How important is a pitch deck?  Absolutely critical.  It’s an opportunity to motivate your solution to a problem you’ve dedicated your livelihood to; it’s a chance to convey your story with conviction; it’s a shot at getting a meeting with an investor who could provide transformational capital to your business.  It greases the wheels in a pivotal moment in VCs initial deal review mechanism - whereas your written word can fade into the constant din of email, your pitch deck can be memorable. 

That said, it’s never been harder to craft a pitch deck that stands out: according to Docsend, every year VCs spend less and less time looking at each pitch deck--furthermore, more and more pitch decks flood the communication channels every day.  Running these numbers, it turns out you have an average of 2 minutes and 40 seconds worth of attention before a potential investor moves on forever.

Here are some tips & tricks to get a conversation going past the pitch deck stage, informed by our experience reviewing hundreds of decks over the years.

Tip 1: Rule of 6

Here’s the conundrum: The investment opportunity should come to life in a pitch deck, but VCs won’t likely take the time to read all words on every slide.  You should strive for fewer than 6 words per bullet, and fewer than 6 bullet points per slide.  In fact, the best pitch decks rely on visualizations much more heavily than text. 

Tip 2: Length

You’re up against a hard truth: If you have an average of 2 minutes and 40 seconds worth of a VCs attention, you have fewer than 10 slides worth of time to convey your opportunity.  You will already be winning if a VC delves further than that.  Conversely, if a VC simply notices that your deck is comprised of more than 30 slides, they might not even take the time to get past slide 3.

In our experience, 12- or 13-slide pitch decks are sufficient to get the nod for an initial conversation.  Annex the rest to be used as a supplement in a follow-up conversation - just keep the total length (deck + annex) shorter than 20 slides.

Tip 3: Layers of an onion

With less than 12 slides to describe your transformational idea, you have to be ruthlessly efficient.  The good news is, there’s a general slide order that tends to work best for getting your message across successfully in the lowest number of slides – following this slide order streamlines your messaging and shortens your deck as a result.

Strive for the reader to get the message early, while enticing them to read on to discover more exciting tidbits, layer by layer – that’s the secret to the Ascend order:

1. Title Slide: Your business name, logo, & your “Uber, for xyz” statement.

2. Your Solution: VCs want to know exactly what your company does is so they don’t have to go searching in the deck for it.

3. The Problem: Motivate your solution as the right one for this problem.

4. More the Problem: Show that the entire industry overwhelmingly suffers from this problem.

5. Your Company in that Market Environment: Show how your company is driving a paradigm shift and is seating itself at the center of the industry in order to power the future state of your industry after the paradigm has shifted.

6. Case studies/Use cases: Examples/screenshots of what your solution actually looks like and/or how it is used.

7. Business model: Describe the actual revenue model in words here: use terms that are standard for your specific industry like per unit basis, a la carte, usage fee, etc.

8. Go-to-Market Strategy: Be specific with channels, the scale of your target market segments, and industry-specific conversion metrics, otherwise you’re leaving your GTM strategy to be assumed generic.

9. Traction: Show external validation of your product.  Be boastful here by featuring a selection of your customer brand logos, showing the breadth of your pipeline, etc.

10. Financials: Show your revenue trajectory here, projected out 5 years.  Keep in mind, by this point in the deck you’ll have convinced the VC of the immensity of the problem you’re solving, so your revenue projections need to reflect that.

11. The ask: Just ask for what you need. Be specific: $2-3m in Series Seed funding, $40m in Series B funding, introductions to prospective customer contacts – whatever the case may be.

12. Team: In all decks, typically this is a text-heavy slide, so assume the team slide will serve as such: toward the end of the deck you’ll likely be running short on time, so VCs will notice any meaningful logos and click through the rest of the deck/annex quickly. Your goal is to get them to click back to the Team slide.  Craft this slide so any reader will naturally gravitate toward reading your amazing bios.

13. Thank You: Don’t forget to include your contact info where questions can be directed.

14. Annex:  Include no more than 7 additional slides that can be used as a supplement in a follow-up conversation/discussion/Q&A.

Tip 4: Design

Objective as you might hope they are, venture capitalists are human after all, and eye-catching design will capture their attention for longer, as it will for anyone.  If design isn’t your strong suit, you might want to consider outsourcing the layout & color scheme of your deck.

Follow these best practices, and you’ll be positioning your company to shine in the backdrop of piles of decks.  You never know, it may be the extra iota of chance you need to get a conversation started.  We look forward to seeing your decks in the Ascend order, and we wish you the best of luck on your path to world domination!

Image by Viva Luna Studios