It can be highly nerve-wracking to present your company idea or product to a group of investors. With the appropriate presentation deck, you can keep their interest long enough to explain what your product does and why it’s a worthwhile investment. A strong presentation cannot take the place of a quality product. Having both of these qualities can help you stand out in a swarm of investors who listen to proposals all day long. For businesses, getting early financing might spell the difference between success and failure. 90% of businesses fail, most frequently due to financial constraints. An unworkable business model and plain old running out of money are the two key problems at the top of the list.
Early on, investing in companies can be risky. Investors are uncertain as to your viability in a few years. Even if you are, you might have spent all of their money and gone bankrupt before they ever receive a penny in return. You need to make a great pitch deck in order to gain their support early on. Today I’m going to walk you through my step-by-step methodology for a winning pitch deck company so you can use it for your upcoming financing presentation.
Get the necessary tools
Your pitch deck can be created in a variety of ways.
You can utilise the widely accessible Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote. Apple Macs come with Keynote for free.
Canva is a great tool whether you’re using an iPad or just want a quick way to make a pitch deck online.
You can personalise the pre-designed templates on it. Additionally, your pitch is saved to your online account so that you may edit it from any location.
Canva is one of my favourite tools, therefore I’ll be utilising it for this detailed guide. Any programme of your choice can be used to create your pitch deck while you follow along.
Let’s get going!
Step 1. Prepare your document
There are two aspect ratio options available when setting up your pitch deck: 4:3 or 16:9.
Widescreen, often known as a 16:9 aspect ratio, is used by the majority of contemporary monitors and TVs. Your pitch deck won’t have any black bars on the sides, top, or bottom of a modern screen if it is formatted in 16:9. This graph demonstrates the distinction.
I’m going to use Canva to design my 16:9 pitch.
Sign up for a free account or log in to Canva.
In the Create a Design menu, select “More.”
Select the 16:9 presentation under “Documents” by scrolling down.
There are various possibilities for graphic components, layouts, and text, as seen on the left side. There is also a place where you can add your own pictures.
As we continue to build our pitch deck in this lesson, I’ll go over how to use each part.
Step 2: Create a visual style
The Layouts tab is the first thing you see when you launch a new presentation.
You can utilise the pre-designed templates on the left side of the screen to quickly and easily construct a pitch deck that looks professional without any design experience.
Pick a style by clicking through the choices on the left.
There are many page layouts offered in some of the templates. This enables you to quickly construct several page types while maintaining a consistent look.
A template will expand to reveal all of its page layouts when you click it.
Make sure the template you choose is appropriate and not overly childish. Investors shouldn’t pay too much attention to the presentation’s visual appeal.
You want people to pay attention to and pay attention to the stuff you present!
It’s better to have a simple layout without a lot of eye-catching images or content. I’m going to go with this look.
Click on the slide you want to add to the presentation to begin.
That template will be added to the right side of your current page.
As you can see, my title page is now complete.
Simply click on the text to edit it.
Although I’m not a huge fan of those colours, it does look very decent. I find the blue on orange to be a little too much.
Click on the orange backdrop to change them.
A coloured square will then appear in the top left corner.
To select a different backdrop colour, click it.
By choosing the desired square, you can select one of the standard colours.
By clicking the Plus square, you may also include a special colour.
Repeat the process to change the text colour from light blue to something more readable after choosing a new backdrop colour.
On a background of gloomy grey, I converted it to my trademark orange colour. Much improved!
Although it might not seem crucial, making a professional-looking deck aids in gaining an investor’s confidence.
The strength of your brand is now considered by 82% of investors when making investment decisions.
After setting up the foundation for our presentation, let’s begin generating the actual slides you need to wow an audience.
Step 3: The overview
The content of this slide is precisely what it says.
Here, you want to make a very high-level summary of your good or service.
Limit the amount of text on the slide. You want to introduce your goods and immediately get the attention of the investors.
