Investor Pitch Decks
What to include/What to avoid
Photo by M ACCELERATOR on Unsplash
News is that VC funding started to show signs of picking up again in Q4 of 2024 - up 70% on Q4 2023 numbers (although a lot of that has been in AI companies). But the suggestion is that 2025 is looking like things will continue to improve. So in many ways it’s not surprising that people are asking me to look at their investment decks as they aim at raising funding this year.
Having gone through this process a few times myself as well as helping others, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what to include and what to avoid.
Just going to start this by sumarizing the biggest mistakes I see and then go through slide by slide what I think you need to make sure you cover.
Common errors
There are a few things that I often see that you might want to think about:
Too long. Keep your deck punchy and leave the detail to an appendix (see my final point in this article about the 10/20/30 Rule). Your deck has to sell your company to a busy VC who sees hundreds of these. They don’t want to have to wade through (or sit through) endless slides.
Too product-focused. I get it.. you’ve spent all of your time, money and thought on the product, you want to try and get across that sense of excitement. But the reality is, VCs are never going to be excited about the product as you. They don’t need half the deck to be about the product features. They want to know it works and is a good idea, but as we all know, ideas are the easy part.
Too shopping list-y. There is usually a page that says what the money will be used for. Investors are less interested in a shopping list of things (people) you want to hire and more interested in where you see the focus of spend and critically, how that will evolve the company.
Too conservative. I’m not sure why, but founders often seem to play down their potential revenue growth. Even worse they massively underestimate costs and predict a stupidly high EBITDA in 18 months’ time. It’s perfectly OK to say that you’re not going to be profitable for a few years and that you expect to raise more money in 18 months’ time. Fast growth means less profit in the short term.
Too ugly. You’re not entering a design competition, but VCs are people and the way you present yourself will have an impact. If you see a deck that is well-designed and consistently laid out, it’s reassuring. If you see a badly laid out deck with hundreds of squashed in bullet-points and inconsistent fonts, it feels like no care has gone into it. Would you want to put millions of dollars into a company that doesn’t even care enough to make their deck look good? How much will they care about your money once it’s in their bank account?
What slides do you need?
Ok. So the crux of this article. What slides should you include in your deck?
1. Title Page
A slide that says your company’s name and possibly your vision. Not because you’re trying to show that you’ve workshopped a vision statement, but because you want to whet their appetite and get them to understand what this is about from the off.
Some examples:
Tesla - Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy with electric cars.
TED - Spread Ideas.
Netflix - Entertain the world.
Zoom - One platform delivering limitless human connection.
You get the idea
1a. (Optional) The Big Change in the World
Sometimes you might want to frame what you do by explaining that there has been a big change in the world, which in turn suggests that there will be winners (the ones who embrace this change) and losers (the ones who don’t).
A big change in the world now is AI, but if you wanted to use that, how will this change impact the customers you are looking to find?
“AI is revolutionizing the way companies manage their data”, for example.
2. The Problem
In my experience, most decks have a version of this. The key is to tie it to your product’s differentiated value. The problem has to be something that your customers really care about because solving it will either: make them money; save them money; or keep them compliant. It should be a problem that the customer is lying awake at night worrying about because they can’t solve it themselves. If it’s anything else you are a ‘nice to have’. Frame the problem in this way.
“McKinsey has reported that those who miss the boat in the next two years will see 43% less revenue growth, when compared to their AI-enabled competition*. But most companies don’t know where to start when it comes to implementing AI strategies across their business, missing out on enormous revenue potentials and cost savings.”
*I made this up for illustrative purposes
3. The Solution
How do you intend to solve the problem and what will the customers get out of it as a result? In other words, we told you about a problem and now we’re explaining the ‘so what?’ of why our product exists.
“What if there was a way to easily define and implement an AI strategy without the need for expensive consultants? Introducing Generic-Name-AI… a smarter way to AI-enable your whole business.”
