Pitch Deck Eval
I have been fortunate to be able to help people put together their story when building companies so they can go out and acquire the resources, whether it’s fundraising or something else, to make their dreams happen.
I look for 9 key questions to be answered when I hear or see a pitch, ticking each one off in my head. How each question is answered is the “art” part of a real science. Here’s what I look for:
- What do you do?
- What do you hope to accomplish?
- Does what you hope to accomplish matter? (Market Size)
- What have you built?
- How has what you’ve built performed? (Insights + Metrics)
- Who are you?
- Why are you the right people to do this?
- What’s next?
- What do you want?
My success criteria is the ability to articulate answers to each of those questions and adequately explain them to someone else.
There’s also that one sauce question:
What’s your secret sauce?
I have had a falling out with this question. I find that if it can be answered well it’s because the team has a product or business model that is refined enough to understand their leverage.
When someone is starting off it’s hard to explain what the secret sauce is (outside of team or domain expertise / partnerships) because one should expect the problem and solution to change.
I find that answering the secret sauce question generally dilutes an otherwise reasonable case being made for a business (in the near term).
Here’s the template:
I’d love your feedback on the template or my thoughts (especially questions I’ve missed that I should ask). Please leave a note or shoot me 140 @niket.
I hope you found this useful and good luck.
Thanks to the many people who helped shape or put up with my ideas as they materialized.
This post is part of a series of posts made towards a commitment to open source a set of tools I’ve been developing over the past few years.
