How to Write a Winning Pitch Deck

Regardless of whether you’re raising financing for your startup or introducing your business plan to different partners, odds are that you’ll require a stellar pitch deck to dazzle your crowd and nail your objectives. A pitch deck is normally a 10–20 slide introduction intended to give a short rundown of your startup, your field-tested strategy, and your startup vision. A Pitch presentation deck also serves very different purposes, from trying to get a meeting with a new investor, to presenting in front of a stage, and each one of them should follow a different structure.

The pitch deck (also known as a slide deck or pitch slide deck ) is the first communication tool to help you raise money with a potential investor. The content of the pitch deck, alongside your presentation skills, can assist the investors in determining whether to keep assessing your business opportunity. There are likely 100 reasons why your organization is extraordinary, yet individuals can just truly recall a couple of them after a short introduction or a pitch. So it’s important for you to plunk down and figure out the 5 to 7 most significant factors individuals should remember when they think about your startup.

A pitch deck works like a persuasion tool to get into Venture Capital or angel investor’s head and for a newbie setting up a pitch deck, it is a compelling, forthright and overwhelming task to begin with.

In any case, the task can be carried away when the basics and must have segments of a Pitch Deck is well understood and included. The basic characteristics of a good pitch deck are:

• Clear and Simple
• Compelling
• Easy to Understand
• Depicts Conviction
• Give some solid numbers, e.g: user engagement, user base growth metrics, etc.
• Tell a story to engage
• Each slide should be on one topic

Also, some basic mistakes while making pitch deck are:

• Using too many bullet points
• Making it more than 20 slides
• Text rich and graphic poor
• Using too small fonts
• Overdoing of color (simplicity is the key)

Your pitch deck has to match the uniqueness of your startup and it should be customized according to the story and concept of your startup. Regardless of all the customization, there are some mandatory components that your pitch deck should cover. Following are some components with a graphical depiction of one of ValueCorn’s client startup:

• Cover Slide: It is usually the initial slide comprising a quick one to two sentence overview of your business and the value that you offer to your customers. It is a short and straightforward method to portray your business in 140 words or less in a way your folks would comprehend.

• Vision: This slide includes what you plan on doing and achieving. It allows you a unique opportunity to introduce yourself, your company, and your brand in a compelling way.. This is helpful for you in finding the right niche or in framing your idea. It is ideal to convey the originality of your idea in a simple vision.

• Problem: This slide is used to explain the problem you are solving and who has the problem. It’s essential that you attempt and recount to a relatable story when you are defining the issue. The more you can make the problem as genuine as it could be, the more your investors will comprehend your business and your objectives.

• Solution: In this slide you get the chance to jump into portraying your product or service. Portray how clients utilize your products and how it tends to solve the problem that you addressed on slide two.

• Market: This slide is utilized to develop who your ideal client is and what number of them there are. It also should include how you estimate your market and how would you position your product in the market. However, it’s essential to be cautious with this slide as it can get fascinating to attempt to define your market to be as extensive as possible. But investors usually opt for a more realistic and reachable market. The key is to make an explicit and more sensible pitch here.

• Product: Think of this as the big reveal at a magic show. You’ve talked about who your product is for, what problem it solves, and how it works. Now reveal what it is. You can compose a straightforward statement on your slide to reveal your product. However, a better idea could be to incorporate an explainer video. Video is an incredible method to convey how something functions, particularly with complex innovative items.

• Business/Revenue Model: Since you’ve depicted the product in the previous slides, it’s in this slide that you discuss how it brings in the cash. What do you charge and who covers the tabs? You can likewise refer to the competitors here and talk about how you're estimating fits into the bigger market. You can mention how your offerings are- premium, high-price, or a budget-friendly one.

• Team: This slide includes why are you and your team the right people to build and grow this company? What experience do you have that others don’t? Highlight the key team members, their successes at other companies, and the key expertise that they bring to the table.

