Pitch deck

Creating a pitch deck is part of the startup fundraising process.

Every stage of investment and industry has different norms, but there are a lot of standard expectations and basics.

I’ll focus on sharing resources around early stage fundraising for your pre-seed or seed rounds, for what you think is a Venture Sized Business.

There’s a movement towards writing up Investment Memos instead of Pitch Decks.

Slide Design

10 slides

Your pitch deck will be 10 slides.

You can (and will) have 10s of appendix / backup / alternate slides. The meat of your base pitch will only be 10 slides.

An overview or intro deck can / should be less!

Send a PDF attachment

Build your deck in whatever you want - Keynote, PowerPoint, Google Slides, Figma, whatever.

When actually sending a deck, send it as a PDF attachment. This works on mobile, it works offline, it can easily be forwarded, and it’s non editable.

There are things like Docsend and various other “send this as a link and email gate it”. This is likely more appropriate for customer sales engagement or other purposes.

The title of the slide should be the take away

LinkedIn post by Stephen Carroll

The best advice I ever got about building pitch decks is stupidly simple:

“Make the title of the slide the thing you want the investor/customer to take away from reading that slide.”

Example:

There’s often a “team” slide… Which is appropriately titled something like “Our Team.”

That title is okay, but it can be improved.

“Team of Industry Veterans with 28+ Years of Experience” has way more punch than “Our Team”

Frames the thinking around how qualified your team is… Before they were just getting a general introduction to your team.

Same info. Different title. WAY bigger impact.

Instead of it reading like a description, it reads like a punchline.

This is psychology.

Another example:

The “Our Product” slide

Typically followed with information about the offering.

Instead, just lead with the punchline…

“Our Product Reduces Manual Effort by 10x”

Much more powerful.

Pitch Deck Coach Outline

11 Pitch Types