Creating the Pitch Deck that Helped Our SaaS Company Raise $9 Million
The folder on my Macbook Pro called “VC Pitch Deck 2014” has 155 documents.
37 of them are Powerpoint presentations.
We started with 15 slides.
And ended up with 74 slides.
This is the story of how we created the pitch deck that helped Canvas raise a $9 million funding round.
To be clear, a pitch deck is a small part of the overall funding process. I can’t stress this point enough. If we didn’t have fantastic growth, passionate employees, a disruptive platform and a CEO who is a great leader and presenter, then none of this story would matter.
But the pitch deck is what ties it all together. And we wanted to get it right.
The Beginning — Chasing the Perfect Pitch Deck
It all started about 8 months ago on April 11.
We met in a small conference room here in Refraction, the coworking space that serves as our office, located just outside of Washington, D.C.
Our merry band of fundraisers in this meeting included myself, the director of marketing; Brent, our head of UX/UI; Lynn, our killer graphic designer; and of course our fearless leader, James Quigley, the CEO of Canvas.
James explained that we needed a few documents to kick off our funding efforts and road show. These included a one-page company overview, a three-page overview and a pitch deck. Sounds easy enough, right? Little did I know this was the start of a multi-month journey to make the perfect pitch deck.
I’m generally decent at pitching ideas but actual presentation design? This was going to be a whole new ball game.
AHHHH!
For the first few weeks, I went through the previous Canvas pitch deck and dove into as much information online as I could find. I was not above googling “how to create a pitch deck” and actually found some pretty interesting resources.
The first thing we did was to put together a framework using only bullets and text. We felt like it made the most sense to agree on the content and structure before getting our designer involved and taking up her time.
The basic framework we put together initially looked something like this:
- Title slide with name/logo
- Overview
- Problem
- Solution
- Market opportunity
- Value proposition
- Why businesses love Canvas
- Competitive landscape and the Canvas advantage
- Go-to-market strategy
- Current status/stats
- Current and forecasted growth
- Investment to date
- Our team
- Summary
- Appendix aka all the other stuff re: metrics, charts and numbers
Pitch Deck Design
With the basics in place, it was time for design.
From the beginning, we wanted to make it clear that our product is disruptive and a natural fit with the overall analog to digital transformation that every industry is experiencing. Software is eating the world. We wanted to show how exactly we fit into that.
We also wanted to emphasize that the problem (paperwork and all the inefficiencies that come with it) is a huge, global issue and therefore giant opportunity. And that it’s not just about replacing paperwork, but doing even more than you ever could before with your business information.
As we focused on design, we wanted to do a couple of other things, including:
- Use visuals over words when possible
- Stay away from using lots of bullet points
- Keep the focus on our “Why”
- Show don’t tell. Use testimonials/press where appropriate to drive home our story
Pitch Deck Evolution
By the end of May, we had a solid, working pitch deck that was 19 slides + an appendix with another 19 slides. By this point, we had expanded the initial framework to include more about Canvas. We wanted to highlight our competitive differentiations, like our App Builder and Application Store. WIth that done, we were ready to go and we started sending it out and using it in presentations.
I was feeling pretty good. Pitch deck perfection, right?
Nope.
Between the end of May and the most current version of our pitch deck in early October, we tweaked the presentation more times than I can count. We ended up with over 20 versions of our pitch deck. The most recent version of the deck has 74 slides. Our appendix grew from 19 slides to 47 slides.
How does this happen?
Data changes as time goes by and there are always more questions.
Not surprisingly, VCs ask a lot of questions during pitches. Our approach was to write down these questions and include the answers in the appendix. So if the question came up again, we could be prepared to answer it, with stats and charts to back us up in the pitch deck.
Here are a few examples of the questions that we addressed:
- What is the breakdown of your paid accounts by industry? By number of users?
- What does your sales cycle look like?
- How do accounts grow over time?
- How does your gross margin compare to other SaaS companies in the same revenue range?
On that last note, we decided to model our metrics against some SaaS industry data in a study released by a well-known VC group. This is something that I’d recommend every SaaS company do and include in your pitch, especially if the comparison works out in your favor.
Each time a question came up that was important enough to include in the pitch deck, we’d revise the deck. You think it’s perfect and then you need to get a new month of data in or add a new chart and you revise it some more.
Special thanks to Lynn, our graphic designer for putting up with all of our revision requests and for making this look great (and for not throwing things at me when I came back with a request to revise a slide for the ninth time).
Presenting the Pitch
As far as the presentations go, I wasn’t in on all of them, but I was there for a lot of them. Our CEO, James Quigley, would make the presentation and lead the discussion, and I was there for backup. It was a great experience.
We got into a nice routine. Arrive 10–15 minutes early and get set up in the meeting room with a laptop hooked up to a projector. It’s interesting how many VCs have their own branded drink coasters in these rooms.
In some cases, we met with one or two partners. In other cases, there would be over 10 people in the room. Sometimes there would be lunch, sometimes not.
In some meetings, people were interested in going through every single one of the slides in order. Other times they wanted to go straight into questions and we’d jump around a lot. In some cases, folks had printed out our entire pitch deck and were flipping through it, heads down, as James talked. In other cases, they could care less about the slides and just wanted to have a conversation. I think it depended on how much someone knew about us before the meeting. It was different every time. And that’s fine. A pitch deck isn’t meant to be the star of the show.
Some VCs understood our value and mission and some didn’t. Sometimes one little thing might not make it the right fit. It’s a lot easier for VCs to say no than yes — so don’t be surprised or discouraged if you get a lot of no’s. But it only takes one yes. We’re all happy where we ended up with River Cities leading our round.
After months of (metaphorical) blood, sweat and tears, it’s hard for me to believe that it’s all over now. If I knew how many revisions and redos our pitch deck would need when I first started, I might have just run out of the meeting screaming.
But in the end, I’m glad it happened this way. I learned how important every little detail can be, how it’s not just what you say, but how you say it, and how timing can be everything. If someone likes you but has another deal in motion at the time, it’s going to be tough.
I uploaded 10 slides from our pitch deck that seemed to resonate most with the VCs we met with (minus the ones with sensitive data). These aren’t meant to be the first or only slides you should have in your pitch, but I hope this is valuable for anyone that might be interested in seeing how things turned out.
There’s really no such thing as a perfect pitch deck. But you should still try.
