There’s an art and a science to telling your company’s story. Here’s the formula I’ve used to raise millions in my career, as well as some potentially controversial things I believe about the pitch process (outlined at the end).
Below you’ll find the exact order I’ve used, along with tips for conveying your message and some real life examples. This is my go-to flow. Please steal it:
What We Do
Make a declarative statement about your category and the problem your company solves.
Mostly advice: You should be able to explain it to a five year old.
Morty pitch deck
Key Operating Figures (splash slide)
Hit them over the head with a few of your top metrics. This is meant to serve as a hook to make the audience stick around. You want people to perk up, lean in, and pay attention. Nothing more. You’ll get to how you actually make money later.
Mostly advice: Flash your traction numbers early on - but only give an appetizer. The entrée (financial forecast) should be left towards the end (more to come on that).
Buffer pitch deck
Our Category
Define where you play and why you have the right to own the space. The best companies don’t just live in an existing category; they create a new one.
Mostly advice: Investors want to underwrite a BIG vision. You should articulate a Unique and clear Vision, and demonstrate your AMBITION to “become” or “be” THE xyz of xyz space…
Quantify the Larger Problem
What secular shifts do you benefit from? A rising tide lifts all ships. It’s even better if you can include numbers that quantify the situation you find yourself in.
Mostly advice: Lean on 3rd party statistics to bolster your case. But not just any numbers - Gartner and Forrester are more respectable than Statista or Wikipedia.
Another option - I’ve also literally screenshots of Wall Street Journal headlines. It’s a cool visual touch.
Stytch pitch deck
Old Way / New Way:
How did people (attempt) to solve the problem you fix before you were around? Why is the old way broken? Juxtapose this with “the new way” you’ve made available.
Mostly Advice: Use language like “we flip the traditional model on it’s head” or “we are the first to solve from the [xyz] user’s perspective” etc.
Nylas pitch deck
Product Slide
Give a glimpse into your platform or product. This slide is always better when you can use real screen shots, and potentially even embed a short video (30 seconds or less). Bring the product to life. Don’t just use your cartoons or words; show the real thing.
Mostly Advice: What’s hard about this slide is it needs to show your tech, but can’t be overly technical (not all investors know what a Git repository is). I’d recommend you use this slide to demo a key workflow that you solve for.
softr pitch deck (if you tried to click on the play button, GOT EM! Sorry, I’m simply showing how embedded video is a great idea for your product slide to show rather than tell.
Secret Sauce
What’s your competitive moat? What makes it difficult for others to replicate? What ensures that [Microsoft] doesn’t decide to throw $2 billion at the opportunity and run you out of town?
Mostly advice: Investors want to know what will keep incumbents from killing you with cash. They also want to confirm you actually own the underlying data or “engine” that powers your product.
A perfect example of this is all the AI companies that claim they are unique, but are really just a wrapper around Chat GPT (something that OpenAI owns, not them).
Prove you have a competitive differentiator, not platform risk.
Mixpanel pitchdeck
Total Addressable Market
You want to show not only is there a problem, but it’s a big, pervasive one, with lot’s of room to run. The numbers here don’t have to be exact, they just have to “big enough”. Yes, I know that’s rather handwavy, but it’s true.
You also don’t want this to be too big so that it’s irrelevant (e.g., “I sell a product for women, and 50% of the world’s population is women, and that’s my TAM”). That also turns people off.
Mostly advice: It’s best to do a bottoms up [price x quantity]. The outcome you are looking for is a TAM where you can capture +$100m in revenue per year at scale. More on that later in the financial section.
Mint pitch deck
Partner Ecosystem
Who’s co-signing you? Borrowed credibility is a real thing. Much like in life, you are the average of the five companies (and investors) you surround yourself with.
You want to be associated with larger names, who’s coat tails you can ride into accounts.
Mostly advice: A visual layout I’ve seen work well is using swim lanes for each partner category, and dropping in their logos.
How Do You Make Money?
How do you sell your product? What playbook do you use, and why is it more efficient than other motions? Are you PLG? Self serve? Channel? High velocity inside sales? This is where that should come out.
Mostly advice: Historically I’ve found that this is the hardest slide to visually create. Mapping out an end-to-end process can be hard, and then overlaying that with verbal explanation is even harder. And don’t bullshit people here. If you say you are Self Serve, but have a CAC Payback period of 24 months, the truth will come out in your metrics.
Ledgy pitch deck
Customer Success Stories
Show how customers buy over time. Ideally you want to demonstrate how they land and then expand (multiple times). I’d pick two or three and show a simple line chart connecting their first, second, third etc purchases over time, and then label the multiple of expansion (e.g., “5x expansion in 18 months from first to fourth purchase”).
Mostly advice: It’s important to show individual customer success stories, since it makes it “real” to see one account in action, and then overlay the bigger picture of how it looks across an entire monthly or annual cohort. This allows investors to do the mental math on one account, validate that it’s real, and then confidently extrapolate across the rest of your base. More of that next…
Cohorts
Now take the last slide and go a step further. Since we’ve hooked investors with specific customer examples, let’s show expansion across the entire fleet. If you are early on, you’ll use monthly cohorts here. If you have more than two years of data, you’ll use annual cohorts, as monthly will get too crowded and colorful.
Mostly advice: This is what investors call the “layer cake” slide. Most startups figure out how to build it in excel after a few hours of trying, but have no idea how to actually read it.