The slide is merely intended to serve as a background with a few essential things displayed on the screen while you speak.
Keep it brief: Aim for a pitch that lasts no longer than one minute.
I would advise coming up with one powerful sentence that encapsulates your product and using it as your overview slide.
Imagine it as your elevator speech presented on a slide.
I’m going to return to Canva at this point and add a new page.
The “Add a new page” button should be clicked.
We now wish to include a fresh slide layout.
Style-wise, it must be similar to our title page, but we must change it up a bit to keep things interesting. Select the overview slide’s page layout by clicking it.
I made my orange the new backdrop colour. The large “02” that was on the page bothered me, so I erased it.
Click on it and then select the trash can icon in the top right corner to do that.
Being off-center doesn’t look good, though.
It’s simple to modify that with Canva. To move your text box to the middle of the slide, click and drag it there.
When the text box is properly aligned with the middle of the slide, you’ll see lines that indicate this.
Every time we advance to a new step in this lesson from now on, add a new page and pick a layout for it.
Step 4: The problem your product/service solves
Your motivation for developing your product or service is discussed on the following slide of your presentation.
You’ve given a high-level explanation of what it does, but why is it even there?
The following questions should be addressed in both your slide and spoken presentation:
Who is it helpful to?
Who is this product intended for?
In the instance of Crazy Egg, it aids advertisers in understanding how visitors are interacting with their websites.
What issue is this addressing?
This is the key component that you must clearly describe to investors in order for them to recognise the genuine worth of your offering.
By seeing how actual visitors engage with your website and where they click, look, and browse, Crazy Egg enables you to gauge its performance.
This gives you the confidence to rebuild your website and test it frequently to make sure users are doing how you would like them to.
How does it address that issue?
This is where you go into technical detail or the finer points.
I won’t go into great depth on Crazy Egg here. I would like to talk a little bit about the software’s technology and how it precisely measures user data.
I came up with a list of important elements for this slide.
I would advise going over each of the aforementioned responses aloud in your presentation.
Step 5: What your product is
Imagine this as the big surprise during a magic performance.
You’ve described your product’s target market, the issue it resolves, and its mechanism of operation.
Tell us now what it is.
In my situation, Crazy Egg is a tool for heatmapping website behaviour.
You could write a brief remark like that on your slide, but it would be wiser to, if you have one, incorporate an explanatory video.
Video is a potent medium for explaining how something works, particularly with regard to sophisticated technological products.
Demo videos, according to 80% of consumers, are useful.
What’s more alarming is that 1 in 4 customers stop caring about a business if they don’t have a video!
Sadly, Canva does not allow you to directly embed a video into your presentation.
A remedy for this is to establish a link to your video on the slide after adding a screenshot of your video to the slide.
During your pitch, you can click the link to watch the video.
You may insert a video right into your slide in applications like PowerPoint.
I created this on Canva for my presentation in the following manner:
Click Elements in the far-left menu to bring up the video on a laptop screen. Next, select Frames.
till you see the laptop, scroll down.
To add it to your presentation, click and drag. Drag the point in the corner to increase or decrease its size as seen in the example below:
When you are satisfied with the appearance, take a screenshot of your video.
In the menu on the left, select Uploads. Click “Upload your own photos” after that.
The screenshot you just captured will show up below the green button after you upload it.
Drag it over the top of the laptop by clicking on it. It will appear exactly as seen in the following format inside the laptop screen:
To make it clear that it’s a video, I chose to overlay it with a “play button” graphic.
Icons of every description can be found in the left-side menu under Elements -> Icons.
Last but not least, I need to connect the screenshot to my video.
To choose the laptop, click on it. then select the chain link icon in the upper right corner.
A popup appears and requests a URL from you. After pasting the video link, click “Apply.”
Step 6: Your team
The section describing your team should come next.
Include your main management team members here and make a pitch for each of them.
Mention the experience, training, and talents of each team member, and don’t forget to mention their specific responsibilities inside the business.
