How do you get funding and support to take your business plan forward? Besides an epic idea that solves customer pain points, a solid investor pitch deck can help seal the deal. Use our latest Ultimate Pitch Deck (Part 3) to tell your story and communicate your vision in the best possible flow and get closer to the funding you need.
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Before you get into any business or technical details, paint a picture of the current marketplace and highlight the customer pain point that you're positioned to resolve. (Slide 4)
Companies with physical products can list potential distribution channels where their products will be sold, whether it's a name-brand store, third-party retailer, or e-commerce website. (Slide 19)
Back up your arguments with numbers. Use additional tools like our pro forma spreadsheets, KPI dashboards, video backgrounds, and product mockups to enhance your delivery. (Slide 39-59)
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Whether via in-person presentation or digital file-sharing, pitch decks are an indispensable tool to raise funds and get the right support behind your ambition. Pitch decks showcase your product, share your business model, outline monetization strategies, and introduce your organizational capabilities to investors.
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Unlike a presentation you just share with the internal team, the best pitch decks should have both solid content and attractive visualization. To balance both aspects can be overwhelming even for serial entrepreneurs. This Ultimate Pitch Deck provides everything you need to impress, excite, and engage potential investors to continue an initial conversation into something bigger.
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This pitch deck follows a standard investor deck structure, which corresponds with the art of pitching. Typically, before getting into the ask or the nuts and bolts of how the business works, presenters should provide the audience with an empathetic story and validating context that shows how a pain point in the marketplace can be addressed. This pain point is the problem.
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For example, imagine you are the founder of a peer-to-peer digital payment platform. The problem to solve is the annoyance and difficulty of transferring money between individuals. It's a tedious and inconvenient process to pay your peers in cash. And if a large amount of money needs to be wired, banks or other transfer platforms typically charge service or transaction fees. No one wants to deduct this from their final payment. (Slide 3)
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If you prefer to break down the main problem into components with more details, you can also list them out as bullet points. In our example, the key problems are lengthy clearance time of wire payments, costliness of transaction and service fees, inconvenience of physical transactions, and inconsistency in personal bookkeeping. (Slide 4)
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Now that the problem is firmly established, move on to the solution. Use a 1-2 sentence statement that creates curiosity for what you do.
In our example, your digital platform offers a user-friendly, end-to-end solution that completes an individual's transactional needs and simplifies P2P transactions down to a process that takes under a minute. (Slide 5)
Similar to the problem slide, you can also go choose to more in-depth on the solution side to answer key aspects of like how you plan to accomplish the stated goal. In our example, we plan to simplify the payment process with a user-friendly interface, a ledger to track completed transactions, and an alert system for pending transactions. Users also have the option of instant deposit to get money to their bank account within minutes for a marginal fee. Users no longer have to visit physical banks. Senders and recipients don't even need to be in the same room. (Slide 6)
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Now we move on to the company overview: who you are and what you do. Founders can include a little background story to establish history, context, and inspiration. (Slide 7)
An alternative visualization focuses on quantifiable highlights and draws attention to important numbers like year founded, profit generated so far, other funding rounds, and team makeup. (Slide 8)
Next, introduce the team. Sometimes presenters like to put this slide more towards the end. In either case, the purpose of the team slide is to showcase your organizational talent and capabilities. List relevant credentials and experiences of key team members, instead of just their current job description. Investors need to be assured that the team is well-equipped with the right skill set and proven success to bring positive ROI. For example, our founding team has two decades of experience and built three startups in the past with aggressive growth trajectories and one successful exit. (Slide 9)
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Now, introduce the business model. This is all about how you make money and scale the business.
In our case, we take a small service fee from users who choose instant deposits. Since many in the US prefer credit cards over debit cards, we also charge a small transaction fee when payments are funded by credit cards. (Slide 10)
Now it's time to show the product that brings money to the table. For digital products, a demo or prototype is necessary to paint a better picture and show development progress, like a proof of concept. The product mockup is intended to showcase what the product is, how it looks, and even notable stats. For example, this could be an improvement in usability by 80%. (Slide 11)
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After that, present your value to customers. This is the value proposition that makes customers welcome your product and its uniqueness. (Slide 12)
It's only natural to back up what you believe customers would enjoy with positive testimonials, even better if with quotes. For a seed round, founders can include testimonials from early adopters or users who participated in prototype testing. For B2B businesses, list notable clients or companies that you've serviced. (Slide 13)
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Follow up the positive comments with market validation. Pull up key observations, trends, and data to prove that there is a time and place and, more importantly, need for your proposed solution. This could be a market cap, an overview of how much money has been poured into similar companies, a review of government subsidies, or something specific to the product or service.
