Lesson 5: Building Your Pitch Deck
Crafting an effective pitch deck
Your pitch deck can either make or break an investment opportunity. A good pitch deck can successfully connect with your audience through authentic storytelling techniques. To achieve positive and successful results, you should ensure the following four critical points are addressed:
1. Give your audience a reason to care
2. Give your audience a reason to believe (include your credentials here)
3. Tell them what they need to know (your proposed growth)
4. Tell them what they need to do (how much you want)
How to build a successful pitch deck (source)
For an example of a good pitch deck, check out AirBnb’s presentation.
To prevent your original business idea getting stolen by investors, or anyone else for that matter, always make sure to copyright your work. To do this, include the following at the bottom left of the pitch deck cover page: “Confidential and proprietary. Copyright (c) by [name of your company]. All Rights Reserved.”
A common mistake with many presentations is including a “meet the team” slide at the start of their pitch deck. While investors most certainly want to know who they might be investing in, they are far more interested in the problemyou’re trying to solve and what it means for them. Leave the team slide for the end of the presentation, and keep it simple by highlighting your experience and roles.
Your pitch deck needs to impress your investors and keep them interested. Here are some tips for you to get started:
- Convince them that the market opportunity is large enough to support the growth of your business.
- Tell a compelling and interesting story that shows your passion for the business and understanding of the problem at hand.
- Plan to have a demo of your product as part of the in-person presentation.
- If you are going to send your pitch deck to investors prior to a meeting, send it in PDF format.
- Include visually interesting graphics and images.
- Use a consistent font size, colour, and header title style throughout the slides.