At Playfair, we get c.100 pitch submissions a week through the pitch deck application on our website. We see the full range of the good, the bad and the ugly and so, I’ve summarised below some of the key sections that founders should be including within their pitch deck with examples from well-known companies who have used their pitch decks to fundraise millions of pounds.
Each section provides content suggestions that you could include. Note, the best pitch decks minimise the amount of content on the slide and focus on including only key information that is most relevant to the business.
An investor spends an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds on each pitch deck. Therefore, prioritise structuring the deck so that the most impressive aspects of your business (e.g. the Haskell engineer you nabbed as a CTO, the 50% MoM revenue growth, the 15% CAGR market growth) are in the first half of your deck and not hidden in the final slides that the investor will never reach. Also, most early-stage investors see the A) founders, B) market and C) product (in debatable order) as the key facets to evaluating a deal so ensure that these sections stand out and that the investor can easily extract the information that is important to them.
Another consideration is the design. Now, this is no-brainer if anyone in the team — or a friend — happens to be a budding graphic designer but in the likely situation where you have to pay for a designer, the costs can start from £500 per deck. An alternative is to use pitch deck template software such as Slidebean, which offers freemium and premium subscriptions for unlimited use of their templates. Or, you could design the deck yourself. It’s debatable how much of a difference a well-designed deck makes and whether it’s worth the investment however, from personal experience, it can often make it easier to pick out and digest the key information in a short period of time. Again, considering how little time investors spend on each deck, this could be the difference between an investor deciding to follow up or not.
Remember, your pitch deck, as with any presentation, should be the final visual to emphasise your points to the viewer. Try to avoid using it as a script during investor calls.
I’ve summarised below all the key information that an investor would expect to see in your pitch deck next time you’re fundraising.
Use an engaging high-resolution background image and include your company name, logo and tagline here. Consider including the name and contact details of the speaker.
Example:
Uber: Cover Slide. Raised £20.48B to date and IPO’d at £6.23B.
Outline the founding team, along with key senior management, and the advisory board. If an advisor has ‘skin in the game’, consider adding this information to the slide to show they have additional incentive to help the founders and company succeed.
Add some detail (either text or logos) on prior experience of the team — consider the most relevant experiences to the current startup e.g. domain experience in the same industry or startup experience. It can also help to emphasise where founders have spent time together previously, either in a professional or personal capacity, to highlight they have the ‘chemistry’ to work together.
Example:
Ooomf (now Crew): Team slide. Acquired by Dribbble.