This video provides a step-by-step guide on creating a compelling pitch deck presentation. It emphasizes clarity, simplicity, and the importance of a strong cover slide to capture investor attention quickly an investor's attention quickly.
What this video covers
The pitch deck is essential if you want to raise money. It’s literally the document that is going to tell the reason and the compelling story of why that investor needs to take you seriously and why that investor needs to invest in your business. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down for you. We’re going to give you a step-by-step guide on how to make that killer presentation. Without further ado, let’s get into it.
The pitch deck needs to be clear and simple. Remember, you only have 2 minutes and 41 seconds, 2:41, to convince the investor because they are literally skimming through the presentation. You can’t afford to have them reading or to spend a significant amount of time per slide.
The cover slide is like a trailer. The pitch deck is the movie. The cover slide is the trailer. Before you go and watch a movie with your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, with whoever that is, you watch the trailer because if it’s a terrible movie, they’re going to kill you.
On the cover slide, you’re going to be including a powerful image of your product in action, your space, a logo, a tag line, and the contact information. That is going to set up the stage for what the investor is about to review, rather than getting into it and then figuring out what your business is about. Again, be clear and be simple.
You don’t have to create this from scratch, by the way. You can use the pitch deck template below that founders are using all over the world to raise millions. Again, use something that is not long, that is not lengthy, and that right away tells the investor exactly why they need to give you that opportunity for a meeting.
The pitch deck needs to balance the facts and the looks very well. In many instances, a visual, a good picture can have a million words, so that’s why you want to be very good with the visuals, with the pictures that you’re adding. You want to make sure that you’re putting a lot of thought into why you’re putting that picture into each one of those slides.
Obviously, on this presentation, you’re going to be adding the cover slide and an executive summary at the beginning so that they know what this is about. But, again, you always want to have a flow and a structure that are consistent with what the investor is reviewing out there.
The presentation needs to show how great your team is because if you ask any investor, they’re going to tell you that the most important thing to them is the team. It’s all about having the right people seated on the right seats of the bus.
On the team slide, you want to include just the executive leadership team, the management team. You don’t want to include even the interns because you need to have only people that you know for sure that are going to be sticking around for the next six months in the business.
When it comes to showing that slide – when it comes to really showing it in a powerful way, you want to put the headshots of the team, and then you want to break it into bullet points. You want to add two bullet points to each one of the members of the executive leadership team, where one could be the experience, and another one could be some big accomplishments of that individual.
Then, one thing that you could do for social proof is, at the bottom, showcase all the logos of big companies, corporations that each one of the team members has worked at. That way, it would pop that logo, that recognizable brand when the investor is reviewing the presentation.
Market size is critical. When it comes to the market size, you need to make sure that it is over 1 billion. If it’s under 1 billion, probably most investors are not even going to touch it because the market size also determines the returns that they are able to generate from that investment. So, if it’s under a billion, it doesn’t justify the risk of an investment into an early-stage company.
