What it takes to ship a minimal viable pitch deck in 3 hours
and how you can have a lot of fun while doing so
When you get an invite to participate in some startup contest, event or conference, your first reaction is probably gonna be something like; “Awesome! Let’s do this!” However, it’s important to realise what rules you have to play by. Sometimes you will be ready for this. Often you’re not. This is a story how I shipped Blindfeed’s pitch deck before we were ready (like way way way ready).
You’ve got mail
It’s Thursday June 29, 2017 and we got an invite to participate in Tech Open Air (TOA) in Berlin. I didn’t check my email until end of the day as we’re busy building in a ninja focused way. When I discovered around 7pm that we had to fill out a form before 23.59 CST (midnight) I scheduled a reminder to do that after my commute.
As I was filling out the form, I came to the last “question”. We had to upload our pitch deck. Pitch deck? ‘WTF, we don’t want any money so why do you want my pitch deck?’. I thought I could skip it and just submit the rest of the questionnaire. Well it turned out that didn’t work, so I was left with a choice. Decide to not go to TOA and miss out meeting on interesting people or… I had to create a freaking pitch deck with just 3 hours left on the clock. Double crap I thought. Then again… I do like a challenge. I do like constraints. Hmmmmm.
So what the f*ck do you do with 2hours and 54 minutes on the clock to create, design and ship a pitch deck?
Let’s think first
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.” — Abraham Lincoln
What do investors really want to see? No wait… what do humans really want?
First, investors want to see a lot of stuff normal thinking people don’t want. They want numbers, a lot of numbers. Numbers about growth, numbers about retention, numbers about financial projections, numbers about the market and numbers that fit the 10 commandments of the potential unicorn. Investors also want to read the right buzz-words that help them box your “IP” into a category. The list goes on with what investors want to see in decks and in what order. There are better posts about that here, here and here.
Never ever I was going to be able to create a full-blown pitch deck from scratch in 2 hours and 49 minutes (time passed fast). Just slicing my data sets and creating more accurate growth & market potential projections wasn’t even gonna happen in that time.
So I decided to focus on the human inside the investors. What humans want, is to be entertained first and foremost. They want to call bullshit out loud when they see something. They want to laugh and they want to feel like you are talking to them. They want to remember you between all the hundreds of pitch decks.
Ok… so now I made up my mind to focus on the human inside the investor, I only had 2 hours and 36 minutes left. F*CK, what’s wrong with that clock! Time is passing too fast.
Then the why/how/what brainstorm happened
What do I dislike most about pitch decks I’ve seen so far?
Buzz words, numbers in tables, bullet points and techno lingo.
What do I like about pitch decks?
Simple messaging, real problems and stuff that provokes some emotion. (I’m actually sounding like a human here)
The next step was to actually stop thinking and start writing it down with 2h and 21 minutes to go.
I took out my Evernote — full screened that baby and started to doodle down…
1. What if I only had 3 seconds? — I would need a… We are X for Y statement.
2. What if I had 10 seconds? — I would need a … 140 character pitch.
3. What if I had 60 seconds? — I would need a … Problem (why), Hope (how), introducing ourselves (what)
4. A contrarian thought — for us that is… “Most companies are going to be disrupted (aka out of business) in the next 10 years. (and it won’t be because of technology)”
5. A WTF explainer — breaking down the contrarian thought into the 3 problem sections that support the statement
(all of this had to be digested <2 minutes total so far)
6. What if I got them this far and they had 5 more minutes? — This is where investors normally want to see market size, competitors, TAM/SAM/SOM and all that crap.
Note: Like I mentioned before, I didn’t had time to make fancy projections and incredible looking and always-up graphs. So I knew this is where I had to be slightly creative…
7. Now they want to hear some stuff about how fast we grow — we’re fucking in stealth mode and we’re testing privately with users.
8. And what and how much we want from them — answer was simple, no money (yet)
9. The one thing we want them to remember — this will have to be a clear message, the one thought you want to leave them with.
