Being a startup in fundraising mode can feel like walking a tightrope without a harness. Building revenue streams and a customer base fuels your confidence, and you’ve honed your pitch to perfection. But one wrong step or slip-up in the heat of the moment can overturn everything. That’s why your pitch deck must function as your harness; it’s where charisma and confidence meet content.
We’ve helped dozens of startup founders overcome the struggle to craft effective pitch decks that raise real funds, and support them in the moment. This is because we understand the principles that structure a good pitch deck: understanding your audience; awareness of best practices/conventions (and when to break these); strong foundational brand concepts; knowing your story and telling it seamlessly; and effective design, especially for data visualizations. In this article, we’ll break these down for you.
Invest in understanding your audience, from every angle
When your audience consists of potential investors, the only thing more valuable than the investment you’re seeking from them is their time. To understand the cliché ‘time is money’ from a pitch deck perspective is to understand the inverse relationship between the two; the more you value their time, the more they’ll value your business.
Anyone in the position to fund your next round has seen every imaginable pitch deck: good, bad, ugly, and all kinds of eccentric. So don’t get too cute with it; investors will appreciate the clarity and brevity of a top-down pitch aligning closely with a familiar pattern. And, no matter your product, never assume any foreknowledge; your pitch deck must be totally self-contained, building a full vision of your business from a blank slate.
Along with valuing their time and conforming to their expectations, it’s vital to deliver a quality deck for your potential investors. It’s a reflection of your capabilities, and your respect for your audience. How can they believe in the success of you and your business if you can’t even manage a boilerplate deck? Investors appreciate simplicity, just the right amount of information, presented clearly and transparently.
I’ve even had an investor tell me that all venture capitalists (including himself) are morons, and to keep that front of mind when crafting your pitch. While that’s an exaggeration, it’s important that, unless you are ABSOLUTELY certain, never assume a supreme level of technical knowledge or prior domain expertise.
To return to our tightrope analogy, avoid tricks, showboating, and risks in your pitch deck. Simply put one foot in front of the other, and you’ll get where you’re going, thanks to the support of your pitch deck.
Know the rules before breaking them (but you probably still shouldn’t)
It should be clear by now that your pitch deck isn’t a place to reinvent the wheel. Consistency and predictability are key, whereas unconventional approaches come off as ignorant of expectations and lacking empathy with your audience. Pitch deck content outlines are basically formulaic, and for good reason. Investors are looking for fundamentals and a clear proposal; unnecessary novelty can raise suspicion more than elicit appreciation. Here are the elements that every investor will look for in a pitch deck.
- Problem: What’s actually broken (or painful) enough that people will pay to fix it. This has to be a concrete, daily problem, not a theoretical issue.
- Solution Relevance: How you specifically solve that specific problem. Don’t list everything you do, just what matters most to alleviate your prospective customer’s pain.
- Competitive Advantage: Make clear the real reason you win, even if a bigger company tries to copy you. This could be proprietary tech, relationships, data, or other intangibles.
- Market Opportunity: Bring together total addressable market with validation that customers actually want this (beyond survey answers), and that now is the right time to pull the trigger, rather than five years in the past or future.
- Growth Goals: Outline specific numbers you’re committing to, such as customers, revenue, usage, etc., over a specific time frame (one or two years). Vague statements are worthless to professional investors.
- Road Map/Timeline: Sketch out what you’re going to build, and when it’s roughly going to launch. This shows you’ve got a plan, not just an idea.
- Leadership Team: Profile the people whose experience aligns with your proposal plan. Investors tend to bet on your team as much as your idea.
- Capital Amount + Breakdown: State the exact amount you’re raising this round, not a range, and where each dollar is going, broken down by category (sales, marketing, operations, etc.).
- Projected ROI: Sketch out reasonable scenarios for best case, worst case, and most likely outcome for investor returns, including with your internal rate of return (IRR) to allow easy comparison of your proposal to other possible investments.
- Appendix: Don’t hesitate to stack your appendix with relevant/technical info that bogs down your pitch, such as patents, detailed models, customer lists, etc., to have them at hand if requested.
