Embarking on the journey of building a start-up can be incredibly exciting. You’ve taken your idea from your kitchen table and brought it to life.
Maybe you’ve brought a team on board who are going to take the journey with you. Maybe you’ve defined your strategy or built an MVP. Maybe you’ve hired a graphic designer or branding agency so your branding is on-point.
Now all you need is an injection of capital to take your vision to market. Or perhaps you’ve already built a profitable business and you need an angel investor or some venture capital to take things to the next level.
Your pitch deck is the tool that will turn potential investors into expert advisors, and bring in some cold hard cash.
So, what does a pitch deck that gets investment actually look like?
At Ten, we’ve been fortunate enough to design a number of pitch decks that have raised six-figure investments for our start-up clients.
Here are some of the best ways we've found to make your pitch deck a success:
1. Make it branded
Your brand should show your personality and it should appeal to the target market. If your pitch deck is already branded and looks great, it’s one less thing for an investor to worry about. They may help you re-align or evolve a brand in the future, but a well-designed deck shows that you care about details and have thought about your brand positioning already.
2. Make it concise and get to the point
High net worth individuals are time-poor. A concise and relevant pitch is enough – in fact, it’s preferable. Don’t weigh your slides down with rambling paragraphs, use each slide to make one point.
3. Start with a macro trend or a pain-point, and show how it relates to your customer
Put your product or service into context. What is the backdrop? What is the problem that your customer is facing that you are solving? From our experience, pitches that do this well, do well.
4. Have an easy to digest competitor analysis slide
This tells the reader why you are different. Where’s the gap in the market? What are you doing that nobody else is? Make it easy to spot with a matrix or infographic.
5. Make the money slide simple and to-the-point
There's no need to make this a complicated break-down – keep it simple. How much are you asking for, how much equity are you offering, and how will you spend the money? Again, a simple but great-looking bar graph or pie chart gets the information across, can reinforce your branding and be memorable. For our wine merchant client, we turned the spending bar chart into a bottle of wine. It went down well with the VCs, and our client got the investment they were looking for.
So, are you a start-up who's fundraising? Would you like to know how to design a pitch deck that gets investment? Get in touch with Alex for a chat.