Where do you start with writing your pitch deck? Here are a bunch of ideas on how to write a pitch deck.

Getting the pitch deck right makes all the difference between getting your startup funded or not. In fact, your deck is likely to make or break your opportunity to get the traction you need with your venture and to make it a reality.

It is easy to get it wrong when it comes to creating a pitch deck. Most do. This is why so few get funded, investors turn down more than 99% of the pitches they get and the vast majority of startup businesses fail fast.

Check out these ideas on how to write a pitch deck and ensure you nail this critical and foundational part of the journey.

Research Other Successful Decks & Raises

Do you want to raise money and big money like you’ve been inspired to do by other startup success stories in the headlines? Then dig into how they did it.

Check out podcasts on how they went about raising, and how they selected their investors? Check which investors funded them, and how they honed and perfected their pitches.

Be sure to check out the early pitch decks of some of those now-famous unicorn startups that have really made it. What do they have in common? Styles may have changed a little since then, but you should still find some similar threads.

Tell A Story

Think about your pitch deck as telling a story. It’s like a storyboard for a movie. You have an opening title screen or the box cover, the big idea, and a crisis to solve, the challenge of solving it, the plot, the heroes of the story, and ending credits.

The more relatable and enthralling your story the better. Make sure you show your investor audience how they can play a starring role in this hit too.

Think of your slides as chapters of the book or the next installment of the series. You can use them to tell stories they can get excited and emotional about. And put them on the edge of their seat, eager for the next episode.

Use them as starting points for ideas on how to write a pitch deck.

Use A Professional Copywriter

If you are having a hard time finding your best story, finding your unique angle, or just putting it altogether consider getting a professional copywriter. It’s the best teams that get funding. Not just in terms of your founding team, technical, industry, and operational expertise.

It is having the best in every area. You can bet your most successful startup competitors are enrolling the help of the best pros they can find in this space, including graphic designers and writers.

The great thing is that even if you are operating on a lean budget and are bootstrapping through your upcoming round of funding, you can find experts in these fields on a freelance and on-demand basis.

Use them for the few hours you need now, and then bring them back in for your next round of funding as needed.

Follow The Money

The financials are becoming even more important for startup investors. After all, while you may value the mission and impact above all else, this is a business and financial transaction and decision for them. Their business is lending and investing money for profit.

From a financial perspective, the stages of this are revenues and cash flow, growth of capital, the return of investment, and the multiple of return on investment, of course as well as how much is to be invested.

Use A Proven Pitch Deck Template

Save all the guesswork, skip the common pitfalls and blunders, and dramatically shorten your learning curve and time involved by finding a proven pitch deck template.

Find a good one, from a reputable source and fill in the blanks to speed you on your way to the funding you need. Use the source for ideas on how to write a pitch deck.

Keep in mind that in fundraising storytelling is everything. In this regard for a winning pitch deck to help you here, take a look at the template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

Work With An Advisor

Work closely with an advisor or expert fundraising consultant who is really helping startups get funded, knows investors and what they want, and can help you polish your deck to win big with your ideal investors.

Start Long & Condense It

The biggest challenge for most entrepreneurs is to create a short, simple, and concise deck of slides. Start getting it all out of your head with a long version first.

Start with your business plan and executive summary. Turn it into a long pitch deck. Then condense it down to just 16 slides. Then again down to a teaser deck of no more than 10 slides.

Start With Your Customer

Just as your business and creating the right product start with your customer, your deck should start with your investors who are also your customers. You have to be able to meet their needs and sell them to get the money.

Understand their problem. Interview them for clarity, and hone in on how to solve their problem. They need a good venture to fund. One that makes them look good, and delivers great returns, with low risk.

Summary

Everything is riding on your pitch deck. While it may not look that complicated on the surface, the number of startups that don’t get funded, or have to go through hundreds of pitches to get a single check to prove there can be more to it.

Use this list of ideas on how to write a pitch deck and ace it the first time around. Then make sure you are soliciting expert feedback before you start sending it out.

You may find interesting as well our free library of business templates. There you will find every single template you will need when building and scaling your business completely for free. See it here.

In the video below Ideas On How To Write A Pitch Deck I cover this topic more in detail.

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS VIDEO:

Hi, everyone. This is Alejandro Cremades, and today we’re going to be talking about ideas on how to write a pitch deck. Before we get started, make sure that you hit that Subscribe button, and this way, you will never miss out on any of the videos that we roll out every week. 

