This is, to me, the perfect pitch deck structure.
We’ve written hundreds of decks using this approach- over $300M
raised just last year with decks we wrote or designed. We know it works.
And we didn’t make this up of course. For years we’ve looked at pitch decks
from the most successful companies- and every single one of them told a STORY.
This structure helps tell a story. In the end, a pitch deck is a story about what your company has
achieved and wants to continue to achieve- but when your day-to-day is metrics, or marketing,
or sales, or building products- it’s not easy zoom out to distill everything you have in your head.
In this video, I am going to go one by one on those slides and give you
a few pointers on how to complete each slide.
That template is of course, available on our platform- because we don’t make
a living from Youtube- we’re in the business of helping founders scale.
I’ve done a bunch of videos on pitch decks - but every year we
learn something new and need to update it. So this is everything we know about pitch decks.
Before we dive into each slide, we need to zoom out a bit.
These are the questions the pitch deck needs to answer:
What opportunity have you discovered in the market?
What have you built to tackle it? How does it work, and who is it for?
How much are you growing, and will you continue to grow?
And why are YOU and your team THE team to change that status quo?
That’s it. As you are writing the deck, make sure to keep that list of
questions as a reference- and test every slide you write against that question.
Now, most decks are consumed over email! Decks for demo days or for meetings with investors
can be different because you will have the founder standing in front of the slides,
providing context and detail and answering questions.
But those are the minority. To get a meeting with an investor,
most investors will as you for a deck over email that they can consume on their own.
before expending half and hour with you
I call that an ‘email deck’ and it needs to do the job of answering
those 4 questions in about 4 minutes. Forget about the number of slides:
that’s pretty irrelevant: it’s not the number of slides; it’s the time it takes to consume the deck
If your deck is too long or your slides are too crowded, people will skim through instead of
reading. If your slide has 3 sentences, then there is really no way to skip through that.
Ok- so let’s tie those questions to slides- or rather sections of the deck.
The Status Quo covers what is happening in the market, and what you envision as a solution.
It answers that first question: What opportunity have you discovered in the market?
_______
The Product section answers the question of What have you built
to tackle it? How does it work, and who is it for?
You can start to figure out that the slides that would go in this section all relate to
the product: screenshots, target customers, milestones, roadmap, business model- for example.
___
Next up is the Market section - which answers the question
of How much are you growing, and will you continue to grow?
Remember, most companies raise capital when they have traction: not before.
The Market section includes slides such as the Go-To-Market strategy (how you’ll
get customers) and the Market size (how big does the business get).
___ Finally, we have the Why Us section - which covers
why YOU and your team are THE team to change that status quo?
This section gets into the competition (and why they suck) as well as the Team.
There you go, we’ve now answered every question we set out to answer.
We can wrap this with an Intro and an Ask:
if you’ve done your convincing well- you can now ask for funding.
Now, a common question we get is - can this order change? I’m all for that rules were
made to the broken statements- but if you change this order, make sure it doesn’t break that story.
If you sneak the team on the second slide, you are
breaking the answer to that last question in two parts- which might be harder to get.
Or if you first tell us about the product, without touching on the status quo- then
suddenly the product is not justified- we don’t know if the need is there.
Another important note before we jump into each one of the slides is that you don’t
need every single one. If you add every single one of the slides in this guide,
I guarantee you will have a deck that can’t be consumed in 4 minutes.
You have to pick the slides that do the best job answering your
questions- but again, you don’t need all of them.
Last note before we get into the slides- remember, we do this for a living in two ways:
Our platform has a pitch deck builder where you can find templates and references from
hundreds of decks. It also has an investor finder,
a 4-hour course on what we are covering today- and a bunch of other things.
We also have an Agency branch, with a team of analysts and designers that can help you
nail that deck- from designing slides you already wrote, to writing them from scratch. Links below,
as always- including a copy of the template I’m using.
OK- let’s go slide by slide.