Brand imports creativity and character to your pitch deck
In the previous two sections, the takeaway was to steer clear of unnecessary divergence from expectations. However, that doesn’t mean your pitch desk should totally lack creativity, or appear sterile. Where creativity comes into your pitch deck, is through the brand that bolsters it.
Weaving the following foundational concepts of your brand into your pitch deck will ensure the effort you’ve put into crafting your brand translates seamlessly into your presentations.
- Core Identity System: Including logo, color, and type, this is your brand’s visual vocabulary. It makes your company recognizable in a single glance, and stick with investors after your presentation.
- Positioning: The unique space you own in the customer’s mind that competitors can’t claim. It must be as clear, accessible, and undeniable as your pitch deck.
- Essence: This is the single, enduring intangible feeling your brand leaves people with, no matter the channel. However, its intangibility doesn’t mean leaving it up to chance.
- Core Statements: Including your purpose, vision, mission, and values, these are your brand’s answer to why you exist, where you’re going, how you’ll get there, and what you’ll never compromise on.
- Attributes: The three to five consistent personality traits your brand exhibits in every interaction.
- Messaging Framework: A repeatable system for saying the right thing to the right person at the right time, always crafted to fit the particularities of any given audience.
- Brand Story: The narrative arc that turns your company from a solution into a character worth rooting for, and worth trusting with an investment.
Your sales pitch and pitch deck live and die with your story
Your pitch deck story shouldn’t involve a novel’s amount of density and complexity. Conforming to the expected content outline is like crafting a movie within the classic three-act structure. Structure doesn't kill a storyteller’s creativity; it brings it to life, allowing you to plot your audience’s reaction rather than hoping for the best.
By applying your key messages in the right places, the pitch deck’s narrative should snap seamlessly into place. Start with your brand story without much adaptation or adjustment, as this should already condense and convey the problem, relevance, and solution. This is the familiar arc to which investors are looking to pay attention.
Beyond narrative flow, discipline to communication design best practices drives success for your pitch deck. These aren't creative handcuffs, proven guardrails that keep your message sharp and your audience engaged. Remember to always keep your copy pithy, like the scaffolding for the hard data at the heart of your pitch.
Design strategically to your circumstances
A final crucial aspect of crafting a winning pitch deck is understanding the circumstances in which you use it. Here are a few common scenarios to account for when designing your pitch deck.
The presentation is always facilitated by you in-person:
- Optimize the type size for easy reading from wherever audience members are seated in the conference room
- Boil down your slides to only key points, and move more complex and expository details to your speaker notes
- Limit your content to three points per slide; split content-heavy slides to prevent your visual pitch from getting bogged down
- Support content with visuals that enhance understanding. Don’t just clutter slides with decorative elements
Your pitch decks function as a stand-alone leave behind:
- This scenario requires a more comprehensive pitch deck; bring together your deck content and speaker notes in a streamlined, report-like way that enables a full understanding from reading alone
- Adjust the type size for individual viewing on a screen or when printed; overly large type will make reading the deck a disjointed hassle
- Don’t over do it with visuals; the more thorough written explanations should only be accompanied with the necessary data visualizations
- If your pitch deck is likely to be printed, always use high resolution images, and consider using a professional design tool like InDesign.
Finally, don’t overlook the medium through which your pitch deck is communicated: your presentation software.
- While Powerpoint is the most common, it’s also the worst software
- For Mac users, Keynote is far superior to Powerpoint
- Google Slides is also a great alternative if you’re using Windows.
- For power users with a strong design team behind them, consider using Figma slides to align your design and presentation capabilities
- Finally, for the ‘perfect to the final detail’ pro designers who need to control every last pixel, using InDesign and converting it to a PDF will keep your vision pure throughout the pitch.
The tightrope can be tamed
Crafting a winning pitch deck is as simple as following these guidelines, in order to align with investor expectations and allow your business fundamentals to shine through. Your pitch deck should always evolve over time, so don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Learn as you go and make informed improvements over time, carefully integrating feedback from investors, without completely changing direction based on a single presentation result. It’s also important to keep an eye on other pitch decks for elements you like, but don’t be too reactionary or copy too closely. Your business and pitch have their own context, and you need to closely consider this before adopting anything from other decks.
