Don’t use builds, reveals or animations in your pitch deck
TL;DR: Just don’t. It will cause a ton of stress with no upside at all.
Most presentation software lets you include animations as part of your slides. There is a time and a place for that sort of thing. Are you doing a keynote at CES? Sure, include them. Are you part of a pitch competition? Knock yourself out. If you’re pitching to a VC, give it a rest.
Consider how you are telling your story.
When you are in an institutional investor’s office, you using a presentation deck — but you’re not presenting per se. You are trying to engage in an interactive conversation. That means that while your narrative and your pitch deck are linear — that’s probably not how the conversation with your would-be investors is going to play out.
Too often, I’ve seen people use animated builds in their decks. It looks okay the first time you present, but then someone around the table asks a question. “Could you go back to your go-to-market-strategy for me?”. Hopefully, as the presenter, you know your deck well. If you have 15 slides, the slide you need is on average 7.5 slides away — you can get there in seconds. Now, if all your slides have animations on them, you’ll end up having to click ‘next’ dozens of times to…