Enjoy it a little bit!a
Describe the special contribution that each person makes to the project. Discuss their enthusiasm for the endeavour and their decision to join a startup.
Investors prefer a staff with a wide range of expertise.
This raises the likelihood that the group will be able to overcome many obstacles en route to success.
Step 7: Market opportunity
You must outline the opportunity for your product or service in this slide.
This slide often includes data on industry revenue and other significant figures.
As an illustration, the pitch deck for Airbnb provided a summary of the market’s overall size, which is represented by the number of annual trips.
They specified the amount in dollars, followed by the percentage of that market they hoped to capture (15%).
This time, I didn’t make a slide on Crazy Egg for you, but hopefully these examples will give you some ideas.
Depending on your product, there are many variations in how market size and share are determined.
I am unable to precisely explain how to calculate the size of your market or what percentage of the market you should strive for.
Check out your competitors’ pricing and user counts by studying them (if you can find out).
Step 8: Your marketing strategy
This slide should explain how you plan to gain the market share you suggested in the previous presentation.
There are many different strategies you can use to sell your goods.
Your marketing strategy will probably need to be modified later to improve the items that aren’t working and scale up the ones that are.
The majority of the details presented here should be covered in your verbal pitch so you can go into more detail.
This slide, like the first, is a summary of the essential information that should be displayed on the screen behind you.
Here is how our initial advertising plan for Crazy Egg looked:
Ensure that you discuss each aspect in your pitch. Mention your total budget as well as how you plan to implement each component of the strategy.
On a meagre marketing budget of $10,000, we increased Crazy Egg’s user base to 100,000.
Your marketing expenditure can go a very long way, especially online.
Step 9: Business model
This is where the money is!
You must be able to succinctly and clearly describe how your product will generate revenue.
Even if you aren’t yet turning a profit, investors want to know that your company plan is sound.
This slide explains whether or not investing in you would be a waste of money.
There are many various business model alternatives available, but these are a couple from well-known firms.
The freemium model is the foundation of Mint’s business plan.
It is free to utilise their personal finance software. Mint receives compensation when a user clicks on a link on their website to sign up for a credit card or other financial product.
Here is yet another Foursquare illustration.
Instead of using a graphic, they opted to describe their business model in words.
Whatever the appearance of your model, it must clearly demonstrate a strategy for profitability.
Step 10: Financial summary
If you’ve already received any financing, it should be summarised on this slide.
Additionally, you must specify how much you need right away and what you plan to do with it.
The goal is to keep the investors in the room’s prospective return on investment in mind.
Describe how the $250,000 in investment you’re seeking would enable you to release your mobile app in just three months. This will enable you to display advertisements and upsell products to clients.
Based on the size of your target audience, estimate the revenue from that.
Determine the value of each user if you want to acquire 10,000 app instals. The revenue from advertising might be $10.
That indicates that you would earn $100,000 in passive income.
Describe how the funds will be used to expand the business once more.
The investors in the room won’t, and don’t want to, squint to read this from 20 feet away.
Be straightforward and visually appealing.
Conclusion
A challenging task is to impress investors. If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, it’s likely that you have never before delivered such a significant speech. The strain might wear you down. Beyond the fundamentals of honing your pitch and being familiar with your financials, you also need to project a genuine human being. Be involving. narrate a tale. Bring in the crowd with your personality. All in between three and ten minutes, on average. A group of seasoned investors can’t be mesmerised by spectacle alone. You must be able to properly describe every aspect of your product or service and put together a strong pitch deck.
Most importantly, you need to convey to the investors how your good or service will generate profit for them. They are there to earn money, and that is ultimately why they are there. They might believe your idea is brilliant and your pitch was well-prepared, but they won’t invest if they can’t find a way to profit from you. A University of Bath study found that only one in ten startup funding deals ultimately generate a respectable profit. The other 90% either fall short or yield meagre results. Investors must make wise decisions. The most valuable startups in the world are well-known, yet failures are rarely reported.
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