A pitch deck is a combination of your company’s product or service, the vision and most importantly the execution strategy. Your goal should be to create a deck that is both crisp and thorough. Keep in mind, investors like business plans that present a lot of information in as few words as possible. While drafting a perfect pitch deck, optimize for time wisely.
Understand your audience, the platform and mode of delivery (in person or over email). These factors influence the discussion and the questions you’ll likely be asked.
Here are the points you need to keep in mind while drafting an effective investor pitch deck:
Introduce Your Idea
What products and/or services do you offer now and/or what will you develop and offer in the future? Think of it as your elevator pitch, in one sentence.
Who’s On Your Startup Team?
Introduce the team and mention what makes them the right team for solving the problem at hand. Include your management team, advisors, and investors. Establish your credentials.
What Is the Solution You Are Offering – Value Proposition?
Describe your product or service offering with links to photos, demo videos etc. References such as these help the audience understand faster. How does your product or service offering solve the problem? Give an example to illustrate the use, if possible.
Define Your Market And Opportunity
Know your audience. How big is/are your market(s) and how the market is/are changing? Who are your target customers? What are their demographic and/or psychographic profiles? What are their needs? How are you adding value?
Who Are Your Competitors?
List out your competitors and talk about their key strengths and weaknesses. In what areas will you have or gain a competitive advantage? How is your solution better than that of the competition?
Current Status And Traction
Describe the current status of your startup. What’s your current traction, how many early customers do you have, how many of them are paying? Some important metrics to mention here are: current revenues, variable costs, operating profit and net profit of your startup.
If you have a product demo, video snippets or images, it’s great it have them here.
What Is Your Business Strategy And Marketing Plan?
How do you plan to make money? How will you price your product or service? How will your reach your target customers? What promotional tactics and marketing channels will you use? What brand positioning do you desire for each of these?
The Future Of Your Business
At this point talk about what lies in the future pipeline. What are the plans for the next 12-24 months in terms of – product roadmap, people, performance, goals and finances.
Investment Rationale
What are your funding requirements and how do you plan on using the funds? Explain why your startup or business idea deserves investment. What is the exit strategy for the investor?
Help the investor understand the opportunity to make it attractive enough. This allows the investor to understand the investment required and plan for utilisation of the money invested.
On a closing note, convey with passion what drives you and your users and you will have an awesome pitch deck. Now that you’ve got the basics in place, what’re you waiting for? Time to get cracking!
[This post first appeared on 91springboard.com and has been reproduced with permission. 91springboard is a vibrant coworking community created for startups, freelancers and business owners with a startup mindset.]
