Pitch decks, also known as slide decks or startup decks, are presentations that entrepreneurs use to pitch their businesses to potential investors in an effort to obtain capital. For every business seeking to acquire capital, presenting a professional and eye-catching series A pitch deck is a crucial step in the process. Because their company is still in its early stages and lacks experience, businesses seeking series A fundraising strategies should pay close attention to this aspect.

Getting capital is becoming more and more crucial to the success of small businesses. According to a National Small Business Association (NSBA) poll, one in four companies said they were unable to grow their firms because they could not get the necessary finance.

Marc Andreessen, the founding partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, stated in an interview that his team evaluates roughly 3,000 of the 4,000 firms that apply for funding from his venture capital firm each year. Out of the 3,000, they take a close look at about 200 and ultimately invest in roughly 20 businesses a year.

This indicates that just 0.7% of startups who present to Andreessen Horowitz secure investment. In today’s fiercely competitive startup market, dedicating significant time and energy to crafting a strong pitch deck and supporting presentation is essential.

We have discussed how to discover the best venture capital companies to approach for your Series A funding as well as how to make your startup ready for the fundraising process in previous blog entries. The next step in getting an investment is to prepare an amazing pitch for the venture capital firms you’ve selected and gotten their attention.

Even if the pitch deck by itself won’t close the deal, it’s a crucial tool for generating interest in your business and, ideally, paving the way for more in-depth conversations. When you pitch your firm to investors as a founder, you want this pitch to help you advance your business and land more in-depth and focused meetings, which should ultimately result in closing a Series A round of investment.

We’ll examine each step in-depth in this blog article and go over the essential components of creating a strong Series A pitch deck, which are as follows:

• Clearly stating the goal of your pitch deck.
• Understanding what essential details to add in your pitch deck.
• Obtaining the crucial supporting documentation you’ll need.
• Putting on the greatest presentation you can.

1. Clearly stating the goal of your pitch deck.

There are those who believe the goal of a Series A pitch deck is to convince potential investors to invest in your company. Actually, a pitch’s main goal is to convince potential investors to want to learn more about your firm.

Everyone knows that your firm needs money, even while you’re presenting to investors. It’s crucial to ensure that your pitch’s main focus and objective is not money.

Making the line between pitching to investors and customers is another important decision that founders must make. You’re attempting to describe what makes your startup unique, not to pitch your goods or services.

Naturally, a significant part of your pitch will involve outlining for investors the difficulties that your product or service addresses for clients; nevertheless, this shouldn’t be the main point of emphasis. Your pitch should focus just as much on your firm and its employees as it does on its goods or services.

Your pitch deck’s contents should provide a succinct and comprehensible overview of your company; it’s not necessary to go into great detail. Recall that your objective is to pique the investor’s attention in order to facilitate future, in-depth conversations. Consider it less of a sales meeting where you’re attempting to close a transaction and more of a potential date. Make sure there are lots of great conversation starters for later on.

When reduced to its most basic and targeted form, your pitch deck need to be able to articulate a clear and succinct picture of the following:

• What you have already managed to achieve.
• What you intend to accomplish.
• How money can assist you in reaching your long-term objectives.

2. Understanding what essential details to add in your pitch deck.

Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and marketing guru, believes that a pitch deck should contain no more than ten slides, and the pitch itself should not exceed twenty minutes.

In twenty minutes, how are you going to describe the past, present, and future of your company and how funding might support you? Making a strong pitch requires careful consideration of the content you choose to include and making sure that each slide serves a purpose, but this is easier said than done.

It should be clear to you what aspects of your company you should highlight in your pitch. The fact that there are several of them is what makes this process challenging. Because of this, the majority of the work involved in creating a pitch deck is focused on figuring out how to communicate all of your key, high-level business data in a clear and succinct manner with the least amount of superfluous detail.

The Proposition for Value

Since your value proposition can only be one sentence, perfecting it will help you with the remaining slides in the pitch deck. The value proposition provides a brief synopsis of what your company performs. It must be concise and simple to read.

Make sure you gather a fair deal of feedback from partners, peers, and even colleagues before deciding on a value proposition. Do they know what it means? Is it adequately clear? Does it actually describe what your business does?

Industry and Opportunity

Failing to achieve market fit is cited as a reason for failure by 42% of VC-backed business founders, according to CB Insights.

