This video discusses the time it takes to create a pitch deck, emphasizing that the process is never truly complete and varies from a few hours to hundreds of hours. The speaker advises founders to consider market conditions and their financial situation when planning the creation of their pitch deck.
What this video covers
Timing is everything. This is one of the things that you really want to keep in mind because the thing is that you want to time the creation of the pitch deck with the market, with your situation, with perhaps the amount of money that you have on hand in order to get to the next level and get that money in. What you want to do is understand how much time do you need in advance to sit down and start putting together all the slides so that you’re not pressured? As Napoleon said, “Dress me slowly as I’m in a hurry.”
Essentially, that’s the same thing. You want to know what timeframe are you dealing with? By when do you need this money? Are there going to be any market conditions?
When it comes to the amount of time, it can literally be from as little as a couple of hours all the way up to hundreds of hours. The truth of the matter is, is that creating a pitch deck is never going to be a complete process. It’s never going to be final. The reason for this is because it’s a work in progress.
Typically, on average, I’ve heard that it could be closer to the 100 hours if you put all the research, all the thought, all the conversations, that network of discussions that have happened around the problem, around the solution that you’re bringing to market before you actually put it on paper. Obviously, you’re going to account for all of that research as well.
Two hacks to really kick it into high gear. One is using a template. You can use the template below that founders are using all over the world to raise millions. It’s completely for free. You can literally grab it and make it your own, even throw in there your own design, and that way, you don’t have to start from scratch. The thing is that when you’re putting together a pitch deck, it needs to have a certain flow, it needs to have a certain structure that the investor actually knows and that recognizes from other decks that they’ve seen. You don’t want to make them extra hard. For that reason, you want to give them something that they’re used to, that they’ve seen in the past. For that reason, don’t start from scratch. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Just replicate it.
You can also hire a pitch deck pro. This could be a site like Upwork, or perhaps you’re hiring a company like what we’re doing at Panthera Advisors to help you with putting all of the materials together. Essentially, you’ve got to understand that you have enough going on with understanding the execution of your business, and that’s a massive, steep learning curve.
Then you want to build the target list of investors. The target list of investors also is going to help you understand how you’re going to be crafting the deck, what kind of investment thesis they’re excited about, maybe you’re going to see that pattern recognition there of these guys or gals that are investing in the same way with the type of business in a certain shape or form, and that is going to help you understand the amount of length, time, and effort that is going to go into putting together your deck.
Developing the copy is another big one. Here, it’s not about just throwing whatever text on the deck. You want to be thoughtful about the words that you’re using. You want to use linguistics that is going to land for whoever is in the deck in a very simple and concise manner so that they understand and they are excited about what you’re putting out there for them to review, and that they get enrolled in that future, in that possibility that you’re coming up with.
Then, you’re going to allocate another one to two weeks for tweaking, for sharing with people in your first and second-degree networks because here’s the thing: before you go out there, you want to really grab this and put it with people that you can trust, that they know you, that they are familiar with what you’re building and perhaps they can help you with identifying certain things that you didn’t know were there. It could be your family member. It could be your former colleague. It could be another fellow entrepreneur that you can share the deck so that they can give you some feedback.