A pitch deck is one of the most important things that you have to put together in order to get money, in order to get out there and pitch investors and to convince them to invest in you and to invest in your business. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down for you. We’re going to show you some of the different things to get inspired and to nail it when it comes down to creating your pitch deck. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

One of the best things that you can do is research other pitch decks. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You can actually go to the program like the Inner Circle that I actually have with my members, where we show them all the different pitch decks from some of the most successful companies. You can also go on websites like SlideShare. You can even see on LinkedIn what people have shared. There are places like Business Insider where you can see some of their breakdowns on pitch decks that they do where they comment. That’s going to be super helpful so that you can see what has worked for other companies. So you may want to take a look at some of the companies that have built pitch decks in your specific market, or maybe indirect competitors, or direct competitors, and see how they framed things because that’s going to help you and guide you when creating your own pitch deck.

Think about putting the pitch deck like a story because storytelling is everything. Remember that investors are investing in the future and in the possibility. They’re not so much investing in historicals in your present or in your past. For this reason, the best way to think about this is like a movie. Every single slide is a chapter. It’s a chapter of that book, or it’s a section of that specific movie. That’s how you want to do it. You want to have the right type of flow and the right type of flow on the information and the structure on how you’re putting those 15 to 25 slides because that’s all you’ve got to really nail it.

By the way, if you want to really get inspired as well on the structure and the flow, you can access via the link below on the pitch deck template that founders are using around the world to raise millions.

You may also want to use a professional copywriter because, in your pitch deck, you obviously don’t want to add a lot of text. You want to have the balance with the right visuals because the investor is skimming through the presentation. The language that you use in that text needs to make complete sense. Avoid having typos, grammar issues, and especially if you are a foreigner, like me, and you come to a place like the U.S., and you want to pitch U.S. investors, you want to make sure that the language is looking good and that there are no grammar issues. It’s like when you send your CD or resume to a company, and there are typos and grammatical issues, it’s just not a good look. So, get a copywriter or someone that can review the deck to make sure that there’s nothing crazy from a grammar or typo perspective.

Follow the money. I’m not kidding you, but the #1 slide that investors spend the most amount of time on is the Financials slide. They want to know that you have a clear understanding of money-in and money-out and how you’re projecting that over the course of time. With that in mind, you want to have someone that is financially savvy that can guide those slides. It’s not about putting a screenshot of your financial model where those numbers are essentially created and put it into your slides. You can’t do that because you need to put it in a way in which investors can digest it very easily. What you can do is break it down into three or four slides where you’re walking them through the numbers, the revenues, the customers, all of that good stuff in a way that they can get it right away.

Also, you should work with an advisor, whether it’s consultants, whether that is people from an accelerator or an incubator program that you joined. You need to work with people that can advise you and guide you, and hopefully, they’ve actually done this themselves so that they are able to help you in avoiding making stupid mistakes that maybe they actually made themselves. This is going to help you in optimizing for time, which is great. And also, in being able to understand what you need to put into those slides.

Start long and concise. What you’re going to do is if you start long, maybe you create a pitch deck of 40 slides, then you can start trimming down. You can cut down on the number of slides without cutting into the story. You can then cut a little bit on the language and the amount of text that you’re using and adding more images.

If you start long, that’s going to allow you to trim it down and get the essence – the best out of that presentation that is going to come across in a very powerful way toward the investor. Maybe one thing you could do is even grab your own business plan, which is more like the written version, which is going to be a bunch of pages, and create with that a pitch deck. Then, you start reducing the amount of text and add more visuals, and then reducing the number of slides that you have in the presentation.

Also, always start with the customer. I can’t stress enough how many times I have seen an entrepreneur that goes with their pitch deck to pitch an investor; maybe they’re in the conference room or in the boardroom. They start talking. The investors have their feet up, checking their emails, whatever that is, and then all of a sudden, when they start to talk about the customer, the data that they collected from them, all of a sudden, everyone is paying attention. So you want to always start with the customer. You want to know what kind of problem you’re solving; what is the solution? Who are the people that you’re going to go after? The kind of validation you already got.  Those are some of the critical components that you’re going to be putting in and including in your pitch deck and perhaps dividing that into different slides to really make it pop.

Access libraries of resources out there, whatever that is, but inspiration is going to be everything to ride this pitch deck. Also, remember that those investors always have concerns, and that is what separates you and the money. So, you want to know what kind of concerns they have. Speak with people out there. Don’t be afraid to ask questions because that’s going to help you to right away put on the pitch deck what they are looking for.

In many instances, when you give the pitch deck, you’re not going to be able to see their body language, their reaction toward it. Maybe they even forward it to a colleague or a friend of theirs. You’re not going to be there, so for that reason, you want to make sure that you are at least trying to capture as many solutions as possible to whatever concerns that they’re going to have toward a business like yours.

Hit a Like on this video. Also, leave a comment and let me know what kind of ideas you have going on. And Subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss out on all the videos that we’re rolling out every week. If you’re raising capital, send me an email at [email protected]. I would love to help out. Thank you so much for watching.