1.    Intro: Who are you?

2.   Problem: What are you going to solve?

3.   Solution: How are you going to solve it?

4.   Target Market: Who wants it?

5.   Competitors: Can anybody else solve it?

6.   Product: Show how it works.

7.   Market Validation: Any sales/leads?

8.   Business Model: How does it make money?

9.   Financials: What do you forecast?

10. Fundraising: How much do you want?

11.  Team: Who are you working with? 

Alas, the truth is not so prescriptive.

“The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.”  
– Albert Einstein

Sure, the startups that pioneered this template have gone on to achieve great things, but it is not actually what got them the funding they needed.

Airbnb had 11 slides, Facebook had 22, Buzzfeed 15. The truth is, there is no perfect number of slides nor perfect structure. 

What set them apart from the countless forgetful pitches investors sit through every week was their ability to answer five simple questions:

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1.     Who are you?

2.    Why are you here?

3.    What are you going to do about it?

4.    Will it work?

5.    What do you need?

These are the chapters you need to tell your story; the foundation of every awesome pitch. How you order it and deliver it, that’s up to you. Judgements, considerations and decisions are made, not just on your answers to these questions, but how you’ve answered them.

This is where the hard work (and fun) begins.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.” 
– William Blake 

When talking to investors of any kind, it’s important to show the market size and impact your solution will give. That much is clear. What’s often missed is the tangible, contextual backbone that turns a pitch into a story they’ll care about.

People care about people. Tell me how your solution affects one person, give them a name and make me care about them, then tell me how many of them there are. We thought hard about this when preparing cybersecurity futurists Padlock for their winning pitch to MIT Future of Work.

They had a strict three minute time limit. Given these constraints, we went with a standard pitch structure — but used the framing device of a story to make the power of their solution real.

While their business is finding flexible work for skilled individuals in the cyber industry, we helped them focus their story on a single mother whose life they’d helped transform. She became the definition of the problem and, once we’d outlined their solution, the metaphor for what was possible.

The point is that big numbers melt into big numbers and become forgettable. While stories have the power to add empathy to abstraction — stories make numbers matter.

“Pitching to a room without knowing your audience is like sending a love letter addressed ‘To whom it may concern’.”
– Nancy Duarte 

A pitch deck that is agile is a pitch deck that wins. Ensuring your slides are tailored to the audience and touching on the issues that resonate with them = much more impact. So take the time, research your audience, make it to fit their needs.

For instance, when developing the pitch deck for an insurance tech company, we decided to split the deck in three: one for the insurers, one for the investors, one for the end users. Each had drastically different needs to address and expectations to subvert, so giving them the same one would’ve meant answering none of them fully.

In an ideal world, you’d know everything about your audience, and rebuild your deck for each presentation to directly address their problems. What are they looking for? What are their red flags? What do they expect? What did they have for breakfast? What are their views on Brex… you get the jist. But realistically, there’s only so much time in the world, and only so much their Facebook/LinkedIn page will tell you. So your ability to read the room will also make a difference.

“Ask for money and you’ll get advice, ask for advice and you’ll get money twice.” 
– Someone

Don’t focus on money, focus on buy-in. Sell your story and the money will come. Obsession over raising a specific amount of money often leads to entrepreneurs overselling their vision and striking out, or worse, getting in bed with the wrong investors.

Having an investor believe in your mission, rather than solely your profitability, always makes for a better marriage. A great way to achieve this is to put them in the shoes of the people you’re helping.

Make it impossible to not take notice. Innovate around the problem, the ‘why are you here’ beat. When we were designing the pitch for Love Language, we didn’t tell the audience the problem, we showed it to them, bringing attention to the disconnection deaf people experience in the workplace by starting the pitch with a deaf person presenting in sign, with no interpreter.

Simple. Creative. Impactful.

People can’t ignore the problem if they can’t understand the pitch. After that, the rest was simple — how many people does this affect, what’s the financial implication, what’s our solution? Starting with an immersion exercise served to give lived experience to an abstract concept, introducing our presenters and why they were there in one fell swoop.

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.
– Oscar Wilde