The 11 Slides of a Perfect Pitch Deck

All the elements investors need to understand our business

Illustration by Shafin Protic on Pixabay

The pitch deck is how startups introduce themselves to investors. It’s arguably even more important than the product itself, so we’d better make it compelling.

The pitch deck provides investors with a summary of our business. It needs to be comprehensive in scope, covering everything from the problem and solution to the business strategy to the investment terms. But each slide should be simple and succinct and together tell a cohesive story.

The goal of the pitch is not to cover every detail but to get investors excited about joining our journey. A successful pitch doesn’t get us a cheque from investors. But it’s a critical step in the process.

For a pitch to an investment group, we usually have 10–15 minutes to present, followed by 10–15 minutes for Q&A. That isn’t much time and there’s 11 separate topics to cover. That give us only about 1 minute for each topic and every one of them is important.

A successful pitch gets us to the next meeting, a half-day deep dive where we go into all the detail and answer all the questions that we didn’t have time for in the pitch.

The pitch deck is not about how great our product is or a technical review of how it…