Transform your boring pitch into a killer presentation by fixing these 3 problems

Last week, I was mentoring at an accelerator for early-stage startups preparing for a pre-seed raise. We split up the cohort into a few separate breakout rooms with a handful mentors of mentors in each.

Once every founder had a chance to pitch and receive individual feedback we reconvened in the larger group to review general learnings. Surprisingly, each breakout room came back with the same set of 3 biggest failings.

Problem #1: TMI — Too Much Text, Too Much Detail

Every early-stage pitch had too much text, too much small print, and too much justifying assumptions.

Let’s start from fundamentals — what is the point of a pitch and pitch deck? If you think the answer is to get investment, you’re going about it wrong. You won’t get a check after a 7–10 minute pitch.

The point of the pitch is to get investors excited enough to set up a 2 hour meeting to dive into the details. If that goes well, we’ll organize a diligence team to spend a lot of time on all the areas of concern. If that goes well and the terms are agreeable, then we’ll invest. The pitch is just the start.

The only point of the pitch is to get us excited. There are 12 topics you need to cover (problem, solution, market size, GTM, moat, competition, team, traction, milestones, financial projections, exit strategy, deal terms) and only 7–10 minutes to do it. That gives you less than 1 minute per topic — not a lot of time to cover a lot of information.

This format exists for a reason. We hear hundreds of pitches. Only a handful fit our criteria for stage, sector, traction, deal terms, and general interest. We’re only going to spend a few minutes on each to see if it’s a fit.

We’re not expecting a detailed discussion. We don’t need to see the details of your TAM/SAM/SOM analysis; we just need to know there’s a large opportunity. We don’t need a comprehensive review of the strengths and weaknesses of every competitor; we just need to know what makes you unique and better. Save the analysis and the answers to every possible concern for the 2 hour meeting. We’ll want to hear them then.

Keep in mind this is a presentation. We’re reading your slides while you’re talking. If there’s a lot of information on the screen, we’re not listening to what you’re saying. If there are complicated graphs we have to interpret, we’re not paying attention. If there’s small print, we’re squinting instead of listening. With less than a minute per slide, even 10 seconds of trying to figure out what’s on the page will lose the flow of your presentation.

Make sure the slides are intuitive to understand at a glance when they flash up on the screen. Have one single, easy to grasp takeaway per slide with just a few words that highlight your points as you’re speaking instead of competing for our attention. Get rid of all the headers, small print, and every word that isn’t absolutely necessary. Use simple graphics which require no reading or analysis to understand.

A good rule of thumb is no more than 15 words per slide in the presentation deck at no less than 30 point font. As for the sending deck, we whip through the whole thing in less than a minute as we decide whether to invite you in to pitch, so the same rules apply with a maximum of 30 words per slide. If there’s more detail, we’ll lost the forest for the trees.

A good trick is to write a simple outline of your presentation in a separate document. Then use that outline as the text of the slides and get rid of everything else.

#2: Too Much About Product, Not Enough About Business and Investment

Why will an investor write a check? Is it because you have a great idea? Nope.

Because you’re a great founder? Nope.

Because we want to solve climate change or find a cure for cancer? Nope and nope. Friends and family may write checks to support you and your business, as may customers and industry experts.

But investors are writing checks to buy stock in your business because it looks like a good investment that could return 10x, 100x, or 1000x within a few years.

Most early-stage pitches focus on the problem and solution. At least once a day, I get to listen to a 10 minute presentation of why climate change is a huge problem and the technical details of their plastic made from agricultural waste that’s going to solve it.

That might be a great science presentation or grant application, but we’re not buyers of your sustainable plastics or government grant issuers. We’re buying stock in your business. So instead of telling us how wonderful your product or invention is, you have to convince us the stock is a great investment.

Your reason your stock is a great investment usually follows this pattern (and if it doesn’t follow this pattern, it might be a great business, but is unlikely to be a great venture capital investment):

  • There’s a huge unmet need that you’ve developed a unique solution for.
  • You have a team that knows the industry inside and out and you know how to build a startup from 0 to 100.
  • You have a way to break into the industry without spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
  • When you succeed, you have a moat to prevent anyone else from eating your lunch.
  • That will allow you to grow exponentially to $100M in revenue in 5 years with just a small amount of capital.
  • When you reach scale, an acquisitive industry giant will be desperate to acquire the business at a huge multiple.
  • Best of all, the deal terms you’re offering for your stock are incredibly attractive so get in now before it’s too late.

That’s the flow of an investor pitch. The problem and solution are only background for why the stock will within 7–10 years provide a huge return on the investment.

#3: Information Dump Instead of Storytelling

You’ve made a pitch deck that follows the template and ticks all the boxes. Problem? Check. Solution? Check. Team? Check. Go to market? Check! Blah, blah, blah.

It’s that blah, blah, blah that’s the problem. Look, we hear a lot of pitches. If you’re at a demo day, we might hear 10 or 20 in a row. After a while, our eyes start swimming. To be honest, they all start to sound the same.

The ones that stick with me, the ones I want to hear more about, tell a story.

If you have a story of how your brother died of cancer or your mother has Alzheimer’s and that’s why you’ve developed a cure, by all means, tell it. But unless your goal is to win pitch competitions, it doesn’t need to be so dramatic.

If you worked in QA at a big bank and it was taking a week to run all your QA tests, and that convinced you to develop AI/ML to find and run the relevant tests within an hour, that’s a story I’ll remember, too.

If you don’t have a personal story, give me a customer story. Tell me about the user who fell in love with your product. What was she doing before and how did your product make her life easier?

The more technical the product, the more you need to use storytelling to bring us into your world and help us understand what the product does and why that’s so important.

But don’t stop at the problem and solution. Extend that story to the team. Don’t tell me your resume and where you got your 3 degrees. I can read LinkedIn for that. Tell me why you and your co-founders are the team that can uniquely solve this problem.

Then keep the story going. Why has nobody solved this before and why will you beat the competition? It isn’t because of a checklist of features. What are you doing that’s fundamentally different and how did you choose this winning route that everyone else missed?

Then there’s the business. How will you break into the market and how will you scale? It’s not a list of direct and indirect sales channels. It’s a story of how you’re planning to kick ass.

And then there’s milestones and traction. I don’t need a list of customer logos, especially ones that haven’t purchased yet. Tell me why those users are desperate to get their hands on your product. Tell us how much they love the product and how they plan to expand their use.

Then comes the most important story of all. How does the investor make money? Who is going to buy the business why will it be so critical they’ll pay a huge premium?

These are the stories we’ll remember long after demo day. These are the stories that will get you invited to tell us more. These are the stories that we’ll share with other investors and get them excited to join in, too.

So instead of obsessing over formatting and graphics, work on your storytelling skills. Transport investors into your world and get us excited about what you’re building.

Here’s my story: The startup, SüprDüpr, has invented teleportation. They’re getting ready for their big public demo. But now the chief scientist is missing and his sister is desperate to find him. So desperate that she enlists her difficult ex-boyfriend, the hacker Ted Hara, to try to find him. Is his disappearance related to the upcoming demo? And why was he searching for elephants before he disappeared? Find out in the award-winning Silicon Valley novel, To Kill a Unicorn — the most fun you’ll ever have reading about a startup.