What Is A Pitch Deck?

What is a pitch deck? Why do you need one? What do you put in one, and what should it look like?

Pitch decks have become synonymous with startups and raising capital in recent years. If you are starting a new business of any type or are planning to pivot or grow an existing one, you need a pitch deck.

There are many misconceptions about pitch decks, what should be in them, how they are used, and also the best business templates sites to find them to get started. Check out this guide to creating a great deck that fuels all of your goals.

What Is A Pitch Deck: Overview

Put simply, a pitch deck is a group of slides, organized in a presentation. They are typically used to facilitate and support fundraising efforts for startups prior to going public or an exit.

A pitch deck is used to explain your business, it’s strengths, and the opportunity for those who get involved.

What Slides Should You Include In A Pitch Deck?

Pitch deck slides can include limited amounts of text, along with images and graphs or tables.

These are the slides to include in your pitch deck:

Cover Slide: Use this slide to provide your contact information, company name, and logo

The Problem: Briefly describe the one main urgent problem that you are solving.

Solution Slide: Briefly state how you are solving this problem

Market Size Slide: How big is this industry? How big are your addressable market and a potential share of that?

Product Slide: What is your product or service? You may include images of the prototype or main benefits in bullet format.

Traction Slide: What progress have you made so far? What statistics and milestones have you achieved. Choose one main metric to highlight.

Team Slide: Who are the founders? In a line or two show why they are the best team to lead this solution. You may round out the experience by including notable advisors. Use headshots and very short one or two-line bios.

Competition Slide: Who is your competition? How do you compare? What are your strengths? What is your unique advantage?

Financials Slide: Simply layout the main financials. For early-stage pre-revenue startups, this is a forecast for the first 1-5 years. What are your expected numbers for sales or new customers, revenues, profits, and profit margins?

The Ask Slide: How much are you raising in this round? What do you plan to do with the money?

Closing Slide: Say thank you for their time and finish with your contact information again?

Formatting Your Pitch Deck Slides

Pitch decks have been most commonly created in Microsoft PowerPoint in the past. Yet, there are many new tools available. This can include new slide building and presentation tools and graph and financial modeling software.

It is important not to get too complicated. A pitch deck is all about simplifying and streamlining. You will likely have multiple people collaborating on creating your pitch deck from inside and outside of your organization. You’ll need to be able to easily and efficiently share your pitch deck and multiple drafts and variations with multiple people. This will include advisers and coaches and potential investors.

You may find something like Google Drive ideal for optimizing this entire process. As well as finding a proven existing pitch deck template and plug in your data, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Your Pitch Deck & Presenting

While you may ultimately publish your pitch deck on various online platforms, and directly send it out via email or other direct messages, as well as presenting it on screen in person, hosting it online can be one of the most efficient.

This way you can give and revoke access instantly as desired, update your pitch deck in real-time and customize it to new audiences, and avoid issues with large attachments, or losing it.

Your pitch deck will always be evolving. You’ll need one at every round of fundraising. You’ll be continually updating it during rounds and between them. Even when it comes time to shop and sell your company you’ll be using some variation of this as a pitch book.

Contrary to some misconceptions you aren’t going to just get by without a pitch deck. Neither can you just expect your pitch deck to do everything for you. Even if you have fabulous relationships with partners at VC firms who want to invest, they’ll need the deck to present to their partners and as part of their process and due diligence for their investors. In the reverse, you can have the best deck in the world, but still, need to be able to present verbally and to field questions from investors.

In fact, today a pitch deck can also play a significant role as a form of business plan and as a recruiting tool for key team members and advisors. You’ll even use it to communicate your company to outsourced workers.

Summary

What is a pitch deck? A pitch deck is an essential tool for communicating and planning and focusing at the early stages of all ventures. It goes in tandem with a great presentation when it comes to investors. A great deck will make all the difference in landing the funding your venture needs at every stage.

BIO

Alejandro Cremades is a serial entrepreneur and the author of The Art of Startup Fundraising. With a foreword by ‘Shark Tank‘ star Barbara Corcoran, and published by John Wiley & Sons, the book was named one of the best books for entrepreneurs. The book offers a step-by-step guide to today‘s way of raising money for entrepreneurs.

Most recently, Alejandro built and exited CoFoundersLab which is one of the largest communities of founders online.

Prior to CoFoundersLab, Alejandro worked as a lawyer at King & Spalding where he was involved in one of the biggest investment arbitration cases in history ($113 billion at stake).

Alejandro is an active speaker and has given guest lectures at the Wharton School of Business, Columbia Business School, and at NYU Stern School of Business.

Alejandro has been involved with the JOBS Act since inception and was invited to the White House and the US House of Representatives to provide his stands on the new regulatory changes concerning fundraising online.

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