Pitch deck
Last week I admitted that despite good intentions and navel-gazing (or maybe star-gazing), I’d not got round to applying for any accelerators. When I say “not got round” I mean I was avoiding it.
My cash runway is about eight months, maybe six if I want Yunus to stick with me, so although I’m not panicking, I need to know there’s more cash to draw on if the MVP we’re building takes off as I (desperately) hope.
I already applied to the world’s biggest accelerator Y Combinator, which would be a dream - $120K plus a network and brand association that’s probably worth ten times that, for 7% equity. But of course it’s hugely competitive. And, although its very simple application form helped me at the time, it means the competition will be even stiffer.
Others expect much more – as they probably should for $100K. One, Village Global, backed by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Mark Zuckerberg markets itself as “the accelerator customised to you” although it has a really long form, with ridiculously hard questions: Walk us through how there will be a $10B player in this market and What's your business model? Walk us through how you'll make $100M in annual revenue. Each with a 300 character limit!
And you need to complete a pitch deck.
Two words that leave me cold.
Not many get far without referring to Airbnb’s, Dropbox’s or LinkedIn’s. So much analysis has been done to fine tune the perfect pitch deck and yet, investors still back people rather than slide-monkeys who dazzle in Keynote.
Or at least they say they do. I guess what investors are looking for is a story. That’s what these three decks do pretty well; they quickly enable the audience to put their feet in the shoes of a customer and say I understand this, I believe in this, I need this.
Of course it’s much easier to do in theory than in real life. In real life we have so much more to say. And in real life we recognise this is our one shot and we can’t screw it up.
One of the best books I’ve read this year was Backable by Suneel Gupta. It was so good I even made notes, which I think I’ve only ever done for two books before (Seth Godin’s This is Marketing and Gary Hamel’s Leading the revolution (now unfortunately pretty dated)). Suneel talks about a good pitch casting a central character with a struggle, and our job is to show the progress, the new life our solution enables.
For my pitch deck I’ve tried to tell the story through a pair of fictional co-founders Alma and Zini who have become stuck, with stalled growth, paralysed by too many options and inadequate data to inform their next step. They really need to better understand their customer, otherwise they’ll blow their investment and potentially miss out on building their dream business. Alma and Zini could wing it, using their intuition and a quick persona session with an online tool; they could run a few feedback sessions and some surveys, hoping what they learn is consistent, without bias and in a format that they can share and rely upon. Or they could blow a chunk of their precious investment on some formal market research.
Or Alma and Zini could subscribe to Familiarize, to hold their hand through the customer discovery process, to manage everything they learn about their customer for consistency and reliability and they could build their product, their marketing – and culture - around their customer.
And unlike the other three options, Familiarize could help them find real customers, real buyers, real advocates.
Compelling enough? Let me know what you think, I would really love your feedback.
The pitch deck creation process feels like hunting for the holy grail, so here’s five tips to help demystify it and get yours out of the door:
Having one is better than not having one. You can write it over and over again, but get something down. As soon as you do, you’ll realise it’s rubbish, but it’s easier to improve than create from scratch
Think about your audience – investors see hundreds a year, maybe thousands. Draw them in, make it personal, give them what they want in seconds not minutes.
Obviously too many words is a killer. The recommendation seems to be one heading, one subtext and max three bullets. Even this sounds a lot. But it’s super hard when you have so much to say.
For some reason, the story format we’ve all grown up with is really hard to write now we’re adults. I find writing the barebones as headers can really help build a strong outline for the story, so you can then fill in the blanks.
Think of the process as one of those Russian dolls. Your first will be huge and not very special, but keep stripping the unnecessary away and create a smaller, tighter V2, and by V6 you might have a really beautiful doll with just the right level of detail, something someone may want to keep.
I feel a bit brave/stupid sharing my pitch deck – especially as it’s still in development.
And I really think with these pitches you get one chance (for a while at least), so I need all the help I can get.
Good luck with yours and you can count on me for some reciprocated feedback.