What can make the difference between winning and losing an investor? A great pitch deck.
Because while all entrepreneurs know their product or service inside out, often they don’t know the best way to turn their story into a concise, impactful presentation. We’ve been through the process firsthand, and therefore know it can be challenging to sum up everything you want to say into a short fundraising pitch.
Not only that, though, but we’ve worked on more than 10,000 design projects–200 of which were fundraising pitch decks in 2014 and 2015 alone.
After working on hundreds of pitches over the course of 6 years, we’ve learned a great deal of best practices. Now, we want to share them with you in order to help you make your pitch deck the best it can be.
Let’s start with a rapid-fire round of our greatest pitch deck advice. Ready, set, go!
Presentation design
When it comes to designing your presentation:
Don’t start too soon
- Pay attention to brand guidelines
- When it comes to tone, always keep your audience in mind
Tell a better story
- Think beginning, middle, end
- Harness the power of storytelling
First impressions can make or break you
- With even more presentations taking place online, cover slides are more important than ever
Keep it consistent
- Stay consistent with your font and color choices
Context is king
- Find out ahead of time how your presentation will be consumed and design accordingly
- Consider creating a separate, condensed deliverable as a send-ahead and/or leave-behind
If you want more tips, click here for the full article.
Fundraising advice
Don’t just take our word for it, though–here’s some advice from investors in the YC community:
Practice, practice, practice
- Getting the message right takes a lot of practice and course correction
- Find people whose feedback resonates with you and work with them—otherwise, you’ll find yourself going in circles every time feedback conflicts
- Pitch the clients and investors that are not your higher priority first, both for practice and refinement
Land and expand
- Start with a very short and clear deck
- Use appendices to dive deeper in the subjects that caught your audience’s interests
- Have a suite of different docs–from a short, high-level deck, to a detailed presentation with lots of business statistics and even a one-slide deck
Focus on what is most compelling
- Team
- Product
- Market
- Traction
For more action items, check out this article!
Slide structure
Last but certainly not least, a good fundraising pitch deck needs to follow a structure. Here’s our tried-and-true guide for pitch-deck writing:
- Company purpose
- Problem
- Solution
- Market size
- Traction
- Technology & product
- Competition
- Competitive advantage
- Why now?
- Your business model
- Customer acquisition
- The team
- Investment
- Summary
- Appendix
And a few bonus tips:
- Stay skimmable
- Make it visual
- When in doubt, go for blue
Takeaway
We know that was a lot of ground to cover, and our main goal is to make things easier for you. That’s why we turned the very pitch deck that scored us our first seed round capital into a free presentation template. Just fill the form in the right and download the PPT file, add your logo and your copy, and you’re good to go!
And of course, should you want to talk to our design experts on how we can help further, just reach out!