The intro usually means just the cover. There’s
not much to add here other than the tagline- which is a 5-7 word description of what you do.
Finding a tagline for your business is NOT easy. It took us months to get to ours.
Also, that tagline is not necessarily your marketing slogan, it’s just a
good description of what you do. In plain English - no marketing jargon.
If the company has relevant traction,
it’s sometimes useful to brag about that early on, to make it a hook.
This must be good and exciting traction, though:
think 20% MoM growth in revenue or in Monthly Active users, not vanity metrics like downloads.
If you don’t have any of those, keep calm, and carry on get to the Status Quo.
remember in the status quo section that we are answering
What opportunity have you discovered in the market?
Usually, this is answered via a slide combo: the Problem and the Solution.
You should always think of those slides as interconnected. Airbnb’s
deck from 2009 (the one they used for their YCombinator demo day) is a perfect example.
See how the Problem statement’s problems, get matched to a solution on the next slide.
These statements need to be clear, objective or based on real-world data.
For example, on Uber’s deck we had two problem slides,
which is totally fair- but not how all the statements are undebatable.
Medallions are expensive, hailing is inefficient, there is no accountability. All true statements.
They could have gone with ‘the taxi experience is terrible, and few people would have argued
with that, but it’s always better to use facts rather than opinions.
You can almost connect each one of these statements to Uber’s features.
So on the Problem slide we are looking for,
Short, to the point statements. Facts over opinions.
On the Solution slide, we want to provide an answer to those statements.
Back to Airbnb, notice how this answer doesn’t come in the form
of features- since we are not yet getting into the product.
It’s more of a 30,000 foot view of what your product does.
Now, most companies start there: the founders identify an inefficient process,
an underserved market, a missing component in an industry- and build a solution around it.
Some startups don’t solve problems, though. Few exceptions like games are not solving the
problem of ‘lack of games in a genre’ but rather taking on a business opportunity.
I worked on this deck the other day for an EV Charging station
company. There are plenty of large companies who supply EV chargers,
but the industry is expected to grow ten fold over the next 7 years- so that’s an obvious
business opportunity. __
This Status Quo section is key: if the investor reading the deck doesn’t buy
into the problem, then they might just stop looking at the deck here.
This very much connects to doing your research about the investor:
you want to be sending this to someone who has an interest in the industry you are playing in.
Lastly, these 3 or 4 statements are key to proving your Industry expertise.
Normally, these problems aren’t too obvious- so by coming up with solid
questionings about that status quo, you are showing your own expertise
in the market you indend to target (which you absolutely should have).
In the consulting projects we take, these are probably the slides that take the most amount
of time to figure out, even for our own team. So if you’re struggling, you know where to find us.
Now this section is the most flexible, remember we are answering What have
you built to tackle the opportunity? How does it work, and who is it for?
It’s easy for us founders to talk about our products, so the challenge for these
slides is mostly around compressing the info to a reasolable amount of slides.
(By amount of slides the concern is not so much the
number, but the time it takes to consume them).
A slide with a product screenshot and a small caption takes 5 seconds to consume. We’d rather
see 3 slides like that, than trying to compress everything in a single one.
Now let me speak briefly about the slides you could add to this section.
You can have a slide with some product screenshots or a demo video.
Not everybody wants to commit 2-3 minutes to watching a video (remember,
their time budget for the whole deck is about 4 minutes) so I always recommend screenshots.
Another way to approach this is with a Step by Step diagram- showing a simplified story
of how the platform works.
A Features slide lets you list some other core benefits of the product.
I always recommend talking about the benefit to the user, rather than the feature itself.
For example: for our pitch deck builder we have always used
‘Edit your pitch deck on the go’ rather than ‘responsive editor’.
Also- make sure that you show (don’t tell), if possible. ‘Easy to use’ is subjective,
while a screenshot of a clean interface actually proves that you made it happen.
Same of AI/ML. These have become buzzwords in the past few years,
that people throw out quite mindlessly. It’s much better to how how efficient the AI is at solving
the task you are assigning to it.
