How To Make A Pitch Deck
How do you make a pitch deck to raise money for your startup?
Every startup needs a pitch deck. If you plan to raise capital or finance, then making a pitch deck is a top-priority task that needs to be started as soon as possible, and for that, you need the best pitch deck design service.
However, the most sought-after startup investors can receive 1,000 or more pitch decks from aspiring entrepreneurs and businesses each week. Even if you hear about one or two startups receiving a notable amount of funding in a week, that still seems like big news. So, yours has to be great. At least in the top 0.1% of all pitch decks being created.
So, how do you make a pitch deck, and create one that is successful?
What Your Pitch Should Be Designed To Do?
The main purpose of making a pitch deck is to bring in money.
There are other scenarios in which your pitch deck can prove very useful too. Such as recruiting great talent, and securing the best advisors.
In all of these cases, your pitch deck needs to:
- Grab attention and stand out
- Say what you do
- Show how you are the best, and why they should want to partner with you
- Create motivation and a sense of urgency for them to easily take action
Even if the pitch decks that prospective investors and financiers actually open and look at, they still spend just two to four minutes looking at them. That isn’t a lot of time to get all of this in.
So, your pitch deck presentation needs to be very simple and concise.
What Is The Right Length For A Pitch Deck?
Given the above, you cannot afford for your pitch deck to be that long. Each slide should also be very minimal when it comes to the amount of content on it. In fact, providing you can answer just a few key points investors are looking for, the less content, and fewer slides, the better.
As a more developed company that has been in business for several years, has developed multiple product lines and revenue streams, and has perhaps even acquired other companies, you may push the limit with as many as 20 slides in your pitch deck.
As an early-stage startup on your seed or pre-seed round, then 10 slides are sufficient.
16 slides is pushing the limits for early-stage startups without much operating history or revenues to explain.
What Slides Should Be In Your Pitch Deck?
Here’s what information needs to be covered in your pitch deck slides:
- Introduction with contact information
- The problem you are solving
- The solution or how you plan to overcome this problem
- The size of your market
- What is your product
- Who your competitors are, and your competitive advantage
- Your financial history and forecasts
- How much money are you asking for, and how will you use it
- How you have the best team to bet on in this space
- Your call to action, and how they should take the next step
Balancing Text & Visuals In Your Pitch Deck
As already discussed, you don’t have much room to get across all you might like to in either term of the number of slides, or in the content on each slide.
In order to achieve your objective, you are going to be limited to a couple of sentences, or three to five bullet points per slide, at most.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. So, you can make up for your minimal text, with images, charts, and graphs that can convey things faster, and clearer. Just stick to one per slide to keep things simple.
Who Should Create Your Pitch Deck?
Absolutely everything rests on the strength of your pitch deck.
Not just your immediate funding needs. It will also make all the difference in who will work for you and associate themselves with your company.
In turn, your entire mission and vision rely on your pitch deck being successful at this stage.
You may be the best, most educated, experienced, and most talented person to have ever come into your industry. Though, unless you are all that in content strategy and creation, especially in the context of pitch decks for startup fundraising, you may have to humbly acknowledge you are not the ideal person to make your own pitch deck. At least for the good of your company.
Ideally, you will hire professionals to help. If you are on a budget, you can still hire world-class talent on an outsourced, freelance basis.
If you have a big budget and want to delegate everything to a whole team who will just run with it, there are agencies that can help. Though the costs can run into the tens of thousands of dollars range.
Tools For Creating Pitch Decks
If you do decide to make a pitch deck on your own or direct your own team, then there are several tools you may want to take advantage of.
For pitch deck creation, you can use Powerpoint or Canva. Though Google Slides can have many advantages.
Look out for proven pitch deck templates that you can plug your own content into, in order to speed things up, and nail the right format that investors want.
Financial modeling software can also help you make dynamic financial forecasts to include in your pitch deck.
You will need a virtual data room for hosting your pitch deck online, along with your other fundraising materials.
Other Materials You Will Need To Create For Your Fundraising Campaign
After creating your pitch deck, you will also need to touch up or make a:
- Business plan
- Action plan
- Investor updates
- PItching messages
- Follow up messages
- Team resumes and bios
Summary
There is more than one way to make a pitch deck. Yet, the most successful pitch decks share these concepts, flows, and data that investors are looking for.
Save reinventing the wheel for your product and business model. Use these tips to craft a pitch deck that meets investor expectations and checks all the boxes they want in a fundable startup.
