How To Create a Startup Pitch Deck - [Template included]

Pitch decks are a set of slides that clearly describe your value proposition, your business case, and your value to prospective investors. After years of developing our own pitch decks, and working with founders to support their fundraising efforts, we can share our experience on the fundamental elements of a good pitch deck and what will help move the needle for investors.

We translated all of these points into a pitch deck template, available below, to help guide you through understanding what the deck sets out to achieve, and how to get there.

A different kind of template

There are a considerable number of resources which provide founders with a detailed guide to every element that must be included in each slide of a pitch deck. We grew increasingly dissatisfied with those heavily structured templates because they lacked the flexibility to take into consideration the wildly varying scenarios that each startup can present. Pitches built on those templates quickly become mechanical and standardised, where they should be a unique and exciting reflection of the company (and the founders) creating it.

We therefore propose this approach – more focused on principles and on the message you want each slide to convey to the investors.

The goal of a pitch deck is to clear the gates

The goal when sending a pitch deck is to make investors feel they must talk to you; that they cannot miss out on the opportunity your venture is offering them.

Given the number of pitches that an investor may screen on a weekly basis, they are usually trained to hunt for the red flags which allow them to dismiss a startup and move on to the next. Your job is to present an exciting opportunity which addresses the perceived risk associated with those red flags. Are you a fit for their fund focus? Is your ambition large enough to be venture backable? Do you have enough validation of your idea? Will your team be able to deliver?

Investors will judge your pitch deck in less than 1 minute

The time that you’ll have to win over an investor once they open your deck usually varies between 30 seconds and 1 minute, no matter if you have been introduced or you have simply cold-emailed them. For this reason, your pitch deck must include some key elements that they expect to see in order to make comparisons with other deals. While reading it, they ask themselves some key question and make a “checklist” of the answers you provide them with in your slides to reassure their perceived risk.

The first slide determines if you win or you lose the investor

Investors will probably take 30 seconds to evaluate your first slide and depending on their opinion on that, additional 30 seconds for the rest of the slides all together. This means that the first two to three slides are the ones that determine if you win or lose your investor. This is a a very short amount of time and space to convey a very important message.

Your pitch deck should appear logical and consistent.

For the above mentioned reasons, your pitch deck should follow the following logic:

1. Opening slide
2. Business description
3. Problem
4. Solution
5. Market size
6. Competitive landscape and differentiation
7. Sustainable competitive advantage
8. Traction / stage of development
9. Business model and monetization strategy
10. Milestones and investment proposition
11. Team
12. Conclusion

In the first real slide (number 2, excluding the one with your logo), you should introduce your company in the most clear and simple way, as you would to a customer. This is paramount to the success of your pitch deck, because if the investors don’t quickly and fully understand that, they will not have the focus required to understand the following slides.

After that, it is just a matter of giving a logical and consistent flow to the presentation. That logic starts with the explanation of the problem, and investors should understand the scale and importance to the extent that a solution feels inevitable. From there, the next risk to mitigate is: how big is the opportunity? Which are the current players in the market and how is your company going to sustain competition?

In this pitch deck template we explain in detail how to deal with those questions for each of the slides listed above. You can download it for free so that you can directly keep track of the advices of the video and start creating yours!

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Curious about other successful startups’ pitch decks? Check out this article!