Dissection of my own pitchdeck by a VC firm

Hi Fellas,

This week I had a chance to present RemotePanda to a marquee group of investors. We were shortlisted out of a national competition held to find promising job tech companies. We ended up in the Top 10….Yay!!

Well, the enthusiasm did not last as we got to know that we were to present to some of the great names in the industry.

The outcome is yet to come, but I thought to share major lessons learned first-hand meeting with investors as we worked with a partner at the firm to improve our pitch deck.

1. Market size not required: Unless you are building something that has never been seen or touched upon, for most investors the market size slide is not so much useful. They already know. Every market is in millions and billions. Hence, I don’t need to emphasize much on how big this opportunity could be. Just like ideas, market opportunities are also only valuable when one executes a plan.
2. Redundancy not required: Initially, my deck had a lot of talk about our business model, problems, etc. like the one below:

These slides aren’t wrong but they take out time and attention from your more important slides. Hence, I was advised to remove the above slides from my slide show. I was told to add more about the clarity of numbers and important metrics, which bring me to the next point.

3. More impetus on the clarity of numbers: Numbers are of utmost importance to bring home your points. Initially, I had put numbers of just 4 things that seemed important to me

• Number of Customers
• Total Revenue till data
• Potential Revenue
• And our success rate

I got to learn that more important metrics, such as revenue per customer, average margins, month on month growth are equally important parameters as well.

In fact, we should show as many metrics as may deem important to making it easy for the investors to learn about your business model and the profit/loss/unit metrics/growth percentage you have.

4. More focus on the solution: Yes, that's where your focus should be. While my initial deck had 3 slides to showcase the problem and just one slide on how we solve it (that's so foolish..yes in introspection).

Was turned to new slides with details

5. Share your journey and the pivots you took: No doubt, I had shared my journey, but that journey was pretty cookie cutter. We started and then we kept on growing. Actually, all investors want to hear the real story. What changes did you make all through this journey? What clicked and what did not?

6. Show a balanced picture when sharing about competitors: Of course, we are doing better than existing competitors. We are killing them. That's what we think but there have to be areas where they are better than us. Be honest in sharing a balanced picture.

Here is RemotePanda’s comparison with Upwork from a biased picture to a more balanced one:

So these were, in summary, the lessons that I learned when dissecting our deck. Looking back at them, these seem like obvious choices but they were not so when we built it forward.

Hence, I thought to share with all of you the lessons learned so that you can make your decks even better at the first go itself.

Let me know if anything further comes to your mind.

In case you would like to access our full deck, drop me a message.