Start-ups need investor support to succeed. Yet, securing funding is extremely difficult. According to Fundera, only 5 in 10,000 start-ups raise venture capital. It takes more than a great business idea to convince investors; you need a great pitch deck to get investor buy-in. That’s the topic of this post. It explains how to create a winning pitch deck, focusing on the following key points:
- What your pitch deck needs to satisfy investors
- How to deliver a persuasive pitch
- Mistakes to avoid in your pitch deck
- Examples of winning pitch decks from brands you’ll recognize
Creating a pitch deck is easier than ever before, thanks to numerous online design tools. You won’t have to slog it out and get frustrated, which is natural when your design skills aren’t that great. If you prefer to delegate or outsource the task, this post will help you plan the skeletal structure of your pitch deck.
What makes a winning pitch deck?
Pitch decks that engage and convince investors have a few things in common:
They have information investors expect to see
Sounds like a low bar? Businesses can fail to add information that investors want to know in deciding whether to fund or decline. Don’t let investors do the thinking – show them the potential of your business idea. When you cover all fronts, so to speak, it shows you’ve thought your idea through and makes you look good.
Here’s what investors want you to tell/show:
- Your business story, supported by data and evidence
- A deep understanding of the market
- The ability to execute the business plan effectively
- A problem statement and a solution to the problem
- The target customer and their needs
- A visualization of your product
- A significant milestone, user adoption, or customer feedback (optional)
- Financial data
- Your competitive advantage
The components of a pitch deck are discussed in the next section.
They are visually engaging
Visuals communicate data and metrics quickly and effectively. The right visuals bring stories to life. They’re essential to captivate investors, who will give you only so much of their time. As visuals require less effort to understand, there is a good chance that they will hold investors’ attention.
Aim to create superlative visuals. There are many AI tools that make your job quick and easy, as we explain further on.
They leave nothing to chance
Businesses that secure funding have a plan to put their best foot forward and to address skeptics. Apart from the presentation, making a good impression during the subsequent Q&A will help seal the deal.
Components of a pitch deck
To create a winning pitch deck, you should prepare information and/or visuals for each of these essential sections:
- Introduction: Introduce your company and provide an overview of what you do.
- Problem statement: Explain the problem or pain point your product aims to solve. Explain why it matters and how it affects potential customers.
- Solution statement: Describe how your product or service solves the problem. Highlight the unique value proposition of your product/service.
- Market analysis: Describe the market size, growth potential, and target audience.
- Business model: Describe your company’s business model, including how it generates revenue, the cost structure, and the pricing strategy.
- Traction slide: This slide shows how your business is already showing its value, as seen in the sales, pre-orders, endorsements, or valuable partnerships achieved. If your company is yet to reach a milestone, explain your customer outreach strategy, cost per acquisition, and ROI.
- Financial projections: Provide high-level financial projections, including revenue, expenses, and growth estimates.
- Competition slide: Provide an analysis of the competition and explain how your product/service compares to competitors’ offerings.
- Team slide: Introduce your core team, highlighting their expertise, relevant experience, and roles within your company.
- Investment slide: Outline the amount of capital needed and where the funds will go (e.g., product development, marketing, hiring). Highlight any existing investors and why they’re backing your business.
Once you have fleshed out each section, it’s time to start designing and beautifying your pitch deck!
How to make your pitch deck visually engaging
Investors see pitch decks every other day. They will find some boring and others interesting. You want to be in the latter club. Eye-catching visual design is key to creating a winning pitch deck.
Best practices to follow:
- Use only high-quality graphics, charts, and images to tell your story.
- Avoid cluttering your slide with too much text; instead, use bullet points to convey key information.
- Ensure a consistent design.
- Use comparison tables where relevant to make your point more effectively.
- Avoid using too many visuals or too much text.
- Prepare an effective oral presentation and practice it.
Best practices/Ideas for various pitch deck slides:
- The title slide is the first slide investors see. It sets the tone for the rest of your presentation and should, therefore, be clean, professional, and impactful.
