Pitch Decks

I’ve seen a couple thousand pitch decks by now, and I’m tired of seeing the same mistakes over and over. I’ll try to encapsulate a couple of key observations I’ve made over the years to help entrepreneurs better focus their efforts when building their decks.

Let’s start with the beginning.

How should you start your pitch deck? Team — talk about how amazing your team is? Market — tell the story of the billion dollar market your going after? The What — tell me how you are x (uber) for y (dogs)? (Please don’t pitch me Uber for dogs.)

My answer is: None of these. Start with the single most important thing (SMIT) about your company that makes it stand out from everyone else. Keep it to one. Then go into your regular deck layout talking about your story.

It may actually be one of the above elements. You have about 30 seconds to grab and keep an investors attention. If the first five minutes of your presentation is a snooze fest I can guarantee you the likelihood of raising capital is slim to none. Some of the better SMIT’s I’ve seen are customer LTV, a customer list, client growth, market size* and product description. It’s different for every company.

It’s so important you know what your SMIT is and, sadly, too many CEO’s I meet with don’t know what theirs is. Getting an investment depends on you knowing it.

As to the rest of your deck, make sure to include these important items and avoid some serious pitfalls

Don’t put us to sleep. Please

1. Show us your product(s) in your deck and walk us through at a high level how it(they) work(s). I’m amazed at how many pitches I get that talk about the company in broad sweeping terms, and many positive superfluous ebullient and exuberant adjectives of course (you get the point?), without actually ever describing their product!
2. Numbers. Active Users. Gross Sales. Whatever you have, put them in there. Bonus points for showing us how you use those numbers to help you make decisions
3. If you have customers: list them. Tell us why they matter. Tell us how they use your product
4. If you have customers: get some testimonials into your deck. Nothing sells your company like your customers
5. Have an ask. It’s probably money. How much? For what? Don’t make us guess what you want

Bonus: If you have to use any font smaller than 20 points on a slide: you have to much on that slide. In the pitch, you want us focused on you, not your deck.

• The real market size. Not: The entire shoe market is worth 123 billion! (but ignore that we only sell white running shoes to upper class women in Tanzania, market size $1,000)