How large is the market for your startup? In order to gauge the potential in the market that your firm is entering, investors want to know this information. It goes without saying that they also want to know how your business fits into this industry and how big of an audience and customer base you have.

In order to estimate the potential market for your product or service, investors want to know the breadth and depth of your startup’s offer.

It’s crucial to remember that not all investors are concerned with market size, thus a market doesn’t have to be very big to appeal to venture capitalists. Investors typically find it far more enticing to learn about prospects in a more diversified market when there is a clear and accessible market. Maintaining the focus of your pitch deck can also be achieved by defining your market as precisely as feasible.

The Problem and Your Approach to Fixing It

Make sure that your clients, not your business, are at the center of your pitch, even though you are essentially discussing the problem that your product or service solves.

Give a customer journey that provides real-life context to help distinguish the problem and its solution. Describe the ways in which your clients use your product or service and, most all, the ways in which it enhances their lives.

Products or services

It’s time to describe how your product or service operates now that you’ve made it obvious what it does and how it benefits your clients. This is an excellent moment to showcase quick tutorial videos, images, and product or service demos to demonstrate it in use and help prospective investors better grasp what you’re creating.

This is also an excellent spot to include endorsements from clients that enjoy using your goods or services.

Traction 

The momentum your startup gains as it expands is referred to as business traction. Although there is no standard method for measuring this, most startups will often focus on two factors: the revenue they are generating and the way their clients are reacting to their goods or services.

Essentially, traction is all about presenting and emphasizing your past achievements. Because you’re aiming to show that your goods or services are actually required and liked by people, testimonials and positive remarks about it could make a nice transition into this slide.

Investors will want to see documentation supporting the objectives and strategies of your firm. Even if they might not have high expectations for you, they nevertheless want to know that your product or service is appealing to your target market.

It may not even be necessary for you to be turning a profit to demonstrate that your firm has gained traction in the market. Even if you haven’t yet figured out how to monetarily support that user base, demonstrating to investors that you have a sizable user community that is actively using your product or service can be just as significant in some business models.

Incorporate your accomplishments’ milestones into this slide as well. Once more, these benchmarks don’t have to be monetary; they could be any accomplishment that you feel shows significant development and advancement.

Team

Of course, you won’t distribute the bios of every team member, but make sure to emphasize any truly remarkable team members—especially those who have had notable success in other, comparable firms.

Cash Flow Model

What is your current income stream and how do you intend to generate income in the future? Are clients paying a one-time fee or a monthly subscription for your service or product?

To provide a clear picture of your current and prospective business model, it’s also a good idea to briefly discuss your pricing strategy and client acquisition cost (CAC).

Competition

Every new business faces competition. Your potential consumers are already utilizing an alternative product or service that addresses the problem you are trying to solve more effectively, so even if your product or service is entirely unique—which is extremely rare—you still have competition.

After defining and describing your target market at the outset of your pitch deck, it’s time to discuss your competitors and how you stack up against them in the context of the market’s competitive environment.

What sets you apart from your competition? In comparison to the solutions provided by your competitors, what benefits does your product or service offer? Your potential investors want the answers to these questions.

Sales and Marketing

You’ve already highlighted a few of your accomplishments while talking about the traction of your startup. Investors are interested in learning how you plan to develop exponentially in addition to maintaining current growth.

Discuss your marketing tactics and how you intend to attract potential clients’ attention. How are you going to set yourself out from the competition? And how are you going to turn them into paying customers once you’ve had their attention?

Finances

Investors spend the most time looking at three slides: your staff, your competition, and your financials, per a TechCrunch survey.

They spend the most time dealing with your finances, generally speaking. Additionally, your pitch deck should be able to provide investors with a clear and short summary of your present financial status, even while it shouldn’t contain pages upon pages of intricate financial spreadsheets. They’ll request to view your income records. They’ll require access to your sales projections. They will want to know how your cash flow is doing and, in the event that you have funds from a seed investment, how rapidly you have been depleting it.

Before they want to know what you intend to do with their money, investors will want to know what your main expense drivers are and how your estimates look.

Your financial plan’s last slide should, without being unduly detailed, indicate the amount of money you hope to raise. As previously stated, if investors are interested in your firm and choose to proceed with talks, these kinds of conversations will later take on a more precise and in-depth form.

