What’s the point of a pitch deck? Hint — it’s not to get investment.

It’s pitching season again and I’m drowning in bad pitch decks. Each one is overwhelming me with information, far more than I can process, and that’s the problem.

Let’s start with first principles: what’s the point of a pitch and pitch deck?

You almost certainly think it’s to get investment. It’s not. Not right away. No serious investor is going to write a check after thumbing through 15 slides or listening to a 10 minute pitch.

The point of the pitch deck, and tattoo this onto the back of your hand: is to get to a deep dive meeting.

The pitch deck is just one part of a long process towards investment:
intro or application → pitch → deep dive → diligence → investment

The goal at each stage before diligence is not to get someone to write a check. It’s to get them excited enough in your startup to get to the next stage. That means the pitch deck doesn’t need to tell investors everything. It shouldn’t overwhelm them with information. Instead, it needs to get them excited, and not about the product but about the investment.

You have 10 minutes to pitch and you have 11 topics to cover. That gives you less than a minute for each topic. There’s no time for details. There’s barely time for the basics. Which is fine. Get us excited about the opportunity, and we’ll schedule a two hour deep-dive meeting to dive into everything.

So keep the story simple and slides even simpler. Give us the broad outline instead of trying to answer every question and counter every possible objection.

Tell a Story

We’ve heard thousands of pitches. Most of them follow the template: here’s the problem, here’s our wonderful widget, look at this $10B market ripe for change, here’s our all-star team. Give us money and here’s what we’ll accomplish.

There’s nothing wrong with the template. It covers all the topics in a way that’s easy for investors to follow. But listen to a hundred of these in a week and frankly, it’s hard to keep paying attention.

Tell us a story instead. It doesn’t need to be a story about how your mother died of cancer so you dedicated your life to finding a new cancer treatment (though use that if it’s true). It can be a lot simpler than that.

  • You worked in an industry and struggled with a specific problem, so you put together exactly the team needed to develop the solution.
  • A customer named Joe struggles with a problem. Here’s what happens when Joe uses your product. Here’s how thrilled Joe is now and how many people just like Joe are dying to get their hands on the product.
  • You have a team with a history of startup success. Here’s why you decided to work on this problem next.
  • Nine out ten startups fail. Here’s why your startup is the needle in a haystack that investors that’s going to make up for all those losses.

Make a Compelling Deck

Simplify the Story

In 10 minutes or less, you don’t have time for a 2 hour movie plot. Save that for the deep dive. Instead, this is a 30 second commercial. It’s short, simple, to the point with no wasted time or words.

Tell a simple story with a happy ending: investors will make a lot of money by investing in your startup.

Simple is difficult. Simplicity takes thought. It takes understanding what matters to the audience.

And what matters to investors is not your product or what problem it solves but how we’ll make money by investing in your startup.

So tell a simple story. Eliminate complexity from the deck.

If you have a complex market where you’ll start with a beachhead and transition to a larger market later, presenting multiple use cases is too complicated for the pitch. Simplify. If the beachhead is a $100M opportunity, focus on that story, adding 2–3 bullet points with expansion opportunities near the end of the pitch. If the beachhead market is less than $100M, then tell the story of the big market with a quick mention that your initial customers are in a particular sub-market.

If you have multiple revenue streams, same thing — simplify. Pick the most important one and talk about that. We can get into the other revenues streams later.

Team — same. We want to know what the founders bring to the table, not your life stories. Your roles and a couple of employer logos is all you need. Same for other key employees — what do they add to the team? If they don’t fill a big gap, there’s no need to mention them. Same for advisors. Only list the ones that fill important gaps. We’ll assume you have plenty of other advisors — but unless you need to mention them, don’t.

30 Words or Less Per Slide

If it takes more than a quick glance to understand the point of a slide, throw it away and start over.

A good rule of thumb is no more than 15 words on each slide of a presentation deck and 30 words on a sending deck.

The slides in a presentation deck should have only a few bullets to emphasize and reinforce what you’re speaking.

If we’re reading the words on the deck, if we’re trying to figure out a complicated diagram, if we’re examining the screenshots, if we’re squinting to read the fine print, we’re not paying attention to what you’re saying.

So focus on telling the story in your pitch, and use the deck to hit us over the head with the key takeaways from each slide. Anything more than that is information overload that we won’t process or remember.

  • Eliminate generic headers, fine print, graphical elements that aren’t absolutely necessary.
  • Go through the deck word-by-word and remove any word that isn’t needed.
  • Replace sentences with bullet points.
  • Replace bullet points with graphical elements.

For a sending deck, you’ll need to include a little context, but not much. Investors will skim your deck in a minute or less rather than examining the details, so there’s no room for explanations or complex diagrams. Just get us excited and we’ll schedule a meeting to discuss.

Just the Outline

The easiest way to create a short, simple, compelling deck is to write an outline of your story. Set down the outline in Word or Docs rather than your PowerPoint or Canva. Instead of headers like problem and solution, just outline what you want to convey:

  • Concrete generates 8% of all CO2 emissions
  • We’ve developed carbon negative concrete
  • $800 Billion market opportunity
  • $2M in paid pilots
  • Team of experts in concrete with successful startup expertise
  • Partnerships with leading concrete makers
  • 5 patents issued
  • Far ahead of competition
  • Reach $250M in 7 years
  • Pre-seed round closing next month

This is a story that sells itself in a total of 50 words.

Now, copy each line to a single slide. And you’re done writing text.

Add any details you need to convey in simple, easy-to-understand graphics like TAM/SAM/SOM and revenue projections.

Grasp the Slide at a Glance

The goal is for viewers/readers to look at each slide and at a glance, immediately grasp the takeaway.

A trick I recommend is to close your eyes, relax, clear your head, then open your eyes again. Without focusing or reading. What do you see?

If it isn’t immediately clear what the slide is trying to say, throw it away and start over.

Keep each slide to a single, clear takeaway. If you have to say more than one thing, put them on separate slides.

Less is more when it comes to pitch decks. Made it short, simple, and compelling. Get us excited about the investment and we’ll schedule a follow up to dive into all those details later. And eventually, as you move from deep dive to diligence, you can begin thinking about how to get that investment check signed.

If your startup is building a teleporter, how do you write a compelling pitch deck? On the team slide, you probably don’t want to mention the Chief Elephant Officer is missing. And that he’s not only responsible for the critical job of elephant procurement but leads the metaphysics team.

Where is he? The founder isn’t talking and the chief of police refuses to look. So his sister recruits her ex-boyfriend, the hacker, Ted Tatsu Hara, to find him.

See what happens in the award-winning startup mystery novel, To Kill a Unicorn.