What should go in your pitch deck?

There’s no single right or wrong pitch deck format to use, although experts generally agree about the topics that should be included in a good investor pitch deck.

Note

Work that you completed earlier feeds directly into what investors are looking for:

The following outline contains a checklist of key topics that most investors want to see covered, along with comments about what should go on each slide. As a business founder, you should feel free to reorder the topics to suit your delivery.

Investor pitch deck outline

Use your own judgment and be sure to address the points that are most relevant for your startup.

Company overview

A one-line description of what your company does.
A brief summary of your company’s current status and key facts to help put the rest of your presentation in context. For example, include the launch date, current revenues, growth rate, previous funding received, and notable milestones.
Why are you pitching to this audience at this time? For example, you might be raising a $750,000 seed round.

Problem or opportunity

What is the main problem that your business solves?
How serious or real is it?
How is it currently being solved?
Why are current solutions inadequate?
How did you validate the severity of the problem with customers?

Solution

How does your business solve the problem?
What is your product?
Status of your product development.
Screenshots, demo, or short (10-15 seconds) video walk-through.
What’s special about your product?
Summarize your company’s value proposition.

Why now?

Why is now the right time for this idea?
Is your target market at a tipping point? Is there a technological development, such as machine learning, that recently made this idea feasible? Are consumer behaviors changing? Are there new regulatory drivers?
Why has no one tried this idea before? Is it too difficult, complex, capital-intensive, or counterintuitive?

Team

Who are the key people in your company?
Demonstrate founder-market fit. What’s your authentic connection to the problem you’re solving? Do you and your cofounders have deep domain knowledge or hands-on experience in this sector? Do you live and breathe the customer problem you’re solving? Is it something that affected you personally?
What projects did you undertake before? How do you know you can function well as a team? If you have previous startup experience, what did you learn from it?
What unique insights do you bring? Why has nobody else seen this opportunity?
List any current investors or advisory board members.
What gaps exist?

Market

Addressable market size.
It’s better to derive an addressable market figure from the bottom up (for example, we sell our product for A x B) rather than from the top down (for example, by referring to a market research report that says the total market is $X and we hope to capture Y percent).
Is it a huge current market that old companies dominate and is ripe for disruption? Or a nascent market that’s about to become huge? Why?

Validation

How did you validate your hypotheses?
Customer hypothesis.
Problem hypothesis.
Solution hypothesis.
(Revenue always trumps feedback from customer interviews.)

Revenue model

How will your company make money?
Unit economics.
How did you validate pricing with customers?
Projections and assumptions.

Customer acquisition

How do you or will you acquire customers?
Economics: Is customer lifetime value (LTV) much larger than the cost of acquiring customers (CAC)?
What’s the rate-limiting factor on growth? Hopefully, it’s at least in part access to capital.

Competition

Who are your competitors?
What are they doing well?
What are they not doing that you do extremely well?
How will you compete? Connect back to your unique insights.

Traction

What traction have you achieved so far?
User engagement? Growth? Retention?
Revenues? Profit?
Brand-name customers or noteworthy testimonials?

Plans (next 12-18 months)

Describe the critical path.
What milestone will you hit before you run out of money that will enable you to raise more money or become profitable?
What are the top one or two risks, and how are you addressing them?

Funding round

How much are you raising?
What will you use the funds for?
How much runway does that give you?
What is your target close date?
List any current investor commitments.
Do you have any other needs, such as introductions, key hires, or advisory board?

Closing slide: Summary

Restate the two or three key points that you want the audience to remember.
Provide contact details.

Backup slides

Produce any slides that address topics you predict are likely to come up as questions, such as financial forecasts or in-depth competitor analyses.

Task: Create a rough investor pitch deck

Create a rough investor pitch deck by following the preceding outline. This exercise is useful even if you’re a long way from being ready to pitch investors. It can help you to think through and articulate the key elements of your business. By sharing the pitch deck with others, such as mentors, you can get valuable feedback and sanity check your thinking.

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