In the journey of a startup, challenges and stumbling blocks are inevitable. One of the primary hurdles faced by most of the startups today is related to the gathering of finances. This is where a perfect pitch deck comes into the play by presenting a brief but compelling overview of your business ideas.
It is crucial to ensure that your pitch effectively establishes the immense value of your idea. The objective is to highlight the future prospects of your plan to the investor or partner so that they are ready to invest in your vision or idea. A typical pitch deck can range anywhere between 10 to 20 slides.
To help you out, the basic structure of a successful pitch deck, is outlined below.
- Cover
The cover should essentially offer a crisp, picture-based presentation of your business and must include your brand name, logo, color scheme and tagline.
- Problem/Solution
This slide should point out the Status quo and how you plan to break it. This is a crucial slide to grab the interest of your investors. In this slide, stick to your most compelling arguments but do not weigh it down with a long list of problems that you might solve indirectly.
- Product
This slide should be solely dedicated to demonstrating the unique value proposition of your product and the magic it will create in the market. While highlighting the most crucial features of your product in this slide is important, overburdening the presentation with excess information will impact its effectiveness.
- Market Size
If you have managed to keep your audience’s attention until this point, now it’s time to get them excited about the huge market opportunity. Make sure that you stick to figures but do not overwhelm viewers with a stream of data. So whatever you present in this section should be reasonable, realistic and achievable. In the end, your audience must be convinced that you can pull this off.
- Competitor analysis
This slide is for including a brief on your market competition. Here, you need to highlight more on how you have an edge over the competitors to seize the market opportunity that everyone is chasing.
- Business Model
This segment of the presentation needs to highlight the Business Model and the efficiency of the model in generating ROI.
- The Team and Advisors
This self-explanatory slide shall include details of the team members and advisers who will add key value to the business.
- Traction/Milestones/Roadmap
This is the “How” part of your presentation. This slide should explain three things.
- “How” you are planning to achieve the goal,
- The roadmap that will ensure the return on investment
- The milestones to achieve on the way.
- Information on Fundraising
Finally, you have reached the “Ask” slide, where you need to put forward how much investment you are expecting. Apart from that, mention what are the major milestones that you are going to attain with that financing. This slide should also cover what your key use of proceeds from the investment will be.
To sum it up, in a pitch deck, you need to articulate your thoughts with maximum clarity while using fewer and simpler words. Also, ensuring that you keep any unnecessary information out is crucial to the overall effectiveness of your pitch deck.