We’re in an environment where funding isn’t in free flow exactly. In such circumstances where startups face a looming recession and funding slowdown, it’s more critical than ever to know how to best pitch your startup to investors.
A pitch deck is a substantial part of drumming up financial interest in your startup. A well-designed pitch can walk the distance between struggling and growing startups. In this post, we understand the fundamental aspects of a winning pitch deck, examples of outstanding pitch decks and what they have in common.
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It’s worth noting that an unclear or cluttered pitch deck results from a cluttered vision behind a business. If you’re struggling to single out the most promising and wanted feature of your product, then you might first want to work on an MVP and reach a clear vision of what your startup is to reflect in your pitch.
Once you have your vision and mission down, fund 5-7 aspects of your product that make you great. There might be hundreds, which is why this process is key. You want investors to walk away with the top 5-7 winning reasons why investing in you is a good idea. Be sure to have everything you need for a slide deck. Then, trust that you have everything you need and create your pitch deck confidently.
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Kevin Hale at Y Combinator advises a pitch deck to be legible, simple and obvious.
At the foundational level, all you want to do with your pitch deck is help investors understand what you do so that they remember you. If they don’t get your business, they won’t remember. Here’s how to make your pitch deck understandable.
If your pitch deck is illegible, you won’t drive a point home. Your viewers would be left confused and wondering what each slide says. Consider the rules of inclusive design and then create your slide decks.
Each slide must be legible, clearly visible from the back of the room and written in a simple font. Be sure to bold and highlight things that you want to emphasize. Keep your text in a good contrast to the background to make your slide legible. A recommended combination can be Helvetica font, bold letters, the size of 100pt+.
Complex slides grapple with too many ideas at once. Each slide in a winning pitch deck must bring out one idea and drive it home before moving to the next. Since you now have 5-7 main ideas to focus on, your pitch deck mustn’t exceed 12 pages as a general rule. Of course, exceptions exist.
For simplicity, refrain from using screenshots as they make a slide overcrowded and hard to grasp. Instead, simplify the function you want to demonstrate through screenshots and simplify it for the slide.
You don’t want investors to remember your pitch deck but your idea. Investors invest in ideas and teams and not pitch decks.
If a stranger can tell what the idea is behind a slide, it’s delightfully obvious. Obvious slides can carry powerful ideas and make them easy to understand. Obviousness in your pitch deck works in your favor as investors get pitched left and right 24×7. If your ideas and their presentation aren’t obvious, investors might move on too quickly or give up on understanding.
Making ideas explicit means, you’re less beating around the bush and more stating facts like they are. Avoid distractions in your pitch deck, such as excessive branding, animations, memes, text overuse, explanations, photos that aren’t obvious, and humor.
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Here are a few other considerations to make while designing your deck.
Work through our short and simplistic guide to build your pitch deck. If you need hands-on assistance and mentorship, learn more about the thriving startup ecosystem at KiwiTech.