4. The Product
Every entrepreneur’s favourite slide! Be careful not to go into too much detail unless it’s super relevant. If they want to invest they will probably want a product demo at some point, but just not right now. They are unlikely to have a strong opinion on your tech stack unless part of it isn’t yours!
The main focus here should be more about what it physically does in an easy-to-understand way. Is there an ‘A-ha! moment’ that you can share with them? How far along is it? How much have you invested so far and how many engineers has that taken? Have you had any stats that prove how much customers love it?
4a. (Optional) Product Roadmap
When would an investor be interested in your product roadmap? Answer: when you have an MVP with initial traction. Especially where customers have given you feedback.
If you think it would be useful to have a product roadmap, avoid a massive list of features. Investors won’t care about the minutiae, but they will be interested if you have a plan to deliver more differentiated value to customers.
5. Market
Because it might not be easy to quantify the size of their market, some businesses just miss this bit out altogether, or they make the numbers random and opaque. But the market opportunity is one of THE most important things for an investor. You might have a brilliant business, but if the most you can ever get to is $5m in ARR, then that’s not going to interest them.
Similarly, trying to skirt around the question by pulling out unhelpful stats: “Such and such market has grown 390% in the last two years alone.” Great. But from what to what?
If you don’t know the size of your market, this might be something worth paying for if the data is only available through a Mintel Report. But don’t skip it just because you can’t find the answer for free.
6. Competitive Landscape
Competition can be a good thing: it might prove that there is a problem out there that customers are already prepared to pay to solve. Maybe you show that the competition is full of dinosaurs and you’re going to shake them up. That’s what we did with ScreenCloud by being technology agnostic, entering a world dominated by hardware vendors.
Rather than listing off a bunch of competitors though, try to group them into ‘themes’ - it could be ‘expensive legacy dinosaurs’, ‘cheap and featureless’, ‘generalists’ etc. You want to show that the market is screaming out for something modern, powerful and industry-specific, for example.
7. Revenue Model
When people show me their deck, I’m often left scratching my head about where they are going to make money. What I want to see are specifics: how much does a licence cost; how long do they sign up for; how much will professional services be billed at etc?
What I hate is when you see a couple of specifics and then there are a whole load of other ‘ways’ in which the company might make money. “And we could charge for this, this and this.” Firstly it comes across as not serious and secondly, it provides no insight into what this would equate to. If it’s a central part of your revenue model then mention it, if you are just coming up with a load of unsubstantiated ideas that may or may not drive revenues somewhere down the line, then don’t bother.
8. Go To Market
How are you going to find these customers? How many? Will you use a sales team or will it be self-serve? Will they need a demo or a free trial? Will they need any kind of training or customization?
You need to pull out some numbers here such as:
Customer Acquisition Cost
Current size of sales and marketing teams
Plans for expansion (is there a correlation between amount of new customers you win now and team size - and how is that expected to change?).
Current traffic to site, social media followers etc
What’s worked to date, what you want to investigate further
For a deeper dive into GTM marketing strategies, read this!
9. Traction to date
This can be a double-edged sword. If you’re pre-revenue then you can make all sorts of predictions and so long as it’s based on sound logic, then there’s no reason to doubt your sincerity, even though you haven’t made a single penny yet.
However, if you are revenue-generating but it’s been a slow start, then you suddenly can’t hide! You have to be honest. Having said that, a slow start might not be bad - it may be what you expected as you are still experimenting with your product and messaging. There may be some other things such as free trial numbers, reviews, customer research data that you could share too.
The narrative here has to be that you’re working towards something exciting revenue-wise. So if it’s been a slow start, point to customer feedback to support your hypotheses that, for example, once you launch feature x you will unlock a load of demand. Ideally though, you will be able to show solid growth that you can extrapolate out.
10. Financial Forecast
Generally speaking, this is where investors are going to feel the most comfortable. So take some time getting this right. It’s where, if you are light on the detail, you might get caught out.