10. Ending with team that is making it all happen — giving them a hint of who we are.
As I was writing down my notes and the story we wanted to share, I lost about 52 minutes (who’s counting right!). That left me with 1h and 29 minutes to actually design a deck and make it somehow all work together… There was this tiny voice in my head that Seth Godin calls the lizard brain. Saying, ‘Screw it Björn, it’s time for bed, you’re tired, you’ve been scaring at this god damn screen all day’ and then there was this other voice that came from Jocko Willink, the co-author of “Extreme Ownership”.
saying.. “Screw it soldier, you’re responsible for getting your ass in that safe zone or you’ll let down all your brothers”. That meant shipping this deck and hitting that deadline. Well it got me going as Jocko just squashed that lizard with is bare fist (poor lizard).
Finding a better tool for the job
“A better pencil won’t make you a better writer”
Now I had to pick my tool for the job. A wise man once said “A better pencil won’t make you a better writer”. Which is very true for writing. It’s less true for making actually a presentation. Normally I would go for either Keynote or Google Slides. The latter works better for collaboration, the first one works good for clean designed decks, but it missed some photoshop like tools, that I would had to go back in Sketch for and I knew would take too much time (and Google Slides also sucks big time in that).
When I opened Keynote I got distracted with previous made decks. My brain wanted to spend hours picking templates and browsing previously made decks (for other startups). Most of them were for super fast growing companies or for ones with millions of dollar of revenue for C, D & E rounds. Totally useless for getting just an idea across.
Introducing the limitless presentation tool
Then I had an epiphany (or you may call it a malfunction)… I had received early access for this new tool called Ludus. It’s a limitless presentation tool. Now some of it is bullshit of course, as nothing is really limitless, but what happened next was kind of a limitless experience. Ludus is web-based, which made it kind of risky as I wasn’t too confident in my internet connection (and a little bit weary as Ludus was BETA version). Oh and I never ever used the tool before. A healthy person would stay away from adding that level of risk with just 1h and 20 minutes before the deadline. Well… not me. Jocko Willink (yes I blame him) was sending me out the battlefield with an untested screwdriver and I simply marched forward like a cyborg, no fear, no nothing.
White space… hmmm oh wait purple and black are there as well
Opening Ludus was like having a mindfulness moment… there were no templates. There was just an empty screen! Great! (I think). Now I just need to add all these notes, cut them in half (like ten times) and style that whole “thing” so it actually looks legit. Pfffff that was not going to be easy as the clock was ticking and so far, I spent more than half of the time I had available into thinking, doodling, note taking and organising that big bald head of mine.
I just moved forward and started hitting almost every button available in the product (and on my keyboard) hoping there would be some cool shit coming out on the screen. For the next 67 minutes I entered a deep ninja focus. Nothing was able to distract me, not even my exploding blatter or the web when I was browsing for some missing icons.
Many times I laughed very loud with the crazy stuff I came up with (such as with our market slide above), other times I cursed even louder because the Ludus BETA didn’t had all the short-cuts I was looking for (DUHHHHH, it’s a BETA) and it crashed on me once or twice (probably just me hitting the wrong buttons)… getting me slightly anxious. I checked the clock a couple of times as I didn’t know how fast time was passing.
Just 7 minutes left and still two pages to go on the deck. “Stop fucking around Björn. You still need to fill out 25 questions as well, export this puppy and upload it.” I said to myself.
In the end there rolled a story off the press that I would have enjoyed if I were an investor. Not because it was perfect. Not because it checked all the boxes for an investor, but it checked the box for me on a human level. It made me smile. Oh and if you want to know how much time there was left on the clock? 23.57 was the time I hit the ‘submit’ button on the TOA form. WOW… what a ride.
It took me another hour to get the adrenaline out of my body before I could peacefully sleep.
Here it is our minimal viable pitch deck, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did in creating it…
PS
This pitch deck is not meant to raise money (yet). It’s meant to show what you can do when you only have 3 hours to pull a pitch deck together and have fun while doing so.
PPS
The next morning I showed the Blindfeed team mates what I made. We all burst out laughing as we used a picture of Doug, my co-founder and we laughed our ass off and it served as a spark of inspiration to push us all more out of the comfort zone more often.
