
Revenue Model — great so there’s a market but how are you going to make money from it?
Go-To Market Strategy — OK you’ve got a plan to make money, but how will you gain market share so you can do exactly that?
Traction — oh wow, brilliant plan. But tell me, you’ve got this unbelievable strategy, but how much progress have you really made so far?
Competition — you can’t be the only one who’s thought of this!! Who are your competitors??
Team — who are the people behind you that are going to help you defeat this competition and why are you the people for the job??
Financials — *investors thinking* “Hmmm this has potential…so what exactly do you intend to do with my money if I do potentially give it to you?” Investors tend to want someone finance-savvy in the organisation so they can trust them with a lot of capital to properly allocate and plan how to use it.
Investment Ask — finally, your CTA! How much do you actually want to raise and how much of your Company are you willing to give away to raise it? Also, how do you plan to use the funds?
These are the key slides in a pitch deck. However, no one size fits all. Every pitch deck is different since every Company is different. It’s your story — you need to write the pitch deck for YOUR Company, no one else’s.
Ultimately, slide order can be swapped around depending on what makes sense. I go on to describe why I’ve chosen that particular order in the e-book but it really is up to you. As a rule of thumb most decks I saw started off with Problem->Solution->Product but after that it depends on what’s relevant.
Good luck with your raise!
If you’ve read on this far thank you. Here’s a little bit about us and what we do:
My co-founder James and I run a podcast about early stage global entrepreneurship. We interview seed to series-A stage founders and investors and discuss key challenges, trends, and ideas in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. You can find our website here along with our episodes on Spotify and Apple Playlists.
We release episodes every week with founders from a range of verticals. We also release free e-books on hot topics in entrepreneurship to our mailing list. If you’re interested in content about entrepreneurship then please head over to our website and sign up to our mailing list for more.
Till next time!