The key things to think about are:
Your gross margins - ie revenues minus the cost of sales (normally includes hosting, payment processing and maybe some customer support costs).
Your cost of acquisition (CAC) - how much does it typically cost to acquire a customer (the sales and marketing costs over a period of time divided by the number of new customers they win in that period).
Growth rates. If you are winning two new customers a week, how do you expect that number to increase over time?
Annual Revenue Per User (ARPU). For each customer, how much are they going to spend on average?
Cash in Hand. How much money will you have in your bank account at any point over the next few years (assuming you get all of the funding you are looking to raise)?
Burn. How much are you going to spend of that cash balance each month?
EBITDA. Will you become profitable over the next few years?
Churn and Lifetime Value. If you are too early to say what your churn (and therefore lifetime value) is going to be, then use some industry standards to show that you’ve considered it in your financial model. If you pretend that you never lose a customer ever, them nobody will believe the rest of your numbers.
Even if a lot of your numbers are assumptions or estimates, so long as you can justify them and ensure that the numbers make sense, you’ll be fine. But if, for example, based on your numbers you are predicting a CAC of $10,000 for a Lifetime Value of $2,000, then that makes your business unsustainable. By contrast, if you are predicting a CAC of $50 on an ARPU of $50,000, then it will look like you don’t know what you are doing.
Sanity check everything.
11. Team
What’s the biggest determining factor of whether a business succeeds or not? Probably the people delivering it. A VC will be asking herself, “do I trust these people to deliver on what they say they can?” The idea, the market, the financial model could all look amazing, but if the team isn’t up to it, then it’s probably dead on arrival.
With this in mind, when talking about your team, show that you have the range of skills and experience needed. Don’t list a load of things that don’t help your company get to a $100m in ARR. Experience of launching/running/exiting successful businesses before, contacts and reputation in your market sector. staff having worked in a similar business at a more advanced stage than yours (for example a VP Marketing who helped scale a similar business to $10m in ARR), existing investors or board members who can bring something to the table may help too - although don’t over-egg it, if they’re not going to actually deliver anything.
Keep it brief and to the point. Don’t ramble or provide an entire resumé on each person. If they want that they can ask.
12. The Ask
Should you say what your valuation is in the ask? Maybe. But I don’t think it’s absolutely critical. The valuation comes about from how much money you need to get you to your next milestone and the equity you are prepared to give away. If you are already revenue-generating there will be a range based on a multiple of ARR that people will expect. So, maybe being specific about the valuation isn’t that necessary. If they are interested it will be a question they ask, but at the moment, you’re more concerned with the money you need to achieve the things you need.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article. What you then include in terms of how the money will be spent should be more about you demonstrating how you have a hypothesis “we believe that by building feature X and pushing harder on our initial outbound marketing successes, we will be able to get to $1m in ARR by November 2026. This will require us to add to our engineering team, and find an experienced demand generation expert who will help us effectively increase our investment in paid media”.
This is much more useful to an investor than, say, a list of hires with salaries next to them. They won’t have a strong opinion on whether an engineer should cost more or less than you have said, but they will either agree or disagree on your hypothesis about getting to $1m.
13. Final Slide
A thank you, a link to further information if you have it and your contact details. No need to repeat anything you’ve already covered. At this point, they either ask for a meeting, or if you are presenting this in the meeting, it’s time for any further questions they may have.
One final thought: the 10/20/30 Rule
This is perhaps a little extreme, but Guy Kawasaki, ex Apple Executive and VC talks about his 10/20/30 Rule. He believes that the best decks should follow this rule:
Contains no more than 10 slides
Lasts no longer than 20 minute
Uses a font size no smaller than 30 points
I’ve already suggested having at least 13 slides, so clearly I’m not following his advice, but the idea of erring on the side of brevity is a solid one. Try as hard as you can to avoid unnecessary fluff and focus instead on the key things that investors will care about.
You can always add appendices if anyone cares enough about those other things.
