Startup pitch decks are currently all broken (and why we designed 250+ slides)
We were starting to feel the stress of it. At least I was.
You know that feeling when you’re doing work that people like but you know(you just know) that it isn’t up to scratch? That.
A year and then some ago, when I shed my banker garb, it wasn’t to do things that people just liked.
When we filled out the marketing team with people who cared and who could, it wasn’t to do things that people just liked.
At PitchDeck, we’ve never quite walked that path. We wanted to make things that mattered.
Things that moved the needle.
Things that people loved.
Things that were important.
But, most importantly, things that mattered.
This December, we decided to fix that little kerfuffle.
The Why
Besides the scheduled programming, we really wanted to craft something spectacular. Something that redefined how pitch decks could(and should ) be made.
For a number of reasons, it didn’t make sense to do yet another round-up post of the existing startup pitch decks. For starters, because round-up posts are written more for virality than tangible impact and, by definition, they don’t redefine much.
But, primarily, because we felt that’d be a bit of a cop-out for us***.
The question we asked ourselves is: how many roundup posts do we actually read from start to end?
The question Sumanth Raghavendra asked me was:
“Is this the absolute best way to show people how pitch decks can be made? Don’t you want to look beyond?”
***For a company that specializes in making performant, business-grade presentations, we were choosing to showcase our abilities by collating work done by someone else.
Irony took a long walk off a very short pier.
How could we possibly avoid getting strait-jacketed into making a me-too resource?
How could we move quickly enough to not have other constraints bring ambition and desire to a grinding halt? Sometimes, even in a nimble startup, this doth happen.
How would we make the leap of faith, as it were, to attempt improvement in a relatively ‘boring’ space of something that was ‘proven’?
The Real Why
Making investment raising pitch decks aren’t complicated. They are complex, though, incredibly so.
And every single startup, that I know of, approaches the making of their pitch deck with a sense of dread and a fair smattering of what’s-worked-for-them-formula.
You’ve got to tell a story, paint a compelling vision, know your metrics cold, and sell, sell, sell as hard as you possibly can.
The problem is most startups lose the forest for the trees; your pitch deck should allow you to tell your story in the best way possible.
But standardized pitch decks aren’t structured for optimal creative expression. You’re literally the primary obstacle in your own path with rules that ruin optimal performance.
“Every block of stone has a sculpture in it and it is the job of the sculptor to find it.” — Michelangelo
As startup operators, we’re not too dissimilar to that block.
We have to chip away at the programming of the ecosystem, peers, existing design language, inhibitions–pretty much everything that says we’re ‘supposed to’ do it this way.
The sculpture inside is your real story. The authentic you.
And so we decided to unshackle ourselves from the traditional know-how of making a pitch deck and become explorers. Wanderers. Innocents, if you will.
And, all the while, amateurs.
We could fail. We could get lost.
We spent over a month poring over the pitch decks of established startups to suss out aspects that could be improved, design decisions that needed to be taken, stories that had to be culled…
And then, as we began tearing up preconceived notions of appropriateness and design aesthetic, our canvas became that much larger. And our colours became brighter. Our comfort zone melded into a much bigger curiosity zone.
Quantity became quality. We started making something we loved.
To be fair, for us, this project wasn’t really about changing the status-quo of how investment pitch decks are to be made by remaking existing decks.
But since we’ve seen so many startups making pitch decks that don’t reveal the full richness of their narrative, we knew there must be a way to liberate that behaviour.
And so we did.
Inspiring Startups, Incredible Pitch Decks
Whether you are a founder, technocrat, or humble non-techie — you’ve surely found yourself looking at the same type of pitch decks over and over again.
We’d like you to start thinking about the possibilities beyond the wall. n the end, it’s quite simply about looking beyond…