Vital Documents Your Series A Pitch Deck Needs to Have

As important as your Series A pitch deck is in helping you get funding, investors will also want to see more in-depth documents that they can review, study, and consult with experts to determine whether your startup is really worth investing in. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the most important planning documents that should go with your pitch deck.

Executive Summary: Basically a longer, more written version of everything you provided in your Series A pitch deck, an executive summary provides a more thorough overview. This paper will frequently be shown by prospective investors to their partners and other trustworthy advisors, whose advice they value highly.

Comprehensive Financials and Market Research: Although your pitch deck has already given a summary of your financials and market research, be ready to present additional information if the investor requests to see it. The majority of venture capitalists will require extremely thorough financial projections for a minimum of three years out. In their pitch decks, startups often make bold estimates and predictions, which may raise red flags for investors who want to verify the accuracy of the data. Although they may not always inquire about specifics of your target market and market potential, you should be prepared with such information in case they are eager to learn more.

Technical documentation: If your startup is in the technology sector, prospective investors will request to view technical documentation that may be forwarded to specialists about your business. Although most venture investors work with tech businesses, not all of them have technical backgrounds. However, they are undoubtedly in contact with many professionals, therefore they will forward your technical documents to them for review.

Creating the Best Possible Pitch

The majority of founders have a strong “elevator pitch” at their disposal, even if they aren’t regularly presenting to investors just yet.

You’ve undoubtedly already mastered the skill of pitching your startup to colleagues while negotiating collaborations or seeking to bring on top personnel. The fact that you’re probably already rather skilled at it suggests that, despite the possibility of much bigger stakes, you shouldn’t be too concerned about pitching your ideas to investors.

When preparing your presentation, keep the following points in mind to ensure that you leave a positive impression on investors without feeling pressured to perform.

You shouldn’t have to explain your Series A Pitch Deck

Investors examine a single pitch deck for an average of three minutes and forty-four seconds, according to a recent DocSend research (assuming you aren’t presenting it to them).

Because of this, it’s critical to ensure that your deck is able to tell the tale of your startup without the need for a presentation. Rather than supporting their presentation with the pitch deck, some founders make the mistake of doing the exact opposite.

Your pitch deck should be improved by your presentation. It’s important to keep in mind that once you deliver your pitch deck, investors may wish to review it again. Make sure it continues to tell a compelling story even without you to lend your assistance.

Present in a brief and straightforward way

It goes without saying that you want to avoid boring or losing your audience’s attention, so keep your pitch brief. Another reason is that you should make sure you include time for queries and conversation. An investor will probably set up an hour-long meeting for you. Make sure the preparation of your presentation doesn’t take longer than thirty minutes.

Another essential component for winning your pitch is simplicity. Investors don’t need to hear the specifics right away because they already know you are quite knowledgeable about them. In a brief amount of time, your presentation must be able to communicate complex ideas in an understandable and efficient manner.

Avoid overcrowding your pitch deck with short paragraphs and bullet points. If the concept could only be summed up in one bullet point, it’s probably not worth sharing just yet.

Balance Good Storytelling with Data

Finding a balance between being an expert and a good storyteller is crucial. Emphasize the facts while maintaining a lighthearted and engaging presentation style.

Using customer examples is one of the strongest storytelling techniques for financing proposals. To assist investors better grasp how your product or service functions and benefits real people, share a story about how your startup has helped a consumer solve an issue.

Your presentation’s storytelling component should be balanced with your experience and familiarity with all the important figures. Naturally, you don’t need to commit every piece of information pertaining to your firm to memory, but the most successful CEOs will be able to recite their company’s key performance indicators with ease.

If you didn’t include certain important figures in your pitch deck, there’s a significant probability that someone will ask you about them during or right after the presentation. Investors will want to know these numbers. It shows that you are capable and ready to lead your firm when you know the figures like the back of your hand.

Practice

Even though you’re accustomed to seeing charming and articulate entrepreneurs on social media and in the media on a daily basis, understand that not all of them were born with these qualities and that developing these skills requires much training and practice.

Practice your presentation out on peers and coworkers to work out any bugs and get comfortable with it. When you practice in front of non-company audiences, allow them to ask you questions regarding your presentation. These kinds of activities can help you improve your public speaking and presentation skills as well as the quality of your pitch deck.