The Get It Done Pitch Deck

Since starting Impression Ventures I’ve seen almost 600 pitches, prior to that as Venture Director at Next 36 (now NEXT Canada) I’ve seen another 100+ pitches (and helped create a few of those). I haven’t seen it all, but I keep getting closer.

Generally, most pitches do the job. That’s a good thing. Pitch decks aren’t meant to get you the investment, they are meant to start a serious conversation about an investment. So how do you build a “get the job done” deck? Here are my helpful tips:

The perfect “get it done” deck:

1. Team. Establish credibility as soon as you can. To me the easiest way to do that is a team slide with key people who are part of the founding team and add credibility to the problem you are solving. The caveat is, if you are a 1st time team with no experience in the domain you are building a company in, skip this. You can still build a great pitch but don’t put the team upfront.
2. Opportunity. Define the opportunity. This can be a simple statement if the domain you are disrupting is generally well understood. However, if your domain is a complex and little understood one, you have a challenge. Explain, in as few slides as possible, with as little jargon as possible, your domain. Diagrams of money flows in your system often help. So do metaphors. Then test this slide(s) with friends who are not in your industry. See if they understand.
3. Market. Your market size is the total annual spend on software/solutions in the specific domain you are addressing. I keep seeing people get this wrong and list irrelevant adjacent markets or total spend hardware/service/software in their domain. I’ve seen companies list the size of their market 10 years out. That isn’t really relevant for today. Today’s numbers and, if you have it, the expected growth over the next three to five years.
4. Product. You now have our full attention: awesome credibility, great opportunity, and huge market. Time to show off the product! Explain how it addresses the problem/opportunity. Show pretty product shots that give us inkling of your UI/UX chops. Detail out key differentiators. You would be amazed at how many startups fail to show their product in a deck. If your solution is more a business process oriented solution this can be more difficult, but make the effort to show us what you do.
5. Customers. Time to go in for the kill: customer testimonials. This does two things. 1 tells us you have product advocates and 2 customers! Even if you are pre-launch you’ve done customer interviews and gotten key input from them right? What have they said? Tell us!
6. Traction. Traction/data/graphs. Time to dig into numbers. Avoid vanity metrics at all costs. Don’t ruin a so far perfect pitch with them. Investors are looking for two things here: velocity of growth and confirmation of initial market sizing. Key stats would be active customers (monthly), revenue, activity based usage. Feel free to use multiple pages of great graphs here. Remember to label all axes!
7. Barriers. For Fintech and other regulated industries, talk about it! What are the barriers? What are the compliance steps? The goal here is to acknowledge regulation/compliance exists and that you are on top of it.
8. Competition. Acknowledge you have competition. Why are you better? Why will you win? The competition slide is also a great time to provide credibility on market size opportunity.
9. Bigger Opportunity. Is there a bigger picture you are working on beyond the next two years? This is the time to talk about it. It makes it clear it isn’t what you are raising money for but gets us excited about the long term prospects of the company.
10. The Ask. Have one. You always need to end your pitch with an action item.

Lastly, always modify your deck to the investor you are pitching to. Some will say “never set the price, just the amount you want to raise” (like me) and some will say “tell me what you are worth”. Some insist on a vision statement, others (like me) don’t care for it in a deck.

Here are a couple of DO NOTS

• Do not fill your deck with jargon
• Do not allow an investment banker to build your deck for you. They are amazing at building decks for wall street analysts — but not for venture capitalist
• Despite the popularity of storytelling/narrative deck — use this style judiciously
• Do not have graph with no axis or labeling
• Do not add advisors to your deck who are not actively engaged
• Do not use “But there’s one more thing”
• Do not be these guys.

I hope these tips will help you put together a great deck that gets the job done!