What to include in a pitch deck

Help us get to know you

A pitch deck is one of the first materials a potential investor reviews to form an opinion on whether they are interested in learning more about your business and the opportunity to invest. A long form business card, if you will. 

While some startups differentiate between a read-only pitch deck that is optimized for sharing per email and a deck that requires voice-over, we recommend in all cases to cover the following topics:

• Company purpose: vision/mission
• Problem: customer pain, how it is addressed now
• Solution: value proposition, demo/video/screenshots
• Product: features, tech, IP, high-level roadmap
• Team: who are you, i.e. background, why you
• Timing: why now, the evolution of category, trends
• Market: how many users/customers does your service have, is it growing
• Competition: outline how you differ, why you win
• Business model: pricing, sales and distribution model, pipeline insights
• Traction, financials + key metrics: keep it simple and focused
• Use of funds: how would you spend the money, e.g. key hires or initiatives to achieve specific milestones

We have put together a template that you can use as inspiration or as a starting point. You can find more references there, as well as links to examples. 

Here are a few practical tips:

Tip #1: The first impression matters. We highly recommend investing in design as well. If this is not your or a colleague’s strength, there are many people out there helping startups to make pitch decks look attractive.

Tip #2: Ideal pitch decks are no longer than 15 slides. 

Tip #3: Investors often scroll through quickly to first check traction in order to see if the opportunity is a fit stage-wise and how “hot” it is, so make sure it is there and well presented.

Some  warning signs we have observed

Or, in other words, “red flags” we noticed over the years going through many pitch decks:

• Poor storyline, raising a question whether the team is able to communicate effectively to potential customers, employees, etc.
• Pitch decks with content visibly prepared by external advisors, raising a question about the team’s ability to fundraise and communicate
• A slide mentioning lots of awards, raising a question how much time is spent on competitions versus building a business
• Latest numbers in the deck being quite old (i.e. older than 2 months), indicating that the company is fundraising for quite some time already
• A slide promising 5-10x return to an investor by selling the company in 5 years, which clearly is not enough upside and it indicates that founders are not in for the long game

In addition to a pitch deck

We, investors, tend to ask for a financial model early on in the process and hence we recommend you to have a financial model at hand, which includes actuals as well as a forecast. Ideally, the revenue forecast is built bottom-up, showing main assumptions regarding go-to-market (such as conversion rates in the pipeline or retention). 

Here are some further materials that will likely be needed in the process of raising a Series A round:

• An overview of current customers
• A pipeline overview
• A cap table
• Product roadmap
• Sales deck
• Overview of KPIs, ideally including cohort analysis, CAC payback, overall company and GTM efficiency metrics 

As we advance in the process, we will talk to some of your customers or users, gather direct and indirect references on the founders and speak to some employees. Equally, we encourage you to gather references on us and we are happy to provide you with contacts if needed. 

Our investments are long term partnerships and we believe it is important to build a relationship based on trust and transparency from the first touch point and the pitch deck and for years to come.

If you like our approach (read more about it here) and you think we are a good fit for your company, you can submit your pitch here – we are excited to hear from you!