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For our example, the number of how many traditional bank transactions are made every year could be included, along with a survey of how many bank customers answered that they prefer a simpler way. (Slide 14)
As part of the market validation, give an overview of your projected market size. Begin with the broadest tier, total addressable market, then narrow it down to serviceable market, and lastly the target market you aim to capture. (Slide 15)
Within the established target market, picture the target persona more in-depth. This is also known as the target demographic and usually includes a breakdown of gender, age and income distribution, as well as the qualitative value that's important to your target customers. (Slide 16)
Next up, show your traction and milestones thus far. This highlights numbers that show an upward trend and list your biggest wins. More importantly, it establishes the potential for future scalability in front of the investors. For example: how many transactions an app has had in the last 12 months, or of how many new users acquired, how many performed multiple transactions within six months of joining, etc. (Slide 17)
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You've talked about who you are, what you do, and who your target demographic is, so how do you plan to acquire more customers? Summarize your customer acquisition plan in three phases: during launch, during the critical growth stage, and once you're more established. (Slide 18)
In many cases, there are other front runners or big profit-makers that overlap with what you try to offer. Position them on a competitive matrix to demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses, and how you excel in certain qualities in comparison.
In this visualization, the x-axis is offline transactions vs online transactions, while the y-axis is affordable vs expensive services. Our competition that is both offline and expensive is the traditional banks. Companies that are online and expensive are other digital transfer services that dominate the marketplace. Meanwhile, our company is both affordable and online, and therefore in the ideal position to serve customers' needs. (Slide 20)
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For a more in-depth look at the competition, identify your biggest competitors and sort them from high competition to low. List their main characteristics with an eye on how to beat them.
In our case, we list the competition's transaction fee. We believe this is a good number to focus on because it highlights how inexpensive we are. You can also include other relevant data, such as revenue and year-to-year growth. (Slide 21)
One way to tackle skepticism is to actively address potential concerns with well-prepared responses.
For example, one concern for our app could be "what do you do if traditional banks launch a similar product with more resources?" In our case, we target a younger audience that prefers newer technology and is wary of traditional players who have abused their positions and refused to innovate.
From the customer's perspective, a potential concern could be "what if I need to send money to someone who doesn't use the same bank as I do?" Our response is "it's not required for the sender and the recipient to bank at the same institution." In fact, they don't even need to transact with the same form of payment. The sender can pay with credit and the recipient can receive the funds as a digital debit. (Slide 23)
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Looking ahead, share your plan for the coming three years. Especially for newly founded companies, the three-year plan has been a standard measure of success. Investors need to be reassured by a practical blueprint of the foreseeable future to consider putting their money into any new project. (Slide 24)
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Beyond the main goals of these three years, share more specific numbers and financial projections. Additional details can be visualized with a graph. The numbers in the table are also linked to an external spreadsheet. (Slide 26)
If you leverage strategic partnerships to deliver pivotal or substantial growth, make sure to include that information in the pitch. In our example, we plan to partner with a credit card company to offer our own card service to drive growth. (Slide 27)
A top concern for any investor is an exit strategy. In some cases, it could be an IPO consideration, or a highly viable M&A. When it comes to the M&A route, include more details and options in the blue box below. For example, as a P2P payment system, it might make sense to merge with a payment processor company or get acquired by a traditional bank that needs fintech to stay relevant. (Slide 35)
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Now it's time for the Ask. This is where you many the investment demand and how that money will be used. Let's say we plan to ask for $10M, of which 40% on software development, 40% on growth, 20% on operations. (Slide 36)
But why invest now? Go over the reasons with a roundup of your main selling points, some of which you already went over earlier, but it never hurts to remind. For example, those who invest now can benefit from first-mover advantage, backed by a strong market validation, simple business model, and highly scalable and competent product. (Slide 37)
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Lastly, don't forget a contact page and thank your audience. As you conclude your pitch, get ready to answer questions on the spot. (Slide 38)
We've also included a section of additional resources that could be helpful to include:
Pro-Forma spreadsheets are intended to help corporate individuals and entrepreneurs ready to propose a venture, display how much it will cost, how much revenue it will generate and at what point will cash flow become positive and the venture will reach its break-even point. (Slide 40)
Spreadsheet charts are collections of Excel friendly graphs and tables. You can find these in our resource library under Ultimate Charts (Part 1) and Ultimate Charts (Part 2) . (Slide 41)
Experiment with Video Backgrounds to create memorable visuals. Make your presentations more impactful with our Video Backgrounds (Part 2). (Slide 42)
Use KPI Dashboards to display progress and track financial information in greater detail: Use them to establish, communicate, and measure goals from financial performance to sales to marketing efforts. (Slide 43-48)
Finally, more product mockups for your demo. (Slides 49-59)