An Alternative Approach to Building Your Pitch Deck

A 4-step story-driven process for fundraising

Every unicorn starts as a pitch deck. Even the rocket-like trajectory of tech giants like Airbnb or Uber started with a small number of slides that were the entrance key to external capital.

Good traction is vital when seeking financing, but before you get a meeting or a call, your pitch deck has to stand out from a large number of decks that investors receive almost daily. Leveraging the usually small window of opportunity to illustrate your case as an exciting bet is difficult.

One of the main obstacles for startups that prevent standing out is building a pitch deck like preparing a grocery shopping list. Such decks stuff separate pieces of information together with only a weak logical connection between them. They sell themselves short by neglecting to include a storyline that can make a significant difference in an investor’s mind.

The following steps are my thoughts on an alternative approach to building a pitch deck that tells a coherent and compelling story to convince investors.

Step 1: Craft a Story That Ensures Horizontal Logic

Nearly every great story begins with something our brains are wired to be fascinated by: change. Change promises opportunity and arouses curiosity. Stories often use unexpected change as the offset for the main character’s journey to endure hardships until he reaches a new state of equilibrium.

This typical story pattern outlines the basic steps every pitch deck should follow: Start with the problem and market opportunity, the change that will disrupt the current state of the world. Then, introduce your product, the hero who fights for a new reality. To close, elaborate further on the business model, strategy, and milestones, the plot which illustrates how the hero will conquer the world.

To make the resulting storyline appealing to investors, it must be compelling and coherent. A compelling storyline is grounded in hypotheses and data, for which I will give suggestions in steps 2 and 3.

An approach for ensuring that your storyline is coherent is turning the usual design process around: Before thinking about design and data, write down the story you want to tell in actual sentences. Pretend that you would have to convince an investor with a 10–12 sentences abstract covering all the components mentioned above.

Relying on writing to clarify thinking is something Amazon has pioneered with the famous 6-page memos. It forces you to express your ideas in brevity and focus, which are essential for the critical first impression. The writing upfront results in the first version of action titles you can use for your slides; it also establishes horizontal logic throughout the pitch deck.

The idea behind horizontal logic is that the slide title alone should be enough to reverse-engineer the overarching story of your deck. The titles tell the story, the content of each slide acts as informational reinforcement.

Key Points:

• Start with a 10–12 sentences abstract that tells the story you want to communicate to investors (covering change, description of the hero, and various elaborations on the plot)
• Use the resulting sentences as action titles to ensure horizontal logic

Step 2: Find the Hidden Hypotheses

Your standard fiction drama has one significant difference to a story about a prospective investment. While the former relies on the insatiable desire to analyze human behavior by using complex characters, emotions, and dialogue, the latter, above all, needs explanatory variables.

The main task of the information you put on a slide is to identify, describe and analyze the different cause-and-effect sequences that will (hopefully) let the story you are telling unfold in reality. Consequently, the next step should be to dissect the story containing the action titles you have prepared and look out for any causal relationship hypothesis.

There are a few standard hypotheses hidden in almost every startup pitch:

• consumer preferences will evolve because of [technological or socio-economic trend]
• our business will provide what customers want because we have [core value proposition or product attributes]
• we have a competitive edge because [strategic advantage, e.g., a better match between customer needs and value proposition, brand, first-mover advantage, etc.]
• our business will generate excellent traction because [combination of distribution and acquisition efficiency and financial engine]

Depending on your specific case, you might find other or different hypotheses that make up your story. In any case, when you have dissected your story that way, each slide can be either marked as serving as a hypothesis (if it implicitly asserts some causal relationship) or as a description (company profile, product description, etc.).

Key Points:

• Dissect the story and look for any parts that present cause-and-effect relationships and therefore present a hypothesis
• Differentiate the slides into those containing Hypotheses and those presenting descriptions

Step 3: Supplement Critical Information

Complementing the necessary information to make the overarching story believable is the most flexible and most challenging part of building a pitch deck.

Slides with the primary purpose to describe are easy to fill; for hypothesis slides, there are three loose categories for supplementary information: primary data (such as KPIs or customer surveys), secondary data (market and competitor statistics from market reports, etc.), and opinions.

While there is naturally an enormous oversupply of opinions, the supply of primary and secondary data to strengthen a venture investment case is notoriously low. Revolutionizing an industry, by definition, has no predecessor.

How to strengthen the hypotheses in your deck is highly individual. It depends on the lifecycle stage, industry, and team background. Series B investors will require a lot more quantitative data than Seed investors. A successful serial entrepreneur might get away with preparing a deck solely consisting of opinions because past exits are the best persuasion tactic.

Even if there is no one magic formula, there are a few guiding principles that can help every entrepreneur to maximize the informational value of his deck:

Slide Content

• Question the action title: When looking for content to put on your slide, take the action title and ask yourself: What would indicate that this is true?
• Prefer primary over secondary data and descriptions: Primary data, especially in the early stages, is usually more sound for investors. For example, self-conducted market research or past marketing KPIs have way more informational value to indicate a market need than a high-level consultancy report and your product description.
• Prefer first-order explanations: Keep your explanations as simple as possible without stating the obvious. Only display the immediate cause for the effect that is your hypothesis.

Slide Design

• Eliminate Clutter: Reduce the cognitive load on each slide by limiting the separate pieces of information (e.g., charts, block of bullet points, pictures) to three.
• Establish vertical logic: Make sure that the content on each slide is self-reinforcing, even though the storyline running through the action titles connects the slides via the big picture

Step 4: Iterate if Necessary and Check for Boldness

A quick recap: you have started with a written story, have identified the different hypotheses hidden in its plot, and have supplemented information, re-inforcing that what you assert in your action titles is true.

A possible way to check the resulting deck and its story for comprehensibility and guide you to potential adjustments is to get feedback from outside people.

If possible, get the deck to someone who does not have any business interest with your company and let him narrate the story to you by only relying on the information on the slides. That way, you get an objective assessment of where the message you want to communicate differs from what the viewer can extract from the slide.

Lastly, I want to mention that the suggestions given in this article for building your next pitch deck in a story-driven way should not prevent bold statements — very possibly even without any grounding data other than your own belief.

Approaching your pitch deck like a story composed of several hidden hypotheses aims to present the case in a more convincing way to investors. However, it should not indicate that you have to base every assertion necessarily on actual data.

Finding the balance between a coherent narrative and plausible and rational explanations is the essence of successful fundraising. A story can also be compelling by being personal, bold and ambitious. Even more, if you find you can find indicating data on everything you are trying to achieve, maybe you are simply aiming too low.

Key Points:

• Check comprehensibility and boldness of the resulting story and deck, and, if necessary and applicable, re-iterate

Conclusion: The story-driven pitch

Building a great pitch deck may take various iterations. There is no blueprint for finding the right balance between narrating and hypothesizing, between being a storyteller and being a scientist. It is an art form.

The story-driven approach I have proposed here gives you suggestions to build a deck from scratch or refine your current one. But in the end, as it is with art, advice from others can merely provide tools and guidelines for your style of creating.

Therefore, deviate from the steps above if necessary to tell your story. A unique and personal presentation can make a business pitch equally exciting as an unexpected twist can make a great story even more enjoyable.

>If you are a founder looking for an investment, I hope you find this article helpful for your preparation.

If you are working in FinTech, Blockchain, or AI, I would love to hear about your company, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Similarly, if you are a VC Investor and have some feedback or additional notes on this topic, I would love to learn more about your views.<