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The pitch deck is a unique beast: once created, it is never static. As you grow, your deck evolves with you. Because it is constantly changing, it can be difficult to perfect it. The hard truth is that no deck will work during the various stages of your company’s journey.
From Seed to Series A, your pitch deck will go through some dramatic changes. When you pitched investors for your Seed round, you focused on your skills in finding a product/market fit, putting together a great team, getting your first grip – and translating all this into 15 slides. Once you get to Serie A, the priorities shift: you’ll be talking more about tactics, performance and growth. So, how do you balance that with your big vision?
As a VC-founded branding agency, we’ve built quite a number of decks that have accumulated $400 million in seed funding over the past five years. We have supported many of our customers with both Seed and Series A decks. This means we’ve seen first-hand how the story, design, and data points shift over time. Here I’ve gathered the five key elements of a great pitch deck for your growing startup to take it to Serie A. I focused on the things that change as you grow — and the things that don’t:
Related: This australiabusinessblog.com Shares What You Can Do to Nail Your Investor Pitch Deck
1. Story is still king
Your business has certainly changed since your seed round, but the rules of storytelling have not. Your pitch deck should still be like a good movie or book – it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It should have a storyline where the protagonist overcomes obstacles along the way until they reach their goal: growth, revenue and most importantly solving the problem they wanted to solve. Your story must also move forward. If you’re using the one from your Seed Round, chances are it’s outdated!
It can be tempting to use your deck as a collection of data points. After all, you now have so many. I want to warn you here: don’t do it. Instead, tell a story that explains why this data is important to the audience — what parts are important and how they fit together into something bigger than just numbers on a page.
Remember that with Serie A, you are expected to have a data room (a file repository on Box, Dropbox, Google, etc.) in addition to a deck of cards. This includes detailed files for any investor who makes serious efforts. So, instead of trying to cram as much data into your deck as possible, use it as a teaser or narrative device.
2. Bet on your achievements so far
Aside from the big picture and bottom line, Series A investors are putting a big bet on the team behind the idea. The main question they will ask at this stage is: does this team have the capacity to take this business to the next level?
By the time your business reaches Series A, your vision will be clearer and you’ll have overcome many bumps in the road. This experience should be central to your story. We see many startups cram details of their past performance into a single slide, usually a timeline. This may not have enough impact.
Instead, try to give your performance room to breathe. Choose the ones that are relevant to your final vision and present them with sufficient detail. This shows your potential investors that your team continues to focus on the long-term vision while reaching the short-term milestones.
Related: These Are the Ten Things Your Investor Pitch Must Have
3. Background: It has to be just right
There are many ways to start your presentation. One of the most common mistakes we see is companies exaggerating with background information.
If you have a complex product in a niche industry, it can be tempting to devote quite a few slides to setting the scene in the beginning. While context is important, investors have very limited time to assess pitches, so try to be concise and focus on a few hard brushstrokes.
You may want to start your presentation with some “background information,” but instead of going overboard with data, try segmenting it. You can split your market into different customer segments and go through each segment individually as you link it to your solution to their problems. This approach gives your story momentum: you can add more color when you talk about your solution and grip, while keeping things anchored in real customer stories.
4. Adjust your footage
You can expect a variety of visuals in your Series A deck. Compared to a Seed deck, your Series A deck has more charts and fewer stock photos or theme-based illustrations.
The focus should be on showcasing real images of your product and your team, so in preparation for creating this content, it might be a good idea to have some professional photos of your team, spaces and products ready. Adding a video to your deck can be helpful in two ways: to give your audience a change of pace and to make your product (and team) more tangible.
Since the Series A deck will be closer to words, be ready to create a greater number of “smart” images and infographics that can simplify and reduce the number of words. However, good infographics are a hard nut to crack in production and require a lot of foresight. Remember that no infographic is better than bad infographics.
Related: Why Your Pitch Deck Needs a Redesign
5. Don’t get too wordy
When you come to Serie A, you probably have a lot to say about your product and your vision. However, there are still some basic rules of human understanding to follow: people remember 80% of what they see and only 20% of what they read – and the average investor spends just 3 minutes and 44 seconds watching a pitch deck.
You have to strike the balance between including important information and keeping the deck palatable. A “digestible” word count is a maximum of 75 words per slide if you are using text, but no more than 50 words per slide if you are using visuals.
To reduce the word count, try using ideas or concepts that the reader may already know as a bridge between their existing knowledge and the new perspective you are trying to provide. This will help reduce jargon and technical terms, making shorter descriptions more suggestive and impactful.
Since a great pitch deck depends mainly on a great story, I reached out to our strategists and copywriters to recommend their favorite books on the subject:
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
- Talk like Ted by Carmine Gallo
- Contagious: Why do things catch on? by Jonah Berger
- The pyramid principle by Barbara Minto
- Whatever you think, think the opposite by Paul Arden
The fields we see every day have become more and more sophisticated, with the same few slides becoming almost ubiquitous. But a good pitch deck is more than just a hodgepodge of popular slides packed with data: it’s a carefully crafted story designed to tell your company’s story in a way that excites investors and drives them to make an investment decision. It’s not an easy job, but if you follow the steps above, you may find yourself on your way to landing that Series A.
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