If your product has a unique piece of technology, you can use this slide to show a diagram of the
infrastructure. It’s not particularly common, but very much applicable to blockchain companies,
for example (in which case you can elaborate about the whitepaper).
The Market Validation slide is important if your product
has a premise that people can’t easily get behind.
Back to Airbnb, this idea of people hosting strangers on their homes
wasn’t obvious back in 2009- so they used Craigslist and Couchsurfing as
references to prove that people were in fact willing to do it.
Strong Market Validation slides use revenue-generating examples. I see a
lot of founders mentioning that they’ve interviewed 20 people in the industry-
which is something you should have done anyway before even coming up with the problem statement.
I do consider the Audience slide a necessary one. In this slide,
you want to identify a persona that buys your product.
Having a well-defined target user goes a long way! It shows that you know who
the product is for, it shows that you’ve researched them,
it shows that you have narrowed down your focus- which means that your features and your growth
efforts will target a thought-out audience, rather than spreading yourself too thin.
Think of genres, age brackets, location and income brackets:
no startup can target all audiences at the same time.
Another way to approach this slide, especially useful for B2B companies- is to show a case study.
Ideally, this should be an instance where your product was adopted by another company,
so you can mention who used it, how useful was it and how it affected their job.
This once again shows focus. The business in the case study should reveal to the reader the
industry and the size of the companies that you target. It should also let them know who
the key person is in that company (which is the buyer you would have to target in the future).
If you have a real case study, absolutely go with that. If not, a sample scenario also works.
Product > Business Model
The business model is also key. We are going to need those details for the Market Size estimation.
This is a pretty easy slide that people like to overcomplicate. All we want to
learn is how you make money: is it a subscription? Is it a per-use platform?
What’s the average deal size?
if it’s a marketplace or an eccomerce platform, what are your margins?
Don’t spend any time sharing projections-
just tell us how you charge customers.
To wrap this section, you could add a Roadmap slide that tells is about
key product milestones, as well as future plans.
Remember, we are talking about the product here,
not so much about revenue. Investors also don’t care too much about milestones like
incorporation or team recruitment: it’s about the product itself.
As for the future, your focus should be on what happens over the next 12
months (which is the time that your round of capital will likely fund).
If you have a long-term product vision, you can even branch that into a new
slide so that it doesn’t feel like a distraction from the immediate future.
which, again, is where your investor's money is going to go
Moving onto the market section, remember what we
are trying to answer is How much are you growing, and will you continue to grow?
This starts with a Traction slide, of course.
If you have no traction you should re-consider who you are pitching with this deck.
Companies in idea stage can raise money from Friends and Family,
but it’s unlikely that they’ll raise from strangers.
A good traction slide should show growth on core KPis like revenue,
or monthly active users. AVOID vanity metrics like downloads,
or sign ups- since they don’t represent true adoption of your product.
Lastly, remember that single datapoints are just dots,
but you can turn that into a story by sharing a chart with historicals.
Making $10K last month is cool, but we want to know if that is growing or shrinking,
if it’s a trend or an anomaly- and the easiest and quickest way to understand
that is with a chart.
The Go-to-Market slide is another one where we see a lot of founders struggle.
Most of the bad slides I see are just a list of 10 marketing channels:
which shows that the team hasn’t really thought any of them through. Again, lack of focus.
A great go-To-market slide should focus on one, two strategies tops- and dive deep into them.
If these are strategies that you are already using, you can even get into
some of the Unit Economics and costs. If they are new, then detail out a plan,
timeline, budget and expectations. Ideally, these should be campaigns or channels that you have
previous experience with (even working with other companies)- and can attest to its effectiveness.
Go to market is important not only because a good portion of raised capital usually gets invested
in growth, but because you need to prove that you are reaching your next fundable milestone.
For software companies, a Pre-Seed round is usually a pre-product, idea stage round;
but whatever you raise needs to be enough to get to the next fundable milestone: Seed.
