This video provides essential advice on creating a compelling pitch deck, highlighting the dos and don'ts to attract investor interest. It emphasizes balancing text and visuals for a clean and effective presentation.
What this video covers
If you’re even thinking about raising money, you’re going to need a pitch deck. You’re going to need to capture the essence of what you’re doing in 15 to 25 slides, depending. Here’s the thing: there are many things, there are many shoes, many problems, many pitfalls that you want to really avoid so that you can get that excitement on the other side of the table so that investor gives you the money, jumps on board, wants to help in investing in you, investing in your company, and helping you to build a business. In today’s video, we’re going to break down what are the do’s and what are the don’ts so that you’re able to have a better path and really understand how to guide yourself to what’s in front of you. So with that being said, let’s get into it.
Starting with the do’s, you want to keep it super clean. Here, you want to keep that balance between the text and the visuals because I can’t stress enough how many times I’ve seen a pitch deck, and then I review it, and it’s like you need to read it, you need to spend time per slide. Investors don’t have time to go through stuff. You cannot literally give the stuff to them to figure it out. You need to hand-hold them, and that’s why having that nice balance between visuals and text is going to allow them to skim through the presentation much quicker. Typically, investors remember that they’re going to be investing about 2 minutes and 41 seconds.
You also want to focus on your most important slides. Here’s the thing: you’re not going to be able to really nail it on every single slide. There are always going to be goods, and there are always going to be bads on some of those slides.
Also, you want to talk about the market size. Those are the three key areas that you want to really be completely sure that there are absolutely no questions and that you’ve really nailed it on your pitch deck in terms of putting those slides together.
You want to show them what you’re going to be using the money for and do some research. I remember being part of certain presentations where the founder would come into pitch. I would listen to the presentation, and then I see that on the use processes, they say, “No. This engineer in New York City is going to cost me 30,000 bucks.” And, essentially, it’s not $30,000 what that is because an engineer in New York is costing you
00,000 or even more nowadays.
You also want to get feedback. You want to distribute this presentation – maybe team members, maybe advisors, maybe other people that you trust: family, friends, former classmates. Because it’s all about crowdsourcing that process, it’s about understanding what are some potential holes that you may have in your story and perhaps cover them by people that really care about you.
In terms of the don’ts of the pitch deck, the first one is not going too long. That is whether you’re doing the pitch deck and you’re going over 25 slides when it becomes like reading a book and people don’t have the time for that, and certainly, investors don’t have the time for that and also, when you are missing the boat when it comes to listening. If you’re presenting your pitch deck, for example, and the investor is asking you for the projections of year one, you should not give them year one, plus year two, plus year three, plus year four.
Don’t put anything in there that requires an NDA. Here, you want to keep it super high-level. You want to avoid any barrier.
What I would highly recommend that you do is keep it high-level. The secret sauce is something that you remove and that you keep for when you sign the NDA, once you’ve gone into the due diligence process.
Another don’t is forgetting your contact information at the end on the thank you slide.
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