This is a fantastic time to found a startup, but unless you plan to bootstrap it, you will still need to go through the laborious exercise of crafting a pitch deck.
With so much riding on the outcome, this can be an extremely stressful process — a convincing deck requires you to come up with data-driven answers for existential questions:
Can you lay out your plan for tripling revenue YoY? What’s your ideal product use case?
It’s tempting to make overly sunny projections or copy what’s worked for others, but your pitch isn’t meant to impress — it’s supposed to show how well you understand the business you’re building and the space in which you’re operating.
According to Jose Cayasso, CEO and co-founder of pitch deck design agency Slidebean, there are five slides where pretty much all founders miss the mark:
- Go-to-market
- Use case/audience
- TAM
- Possible outcomes
- Team
Using examples from Airbnb, Uber and others, he shares several strategies for avoiding the most common pitfalls, along with the pitch deck framework Slidebean uses with most of its clients.
“Remember, a pitch deck needs to achieve two things: tell your company story and convince the investor that they can make money with this,” says Cayasso.
Thanks for reading; I hope you have an excellent weekend.