A seed round, again for software companies,
is usually raised with a live product and some solid MoM growth: 20% or more. Once again,
your go-to-market needs to show that you can reach the next milestone, series A.
For SaaS companies specifically, series A rounds happen at $1.5-$2M of ARR at least.
Hardware companies, blockchain companies and biotech operate very differently around
these milestones- but again, you need to show that you’ve budgeted what you need to
reach the next one.
This is another slide where founders struggle. It should
answer the question of ‘How much revenue can your business generate, annually?”.
It’s NOT about the size of the industry or the market
in general- but about your specific business.
The math is extremely simple, and at the same time really hard to get
right. It’s just Potential customers x Annual revenue per customer. Done.
Finding your Annual Revenue per customer depends on the business model slide,
which we touched on earlier. The hard part here is confirming that
your business model is indeed compatible with customers: accepted by your market.
Finding the number of customers is the hard part, because you have to really narrow that
down to the people or the companies that will buy from you. Steve Barsh,
one of our investors, made a fantastic video of good practices for TAM, I’ll drop it in the
description below.
We’re at the last bit of the deck now. The question to answer here is
why YOU and your team are THE team to change that status quo?
You can talk about competitors in a number of different ways- but the end goal is
always to show what you understand about the market, that they don’t.
It’s less about comparing features, again, it’s about WHY YOU.
You use that famous 2 axis chart that Steve Jobs used- as long as you use it right.
Those charts work as long as you have 2 clear variables,
one for the horizontal axis, and one for the vertical axis.
It also works as long as your product is a clear outlier. If you have other
products on that top right section, then it’s not the best of arguments.
Another approach to use is to just list features, pricing, and compare them. That works as long as
it focuses on market understanding: it’s not just showing that you have more features,
but confirming that your competitors can’t easily copy them, or wouldn’t want to.
The last approach I’ll mention is just listing 3 companies and writing
a few lines about each one of them. You can mention their size, location and funding as
a reference-and then simply state what they don’t know about the market, that you do.
Talking about how much they raise also helps/gives investors a perspective on how big the market can get or how big your company can get
As for the team- what we want to see here is not founders,
not advisors, not the entire team- but KEY PEOPLE.
The people on this slide should have the skills to bring the company to that next fundable mileston.
If you are building an app, then the technical lead (likely your
CTO) should be here. If you are aiming for 20% MoM growth, then your head of
marketing or your head of sales should be here, regardless of their founder status.
If you don’t have that person on the team, you probably need them before you can actually close
a round: recruiting for early stage is really hard and money isn’t the only answer: it’s network,
it’s getting people to believe in this idea, enough to take a risk and work with you.
We have a whole video on finding co-founders, I’ll link it below as well.
The bios for those people should focus on that industry expertise, rather than unrelated
achievements. After looking at 1,000s of decks, Ivy League schools stopped surprising me: they’re
not irrelevant, don’t get me wrong: but experience is what really makes the team interesting.
You can close this section with a Why Now slide, which is optional,
but useful if there’s a time constraint that you can use to your advantage.
If, for example, there are few competitors at the
moment (either because people haven’t figured the business opportunity out, or
because there is some legal or logistic barrier for others to enter the market).
You can also frame this slide as the Secret Sauce- where you highlight some unique technology,
strong network connections or a very unique understanding that nobody else
has and that ‘protects you’ against competitors. And that concludes the Story side of the deck.
If you did your job well, investors should be convinced by now. The last couple slides,
which would represent k, focus on your financial estimations,
and on the amount of money you are raising, the terms, and the use of funds.
By no means they should be underestimated,
mind you. We have plenty of videos covering how to solve your financial models, including
this one from last week- which covers financial modeling from the abstract to the spreadsheet.
Remember, the template we’ve been referring to is available
on Slidebean- sign up link below. And if you need our help to write or design the deck,
you should chat with our sales team: I’ve linked their calendar below as well.
Good luck!