Pitching is about storytelling — and this presentation is the backbone to your success story. Your deck should be to-the-point. It should effectively communicate your financial potential and commitment. It should excite and intrigue potential investors to become part of your team. Here are some tips to get started.
What Makes A Great Story?
Business is about relationships and the ability to connect on a human level is everything.
“If you ask professional investors — venture capitalists — they’ll tell you they have to review and compare hundreds of startup ideas each month,” explains Alan Jones, evangelist at Australian startup accelerator BlueChilli (and former Product Director at Yahoo! South Asia).
“And the most efficient way for venture capitalists do so is to keep a spreadsheet and score each business idea on the same metrics, which correspond to the subjects of each one of those slides in the standard template. That way, all the VC has to do is look back on a month’s worth of company presentations, sort them by metrics, and call in the top three teams for a meeting.”
“If you’re confident your business idea is doing so well that you’re definitely going to score in the top three on those metrics, maybe that’s all you need to do. But for the rest, it’s important to do more than simply make it easier for a VC to rank you in a spreadsheet. You have to reach in down their optic nerves, right through their rational, calculating forebrain, and grab them by the emotional hindbrain, with both hands, and pull… hard!”
“A story sticks in the memory of your audience when it engages our senses and our own memories… so great stories always include sentences that begin with, “Take a moment to remember how you felt when you first…” and “Do you love/hate the sound/feel/taste of…”.
Bosco Tan, co-founder of popular budgeting app, Pocketbook, agrees. “There are the user pain-point and product experience story, and there’s also the company trajectory story. The key is to succinctly thread these together and present this in a way which intrigues a venture capitalist. They are attracted to companies first with their hearts, then with their minds. If the presentation is sounding like a mundane university lecture, then you’ve missed the first opportunity to engage.”
What Should A Pitch Deck Look Like?
It’s generally accepted that a pitch deck be no longer than 10–15 slides. Some say 7–10 pages or less. Design-wise: short, snappy, sexy and glossy are all great starting points.
You’ll want to introduce yourself, the problem and your solution. Why now? How is your tech different and who is your competition? How will you monetise the app? Explain your financial modeland detail the 12-month forecast.
And second only to the financials: be sure to highlight your team/advisory board. Even the best ideas can fail without great people! That’s why investors back people, not ideas.
A 2015 joint Harvard Business School study of more than 200 successful pitch decks revealed that investors spend an average of just 3 minutes and 44 seconds reading a deck. The most important pages according to the analysis:
Jason Gitmans is the CEO of Wangle Technologies, which is developing a patent-pending app that provides data acceleration for smartphone users. Jason reinforces that the business plan and product has to be articulated well, and in terms the investor will understand. His suggested pitch deck approach:
- What do you do (overview)
- Testing or third party, independent verification and endorsement.
- What is your unique selling proposition. How is your Tech different? How does it work?
- What’s the market segment you’re in? What’s the need for your product? And how big is the market?
- Who are your competitors and how do you stack up comparatively?
- How will you monetise the app, and by when?
- How much do you need to get it to market and how long will it take?
- Who is on the team and what resources will you require? What are their backgrounds?
- How will you get customers (marketing plan)? How will this be rolled out and by when?
- What are your revenue projections (blue sky)?
Financials: Don’t Bullshit. Be Accurate
Ultimately, you’re chasing series A funding. That first $1–2 million. Investors want to know your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and your customer retention rate. They’re trying to work out what their investment will generate and how that looks 12 months from now.
“Be specific in your ask,” reminds Djordje Dikic, co-founder of Palette — a hardware gadget dubbed the ‘Shazam for colour’ that went through the University of Melbourne’s Accelerator Program. “You should know exactly what you’re trying to achieve and how much money it will take to get there. The optics of a deal have to withstand intense investor scrutiny. Don’t do fluff.”
“Getting to the point involves clearly communicating 3 things,” says Anna Reeves, CEO and Exec Producer for online series That Startup Show:
- That your product or business is something which people actually want and will pay for (not what you think they want) — and you have some validation/testing around that
- Your numbers add up (as opposed to being made up) and
- You have the passion and purpose to make it happen.
