The Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch

I’m not going to lie, I was very nervous…

After 3 months of being part of the Collide Village Accelerator Program, we graduated last week.

Most Accelerator programs end with a Pitch/Demo Day, so we had ours. There are different ways to structure a pitch. We had 10 minutes so we needed to decide what story we wanted to tell. This was very important for us. We didn’t want to have too many slides or information that was not related to our journey.

This is a list of the things we focused on and the reasoning behind them. Hopefully this will help you in your own pitch!

1-Why?

As Simon Sinek says: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it”. It was important to us to explain why we decided to start working on this full time four months ago. Why are we so passionate about it? Why are we here for the long haul?

2-The problem

It is important to establish the problem you are solving ASAP, so we just jumped right into it.

3-Market size

Investors like to hear that you are in a multi-billion dollar industry. Some investors are obsessed with this. Market size is a living beast. It changes. Luckily for us, our market size is growing. We wanted to communicate that.

4-The solution

Once the audience learned about the problem we are solving, the solution is easier to explain.

5-Why we are different?

No matter what you are working on, chances are that you have competitors. Who are they?, why you are so special? Investors need to know that to get excited, but you should know that too!

6-Competitive Advantages

Being different is not enough. How are you better? What are you seeing that your competitors don’t? You have to be ten times better than your competitors. Tell them how you are better.

7-Expansion, our vision moving forward

Beyond the market size, we wanted to explain what our strategy moving forward is. It doesn’t matter if you potentially have access to a large number of customers/users if you do not know how to execute a plan that will lead you to acquire those customers. How to grow your business is the name of the game.

8-How do we make money!

Be as straightforward as you can. Just say it. Don’t run away from the question. If it is advertising, say advertising (google is a massive advertising business). If you are using a subscription model (like we do), that’s OK too!

9-Traction

When I have to make our 30 second pitch, I talk about three things:What our company does. How big the market is. How much traction we have. Traction is very important. If you are pre-launch, focus on your progress. Tell your story from that perspective, it is not all about how many users you have.

10-How much money we are raising

This is optional, not every pitch should have this slide but we included it. We had a room full of investors. It was a golden opportunity to say: “We are making this and we need your help. This is how much we need to hit our goals”.

11-Team

This is so important because investors really invest in people first. The idea is second. The idea is barely the start. Every company needs a solid team able to execute their vision.

We also showed a promotional video:

Demo day is over. It was a great learning experience. We have new challenges ahead of us and I’m planning on continuing to blog to help other entrepreneurs out there.

Thank you for reading! You can follow me on Twitter.