How To Make A Winning Pitch Deck For Your Startup

Shutterstock

A pitch deck is a written investment proposal — typically of 15–20 concise, visually appealing and non-wordy pages — that is used to solicit investment from prospective angel or venture capital investors. Having a good pitch deck can make or break your startup, as it is often the difference between getting investment and not getting investment.

Our company's pitch deck helped us secure over $200,000 in seed funding from a number of different investors.

Below, I will outline the key components of a pitch deck, as well as a number of ways to make your pitch deck stand out above the rest.

Key Components Of An Investment Pitch Deck

• Company Mission/Vision: An introduction to how and why the company started, and what your long-term goals are.

• The Problem: A statement of a familiar, existing problem.

• The Solution: A proposed solution to the problem, including or leading to an explanation of how your product helps solve the problem.

• Product Overview: A detailed explanation of your company, product, brand, services, etc.

• Current Market: Summary of the current industry, including market size, leading brands’ market share, growth/decline, consumer data, rising or falling trends.

• Market Opportunity: Using information on the current market, identify unexploited market opportunities your company will capitalize on.

• Competition: Detailed account of the competitive landscape you are entering.

• Differentiation: Detailed account of why your product or offering is different and/or better than existing competition.

• Current Traction: Brand milestones, sales figures or survey results that show acceptance or approval from the market.

• Marketing Plan/Go To Market Strategy: A detailed and realistic breakdown of how you will bring your product/brand to market. Include geographic regions and sales channels you will target, including a timeline of growth.

• Financials: Projected cost of goods, expenses, revenue and profit over the first year or longer. It can be useful to have multiple scenarios, based on different funding amounts.

• Amount Being Raised: The amount of money you are asking investors for.

• Team Bios: Short bios on the founding team and key partners, investors or employees.

Opportunities To Make Your Startup Pitch Deck Stand Out

1. Make your company’s mission/vision personal and relatable.

Investors love authenticity. If your company was founded because you truly needed a solution to a problem and none were available, here is your chance to tell that story and to connect it to a greater vision of social or global significance.

Our company was developed because when my co-founder, Ian, was attending Boston University, he wanted a way to enhance his focus that didn’t involve pharmaceuticals. He developed a natural formula and solved this problem himself, and discovered his ability to help others solve this problem, too. From there, our product was born. This is just one example of a feel-good story that is a great way to start a pitch deck.

2. Provide a thoughtful analysis of the current market, and identify unique opportunities.

Simply stating the market size and trajectory is something anyone can do, and if your investors have done their homework, they probably know all of this already. Stand out by delivering a deeper analysis of market data and trends than they have had time to develop. Scour the internet for market research and published industry data, and prepare to dig deep. If you are still in college, you may have access to very expensive research syndicates such as MarketResearch.com.

3. Get an inside perspective from industry vets on market trends and sentiment, and use this in your pitch deck.

We learned quickly while attending tradeshows for our product that, while everyone loves 5-Hour Energy, nobody wanted new energy shots in their stores. That’s because they felt duped by the same brand, Tweaker, positioned as the cheap alternative to 5-Hour Energy, which sold for $2.99 or more. Priced at only 99 cents, Tweaker was flying off the shelves, but since the profit margin was so small, stores were losing money even though unit sales were up! However, retailers were receptive to new shot products other than energy, such as focus, as long as the price point was right. We signed over 100 new stores that day.

Incorporating this information into our pitch deck showed that we were well-positioned and the market was ripe. It also helped us eliminate some of the competition we faced in getting investment. Investors often look at multiple similar companies at the same time, and this potentially helped us weed out any energy shot brands that had the same investors’ eyes on them.

4. Use data to help tell your story.

If you have access to sales data on your product, spend time analyzing it. If you can get sales data on competitors, use this as well, and see how these charts look side by side. In doing this, you may just find new angles to pitch.

We were fortunate enough to have a retailer provide us with sales data on our product alongside 5-Hour Energy sales data. The data showed that we did not cut into 5-Hour Energy sales but actually grew the shot category in these stores by 20% in both unit sales and revenue.

This data supported our claim that our product is not an energy shot, as it showed we were not stealing energy shot consumers. Instead, we were attracting new consumers who weren’t already buying shots.

5. Don’t brush over the design of the pitch deck.

Once you’ve got all these components laid out, be sure to make it look good! If you’re not a skilled graphic designer, consider downloading a PowerPoint presentation template. You can also use a website like 99designs.com to post design competitions for as low as $300 or hire cheap graphic designers from around the world.

For more inspiration, check out these pitch decks from legendary companies.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/08/28/how-to-make-a-winning-pitch-deck-for-your-startup/