Making your own pitch deck can seem like a daunting task. You need to include all the important details, effectively communicate all the key messages, convince investors that your product will change the world, and make it beautiful. All while keeping it simple and easy to understand.
And do it all in 12-15 slides or less.
Whew! It’s a lot to absorb. Fortunately, there is a formula to the madness.
Well, kinda. This formula, like a recipe handed down from mother to son, needs to be tweaked and modified depending on the product or service you are offering. No two investor pitch decks are the same, but they all have similar ingredients.
How to pitch presentation
Here are the slides you need for a great pitch deck:
- Title slide
- Problem statement
- Solution statement
- Market Analysis
- Market size
- Financial Projections
- Competitive Landscape
- Product IP
- Go-To-Market Strategy
- Product Timeline
- Company information
- What you need
- Contact information
Let’s go over how to make each of these pitch presentation deck slides, one by one.
Slide 1: The Title Slide
This slide is more important than you might realize. While your audience of potential investors waits for you to set up your equipment and begin, this is the slide they will be staring at. It needs to be beautiful. It needs to tantalize, create anticipation, send shivers down the spines of the audience. Make the audience excited to see what it is you’re going to talk about.
What’s On a Pitch Deck Title Slide?
On this slide, you will include the name of your company and the tagline. Along with this simple text, add some engaging visuals that will make those VCs get excited before you even start the presentation. You can also include the names of your team members doing the pitch deck presentation, if that makes sense in the context of your pitch.
Slide 2: The Problem Statement
This pitch deck slide describes what is wrong in the world. What is the burning issue that needs to be solved, that your business idea solves? The more data and numbers you can show in this part of the pitch deck, the better. “100K housecats cannot get pure spring water on a daily basis!” Or “Residential plumbers are 78% more efficient when they have access to healthy foods like fresh truffles, yet only 1% of homeowners provide any mushrooms at all for their plumbers while they’re working on site.” You get the drift.
Slide 3: The Solution Statement
Here’s where you show how your business plan will create a solution to the problem for potential clients. How can we fix Kitty’s water problem? “We provide an in-home spring water pumping system.” How about those porcini for pipe jockeys? “We’re a service that will deliver fungi automatically.”
But providing a solution isn’t enough. You also need to show how your product solves the problem and has the potential to make a lot of money.
Slide 4: Market Analysis
What does the market landscape look like right now? Why is it important that those cats get that spring water? What changes are on the horizon that add to your value proposition? Your market analysis slide effectively communicates to your audience that NOW is the ideal time to bring this product to the world. When in doubt, graph it out.
Slide 5: Market Opportunity
This is rather straightforward, but it’s also where startups mess up. A lot. Market sizes are huge, right? There’s a crapton of cats in the world, who will drink a lot of water in their life times.
Well, not all of those cats are going to have the funding to afford your in-home spring water pumping system, however. Even fewer will value it enough to buy.
Present Realistic Numbers
Continuing with our cat analogy, one standard way to show your market size is to display the number of cats in the world, show the percentage of those cats that can afford your product, and then choose 1% of that number to represent the target audience you hope your business will capture.
It’s relatively simple math, but it’s gotta math.
TAM, SAM, and SOM
Many entrepreneurs like to use the terminology of Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). These are fancy acronyms that are very similar to what’s displayed in the pie graph above. The total number of cats in the world who are pathologically opposed to stagnant water would be the TAM, the number of those cats that could afford your product would be your SAM, and the SOM is the 1% or smaller amount of the SAM that you can reasonably expect to capture.
Slide 6: Financial Projections
How much does your company expect to make with your offering? This part of your pitch deck might need to be several slides. It can include your pricing strategy, your revenue model, how many units you intend to sell in years 1-5, your net profit for each unit, etc.
You need to make sure your numbers are researched and believable to the investor, and yet still large enough to make the investor salivate. Good times.
Slide 7: Competitive Landscape
These slides may or may not be important to include in your pitch deck presentation. It really depends on your business model and target market. If you create a truly disruptive technology, you may not have many competing businesses to show. More likely, however, there’s at least one similar business out there, but your brand has a strong competitive advantage.
Use this part of your pitch deck presentation to showcase how and why your brand will be wildly successful, compared to similar businesses. That competitive advantage should be justifiable to the investor, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. It could very well be that you combined two things that no other brand has combined in their offerings. Or, you may offer a common thing in a way that will appeal to a new kind of customer who has traditionally hated that thing.
Slide 8: IP
Nothing is worth investing in if it can be easily copied. You need to show how your ideas and process are protected. No one else should be able to reverse-engineer your product on a moment’s notice and take all your profits away. Your intellectual property is the core of your business’ value to the investor, and you need to show what you’ve done to protect it.
Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights
In this section of your pitch deck presentation, mention how many patents you have. List any trademarks. Even registered web addresses count. If you are marketing software, make sure you’ve filed for a copyright. You don’t need to list all the patent numbers on these slides; the key messages are how many are pending, how many are granted, and how many more are being written by your team.
Slide 9: Go-To-Market Strategy
How are you going to sell this thing to potential customers? How many sales have you had so far, and how did you accomplish that? Does your team plan to partner with other businesses? Will you white label license your product to grocery stores, or sell it directly to clients in your Etsy shop? (Of course, if Etsy is your goal, you probably need to rethink your entire strategy).
Your pitch deck needs to show your GTM strategy, because investors want to know before they even consider funding your ideas. If you haven’t gotten this part of the process figured out, you’re just wasting their time.
Slide 10: Product Timeline
Every investor wants to know where you’re at in your business process. Have you created a working prototype of the final product? Does the business already have funding from other investors? Are you already at the manufacturing stage? Does your company have customers or other partners already?
Your Timeline Predicts the Future
Where is your team at in the timeline of bringing your product to market? Where will you be in a year? Five years? Will you try to introduce new products you create with your existing technology down the road? What is your exit strategy?
This part of the pitch deck should answer all potential investor questions related to what you’ve already accomplished in the process of coming to market, and what you expect the process to look like in the future. Go ahead and illustrate the timeline, so they can see how far you’ve already come, and how long into the future you’ll be relevant.
Slide 11: Company Information
Ok, deep breath: that was the hard part of the pitch deck presentation. Now that that’s over, you can do the easy stuff.
In this part of the pitch deck, you can brag about your team. To do so, create a compelling story that builds value for your target audience. Investors don’t care that your co-founder Bob won a professional cornhole tournament in San Francisco. You’ll lose the audience’s attention if you yammer on about how much your team member Shelly loves her cat.
But your audience of investors will perk up when they hear that Bob is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of many successful startups. They’ll nod along with interest at your captivating narrative about Shelly’s world-renowned research on the effects of spring water on cat’s bladders.
Include key information that effectively communicates the idea that your team is shockingly perfect to deliver on the business’ unique goals. Why is your team the perfect team to launch this business? If they have a proven track record of turning startups into businesses with kickass value, do you think your audience of investors might want to know that?
Branding Within Your Pitch Deck
You can also use this part of the pitch deck presentation to drive home your brand identity. At this point, your audience should see the value in your offerings, and understand the potential to make money. Yet, it’s too easy to say “that’s a great idea, I think you’ll find investors…but I’m going to pass.”
Your presentation should make you sound not just like a professional with a well-crafted plan, but like someone they’d enjoy working with. Make the audience like you and identify with you and your team. Of course, this isn’t the first time you introduce your brand image within your pitch deck. Like any satisfying meal sticks with the same general cuisine, your entire pitch deck needs to coherently imply the qualities and characteristics of your brand.
This is where a professional pitch deck design service can really give you an edge. When investors see not just what you do but who you are throughout the entire pitch deck presentation, you’ve already built rapport by this point. Which is pretty crucial for what you’re about to do next.
Slide 12: What You Need
So many people forget to do this, but you never get anything unless you ask for it. Are you looking for professional mentors? To raise funding through venture capital? A business partner to act as co-founder?
The Ask
You don’t have to have exact numbers, but you do need to know what you want. Sometimes people pitch because they want to trade services. Or, sometimes they want business mentorship. Sometimes the only point of the pitch is the need for cold, hard cash. This part of the pitch deck presentation should make it clear what you’re after.
Final Slide: Contact Information
Your final pitch deck presentation slide is basically a business card. The slide should include a pretty picture and email address. Maybe a web address (if you’re to that point) and a company phone number. Just make sure they can get a hold of your team later with follow up questions.
You’ll probably want to leave this slide up until the audience leaves, so they have time to snap a pic or jot down your email. So make sure it’s beautiful, with clear branding and a visual reminder of your product.
Pitch Deck Design Services
Gathering all this data into a proper pitch deck format can be a job in itself. Such a big job, that many startups stop there. This is where you can work your advantage. After reading this, you know how to make your pitch deck sound really interesting.
We eat with our eyes first, however, and just slopping your data on a plate and calling it dinner isn’t enough. Visual presentation quality makes up much of the difference between a 24-hour diner and Michelin star haute cuisine. Which of those would you pay more for?
Isn’t that the point—to convince investors to sink as much dough into this venture as possible?
Want to dig deeper and beat your competition?
We are in the process of building a course on pitch deck presentation design, and we are looking for volunteers to review the first module. If you are interested in learning about our upcoming pitch deck course, please fill out the form below and we will be in touch.
Not interested in taking on a new course right now? We have decades of experience in entrepreneurship and design, and can work with you to create a winning pitch deck, no matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey. Schedule a call with us today to learn how we can help you.