As you can see in the blue layered pyramid below, you want the blocks to be tipping up and to the right. They should look like they are climbing the margins of the page. If one of the blocks is dipping down to the right, that means the cohort is getting smaller, or churning over time. If that’s the case, avoid this slide format.
Front pitch deck
Competitive Landscape
This is the 2x2 where you magically find yourself in the top right hand corner. How do you get there? Pick criteria that set you apart, and make those your comparative vectors. For example: Are you the most [customer] friendly x cloud based?
Choose your homefield advantage wisely.
Mostly advice: The vectors you choose should be a combination that your competitors can’t replicate (or have chosen not to replicate). The last part is key - your competitors may not even want to approach the market from your angle, but at this point hopefully investors have bought into your vision, and like the fact that you are differentiated.
Airbnb pitch deck
Financial Profile
This is your historical financials - minimally your last eight quarters, and ideally twelve. I’ve seen the use of simple bar charts work well. This can look super simple. The numbers should speak for themselves. You don’t want to overcomplicate these.
Mostly advice: If you have to orient someone to either a format or a metric, you’ve already lost. Try to stick to revenue, customer count, and one other (Billings, GMV, ARR).
DO NOT invent a metric (like compound quarterly growth or annualized daily MRR). This is not the place for Hollywood Accounting.
Financial Forecast
Now take the same bar charts from the previous slide and forecast them out on an annual basis for minimally three years (but ideally five).
Mostly Advice: Ensure the forecast goes through $100M, no matter how many years it takes to get there. Why? You need minimally $100M to IPO and investors use that as a barometer for “scale”.
Team
Who do you have steering the ship? What have they done previously that uniquely qualifies them to solve this problem? Do you have a combination of industry specific experts paired with employees who have operated at hyperscale? Do you have people who have worked together before and experienced success together? The sum of the parts is greater than the individuals themselves, so show a compelling through line as to why this is the right mix of talent to go not only to the next level, but through the next few chapters. Investors are buying into the people as much as the product. And they’re buying into your long term trajectory, not just the next year.
Mostly advice: Come up with a “theme” for your executive team. For example: “Deep real estate experience x Hypergrowth at scale” or “PLG experts x Automotive veterans.”
Source: Beelinguapp
Why Now
Leave investors with a list of compelling reasons why this will succeed. This is where you basically write out their investment thesis for them (e.g., a new law is impacting the industry, people’s buying patterns are changing in this direction, data is exploding, digital transformation etc.)
Mostly advice: I usually try to come up with five statements on why the time is right for this business to succeed. This is where you tie together external tailwinds with your unique business model, and how that’s a dangerous combination for durable revenue (i.e., magic). Put a bow and a ribbon on everything here so people say “How can this not work?”
Some potentially controversial things I believe:
Number of slides: I’ve found that the “right” number of slides, including the mission splash slide, is 17. Ideally you have between 15 and 20, depending on how many financial slides you decide to include (these are usually what increases the count). But don’t go over this number for two reasons:
First, you have to be able to complete the pitch in a ~30 minute window and leave time for questions.
Second, if investors really like your story, they’re going to ask you to send over detailed customer level sales and pipeline data in excel, which will go deeper than whatever forecast you have in powerpoint.
Modularity: Your deck should be modular. What do I mean? You can take out the finance slides, for example, and still use the materials for a big meeting that your CEO has. These decks come in handy for big partnership meetings where you are looking to work together and want to teach them about your company, but aren’t looking for money.
The Ask: You don’t need a slide with a dollar ask on it. That’s amateur hour. Talk that out in person. Investors usually just take whatever number you give them anyway and gross it up by a dilution amount anyways (say, 20%). So you gave away your valuation hopes anyways by writing down a raise amount. You want to verbally discuss a range to give yourself more wiggle room and not cap your upside.
TAM Construction: Your TAM should be built bottoms up. You shouldn’t just take a number that Gartner or Forrester gave you. Why? Most of those estimates are stale, plus you want to show your own build up based on how you define your market. You need to do the P*Q (price x quantity). If Uber just took the existing taxi cab market and multiplied by a take rate, that would have grossly underestimated their TAM. You want to show, on a unit economic level, how you can take a market, piece by piece, even if it’s not the “obvious” market someone would have defined. Plus, this gives you more opportunity to cobble together multiple markets that Gartner or Forrester would have individually pigeon holed you into.
Customer Logos: Find a way to get customer logos onto some of these slides (ideally your sales motion / how it makes money is a good spot, or on your metrics splash slide). You don’t need explicit approval to use them. This isn’t a public facing advertising deck, so go for it. This provides social proof and credibility that big companies are willing to take a commercial risk on your company, and helps VCs take the financial risk.
The Problem Slide: You don’t need a classic “Problem” slide: Why? Because most of the investors you pitch to aren’t fully aware of the problem. Unless it’s something that every single normal human does, they probably won’t fully understand. “Oh, you make Integrated Developer Environments load faster when you are coding in Python? Oh, you help boat dealerships order parts across multiple distribution channels?” Chances are most investors don’t code, or never spent a summer behind a boat service counter. Therefore, the problem isn’t real to them until you explain the old way of doing things versus the new way of doing things. The problem comes out by making the comparison. You have to make it tangible.
Quote I’ve been pondering:
“That’s what you get for giving a fuck when it wasn’t your turn to give a fuck”
-Bunk Moreland, The Wire