- The problem/opportunity slide can include statistics, bullets, and images to convey key points in a visually dynamic way and make them easier to grasp.
- The value proposition slide should have an arresting headline. It can have icons, a chart or an infographic that shows rather than tells. This way, you can avoid crowding the slide with too much information.
- The business model slide can be funnel or hub and spoke slide to present the different elements in a visually appealing way. You can use a waterfall slide to show fixed costs, variable costs, and product/services revenue.
- The competitor slide can use magic quadrants, comparison tables, or custom visualizations such as area charts.
- The traction slide can have pie charts, stacked bar graphs, or stacked area line charts.
- The financial projections chart can have an area chart slide or data comparison bar graphs.
Pitch deck design tools
When you plan to create a winning pitch deck, having the right tools can make all the difference. The popular design tools for pitch decks are Canva, Visme, Slide Bean, Beautiful.ai, and Haiku Deck. Some have a free plan to help you decide if you want to upgrade to access premium features.
Most tools are ideal for creators with no design skills, offering a simple user interface and customizable templates. With one of these, you should be able to create a professional pitch deck without too much effort. PowerPoint will do just as well and likely be your go-to if you’ve created presentations on it before.
How to deliver a persuasive pitch
Earlier in the article, we mentioned leaving nothing to chance and preparing for your pitch deck presentation like a pro. Here’s what that means in practice:
- Being passionate about your problem, not just the product: Beyond the specifics of your product, investors want to see energy in your pitch. They want it to be about them, not you/your product.
- Lean on relevant experience: Facts matter a great deal, but experience counts as much or more. The more senior your audience, the sooner you should convey your relevant experience to build credibility. Sway a less senior audience with deep research and a mastery over the facts.
- Have supporting facts and stats at the ready: Anticipate in advance questions investors will likely have for you and be ready with the answers. Pre-empt and provide supporting data to impress the big guns.
- Make it a joint effort: Give your co-founder, CEO, or another core team member a chance to speak. Showing the chemistry of your pitch team makes you look more trustworthy than if you were to make one person do all the talking.
- Listen more and speak less: Overtalking is a turn-off. Make sure to have a conversation where you listen carefully in order to be able to speak in a logical and orderly manner during the crucial meeting.
Common mistakes to avoid
The enthusiasm of creating a winning pitch deck can get the better of some founders and be counterproductive to their goals. It can manifest as:
- Information overload/Excessive details
- Pitching the product over the value proposition
- Using tired business cliché
- Solving too many problems
In an opposite case, founders’ doubts about their business idea or insufficient understanding of the target market can create an unfavorable impression before investors. It can manifest as:
- A lack of a strong business model or revenue stream
- A lack of deep insights into customers or competitors
- A lack of differentiation
- A weak sales strategy
- Not being clear or transparent about what is sought from investors
Needless to say, a pitch deck with an inconsistent design, cluttered slides, and/or poor font choices will cause even a great product to fail before investors. Rather than jumping in to create a winning pitch deck, think about how best you can showcase your business and whether you should be addressing some aspects of your business plan first and reach out to investors later.
Pitch deck inspirations
Pitch decks of well-known companies are available online. Examine them to get ideas for your own. Make sure you check out the latest pitch deck designs based on ready templates or AI. Design tools today offer a lot of choice and flexibility in creating eye-catching visuals. Here are some pitch deck examples – click the source links to view the full presentations.
Shopify
Alt text – Shopify pitch deck
The eCommerce platform was founded in 2006, before the ubiquity of user-friendly online design tools and AI assistants. It is a good example of ‘show, not tell’, making liberal use of visuals to gain attention and make information easier to understand. The tagline ‘Make commerce better for everyone’ is punchy and memorable.
LinkedIn’s pitch deck is a good example of presenting textual content logically, concisely and without cluttering slides. Also an older pitch deck, it is data-heavy and may require more cognitive effort to grasp and remember, with a total of 37 slides to boot.
Alt text – LinkedIn pitch deck
TikTok
TikTok’s pitch deck is worth viewing for its consistent design and good use of icons, images, and bullets.