• Traction and Roadmap: You can utilize this slide to discuss your milestones. What significant objectives have you accomplished up until this point and what are the major following stages you plan on taking? A product road map that defines the key milestones is useful here. Besides, if you already have sales or early adopters utilizing your product, talk about that here. Investors need to see that you have demonstrated some part of your business model as that reduces some risks, so any verification you have that approves your business model to solve the stated problems is very helpful.

• Point of Difference/USP: How you differ from the rest in the market is important to portray your uniqueness to the investors.

• Competitive Landscape: Regardless of whether you are opening up a totally new market, your potential clients are utilizing alternative solutions to tackle their problem today. Portray how you fit into the competitive scene and how you’re not quite the same as the competitors that are available today. What key benefits you are offering or is there some “mystery ingredient” that you have and others don’t? The key here is clarifying how you should be chosen over the different players available.

• Go-to-Market Strategy: This slide needs to deliver how you will get the piece of the pie you proposed in the previous slides. There are a lot of various approaches to showcase your product. In all probability, you’ll have to amend your marketing plan later on to change the things that aren’t working and scale up the things that are.

• Financials, Funding requirements, and use of funds: This slide should summarize any funding you’ve received so far if any. You also need to explain how much you’re looking for now and what that money will be used for. The key is to focus on the potential ROI for the investors in the room.

A great reference for entrepreneurs around the world is the Airbnb pitch deck from 2009. This giant player in the travel industry was founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk who had used this pitch to raise $600K from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures. The company closed a round in early 2015 on a valuation of over USD $20 Billion. The deck was incredibly successful at summarizing the company vision and the huge market opportunity they had before them.

If we break down some important slides of Airbnb, it will be evident that they have successfully stuck to the basics and the mandatory items in their slides yet juggled in all the necessary and stunner points to take over the investors. Starting from the cover slides, they used ‘Book rooms with locals, rather than hotels’ as a tagline which is a perfect explanation of what their service is, their business model, and the audience they are targeting. It’s simple words yet easily defining the product/ service being offered. It is crucial to define and make the viewers understand your product this early on the deck, helps them stay engaged with the presentation. Too often, startups are found to struggle with the problem slide and a mainstream approach is showing an image of the pain of the status quo, the guys at Airbnb went with 3 simple lines that perfectly explain their approach. Airbnb tries to solve a pricing problem with hotels, a cultural problem for leisure travel, and finally a technology problem that other competitors like CouchSurfing had tried to solve in the past, unsuccessfully. So they have highlighted the three key words- price, hotels, and no- easy way exists in the three sentences to present the problems they are here to solve. Clear and simple, yet again! The Solution slide also had a summary of the 3 most important reasons why a customer would opt for Airbnb; in other words, their core value propositions. Airbnb’s Product slide had a summary of the core functionality of the product in as few words and images. The Search by City > Review Listings > Book it! helps guide the user in what the interface does, and implies that the process consists of 3 simple steps. This enabled the viewers to have a clearer idea of the interface and its accessibility. Another great approach to this slide could be a short 30-second video. A video is truly worth a thousand images, and as long as your technical setup allows it, that’s definitely the way to go. The most important slide was the business model slide where it started off with — “We take a 10% commission on each transaction” and their approach for this slide was to run a simple projection: assuming that they were able to conquer 15% of the market. With an average transaction fee of $25, the company could easily project $200M in revenue between 2008 and 2011, which is bound to get anyone excited. It showcased its simple business model with greater potential in the market.

Hence a balance of key points and points that would instigate an investor were simply presented in the pitch deck that successfully won over the investors and Airbnb could raise $600K from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures.

In summary, a pitch deck requires attention to detail and knowing the interests of the audience as well as the investors. Bringing simplicity in a pitch deck and having the engagement of the investors is easier said than done but it is the key to a successful pitch deck presentation.

Writer: Afia Zahin
Analyst, Stellar Value Partners