You’ll need a reliable sidekick to raise funds: a pitch deck. With a well-designed one by your side, you’ll be equipped with the superpower to convince investors and secure funds effortlessly.
Yet, any pitch deck won’t work, especially a poorly designed one. After creating numerous winning decks, we’ve learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t.
Here’s what we’ve found:
Do’s and Don’ts of Creating a Winning Investment Deck
Investors go through a ton of pitches every day. So, stand out with these tips:
What to Do?
- Integrate storytelling: Wrap your pitch in an engaging story to hook your investors and stand out in a crowd.
- Highlight your traction: An upward growth curve is what makes investors tick. So, accentuate your progress, milestones, and continuous upward journey.
- Show, don’t tell: Use visuals, graphics, illustrations, and other elements to express more with few words. The general rule is to make your deck an aid as opposed to your entire pitch.
- Demonstrate your product: Your product is one of the most significant parts of your pitch. So, consider adding a demo to ease understanding of the product and its market potential.
What to Avoid?
- Information Overload: Your investment pitch deck doesn’t need to be your company’s complete history. Instead, let it be crisp and have its highlights.
- Industry Jargon: Not every investor knows your industry well. So, you might isolate them when you use too many industry-specific terms. Don’t do that.
- Low-quality Look and Feel: Your deck is your first impression on potential investors. So, avoid seeming too casual and loop in a professional team to design your deck.
- Out of Date Information: Whether it’s old dates or information, it shouldn’t find any place in your deck. So, do a final check and refresh your data from time to time.
4 Critical Slides to Pay Special Attention to
While crafting your investors pitch deck, you might not want to spare any detail. And, we get it! Yet, it’s much better to go by the mantra less is more.
Let’s talk about the crucial elements you should focus on:
1. Problem & Solution
As an organization, you’re driven to solve a pertinent problem for your customers. While preparing your deck, talk about it and its relevance to your target audience.
Purpose
You’re answering an implicit question your investors have– why does your company exist. Not just that, it also strengthens your chances of securing funds if they understand and believe in the scale of the problem you’re solving.
Approach to Deal With these Slides
- Pen down the problem.
- Think about creative and engaging ways to represent it. Can you share a relatable story or some thought-provoking statistics?
- Use visuals to communicate well and create an impact. Don’t forget to seek professional help to get well-designed and thought out slides.
Investor Expectations
When you present this slide, investors expect to know:
- What problem are you solving?
- Why is this problem relevant?
- What is the current solution to this problem?
- Why are you a better alternative?
Do’s and Don’ts
| Do’s | Don’ts |
|---|---|
| State the problem clearly. | Add too many details and complicate it. |
| Make it easy to read and understand | Address an irrelevant or unrelated problem. |
| Seek professional design help for better results. | Describe a common problem with numerous solutions already. |
2. Product
What you’re building–your product–is a critical slide you shouldn’t miss. You can combine it with the solution section of the above combination to minimize redundancy.
Purpose
By explaining everything about your product, you’re showing how you solve the problem. Through this slide, you also talk about its viability and competitiveness.
Approach to Deal With these Slides
- Note down your process.
- Use mockups or app screens, demo videos, flow charts, and other visual tools to illustrate the steps.
- Trim it down and integrate product features.
Investor Expectations
Through these slides, investors expect to understand how your product works, feels and looks.
Do’s and Don’ts
| Do’s | Don’ts |
|---|---|
| Keep the design simple. | Repeat data from the solution slide. |
| Use high-resolution pics to ease readability. | Fill your deck with this slide type. |
| Make it concise. |
3. Traction
When you’re raising external funds, you need performance indicators to show that your product is generating value or interest.
Purpose
Startup investments are risky ventures. With a solid traction slide, you assure them that your organization will be among the few that’ll make it big.
Approach to Deal With these Slides
- Gather data about your current sales, growth, endorsements, pre-orders, and valuable partnerships.
- Pick the data that represents your firm’s value the best.
- Find creative ways to highlight these facts appealingly. Our recommendation? Use graphs. They work the best.
Investor Expectations
When you present this slide, your investors want to understand:
- Are you progressing?
- Are you close to achieving the product-market fit?
- Do your customers love you?
- Is there immense growth in the market?
Do’s and Don’ts
| Do’s | Don’ts |
|---|---|
| Make it persuasive. | Use complex charts and graphs. |
| Keep it brief and easy to go through. | Overload your slide with too much information. |
| Use an appendix to include more performance indicators. | Include unclear information and generalizations. |
| Use numbers and statistics to create an impact. |
4. Business Model & Financials
No matter how great your idea might be, its execution matters equally–sometimes, even more. In your investors pitch deck, you talk about it through your business model (or revenue model).
Purpose
With this slide, investors come to know how you’re planning to conduct business and generate revenue for your company.
Approach to Deal With these Slides
- Summarize your business model using impactful phrases.
- List an outline of your revenue streams.
- Include a short description of your pricing strategies.
- Tie it all together using intelligent design.
Investor Expectations
With this slide, investors want to know:
- How are you generating revenue?
- What is the total revenue?
- What products will generate income?
Do’s and Don’ts
| Do’s | Don’ts |
|---|---|
| Use easy-to-read fonts and design style. | Add too much data. |
| Keep the content concise. | Avoid visual elements. |
| Be prepared to tackle investor questions about this slide. | Complicate the math. |
3 Good-to-Have Slides You Could Include
1. Mission/Vision
In a highly competitive marketplace, you need to differentiate yourself. So, do that by including your mission and vision in your investors pitch to attract investors interested in funding purpose-driven firms.
2. Team
A powerful core team is key to a startup’s success. Every investor knows that. So, flaunt your skilled team and reputed board members in your investment pitch deck.
3. GTM Strategy
With a go-to-market strategy, you talk about how you plan to attract customers to buy your product. So, use pricing, sales and channels, buyer’s journey, launches, and branding/rebranding to gain a competitive advantage.
What to Do After You’ve Pitched to Your Investor?
You might not receive investment right after your pitch. And the real money is in the follow-ups. Here’s your post-pitch checklist:
- After the pitch,
- Send them a copy of your deck.
- Answers to any outstanding questions during the pitch.
- Attach any documents they’ve specifically requested.
- Loop them in to receive updates about your firm’s progress since the pitch.
Final Thoughts
Securing external funds isn’t a cakewalk. It takes a ton of work to pull out relevant data and represent it properly.
Plus, if you’re raising funds for the first time, you might find it even tougher to craft your deck. So, outsource your investment deck troubles to our team so you can focus on making your pitch more engaging.
