How-to
March 11, 2019
Creating a good pitch deck and presenting it well is a crucial step for a startup looking to secure venture capital or other forms of funding. Especially for early-stage startups, building an impressive deck can feel like a struggle: you might not yet have a big amount of data to use as a communication tool or this might be the first pitch deck you’re building in the first place.
Here are some tips to get started and some pitch deck examples you can take inspiration from.
The pitch deck is the company’s chance to make a strong first impression, share its narrative and make a case for why an investor should invest. When raising funding, there are two key elements: traction and narrative. In the beginning, you rarely have any traction, so you should focus on narrative.
Investors are always interested in understanding the opportunity, and a good narrative explains why you have a great opportunity someone should invest in. You need to make a point that there is a pain in the market craving for a solution.
Something in your background, e.g. your work experience, should tie to how you have discovered this opportunity: maybe you have experienced the problem yourself or have noticed it when working with your potential customers.
In best cases, you can also quantify the value you’re bringing to your future customers. How many hours are spent today on the task your automating? How many euros would companies benefit if they could cut their costs on the area you’re working on? This signals that there will actually be a willingness to pay before you are able to show paying customers.
Finally, your narrative should tell why your team has what it takes to solve this problem in the near future. Maybe something is changing in the technologies used or there is an opportunity in the market no one is taking on yet? Or perhaps you are the first ones to spot this problem? Do you have a unique technology or data set no one else has, or exquisite talent?
If you want more insight into market and differentiation, you can check out this blog post about future markets and external waves to ride on.
Once you have built your narrative, you can build your deck around it. There’s no one size fits all solutions: in some cases, explaining a complicated industry takes more slides, and in some cases, you can focus more on how you have created a ten times cheaper technology that is 10 times more accurate. For the structure, you can take inspiration from the pitch deck examples at the end of this post.
Here are some examples of companies whose pitch decks are exceptionally strong. Take note of how they are different, yet still accomplish the same goal: telling a compelling narrative to attract capital.
There are many pitch deck examples out there. Check out this article from Konsus, this Medium article from the creators of The Open Guide to Startup Fundraising and Cirrus Insight for more ideas.