Many founders make the mistake of thinking that creating the pitch deck is the same as creating the pitch itself. That isn’t the case on multiple levels. The “pitch” is about the story you are telling your investors. It is the answer to the question, “Why should I give you $3m to continue building your business?” The deck helps tell part of that story, but it isn’t the story itself. Crucially, you should be able to do your pitch to a VC firm without a pitch as a crutch.
Is design important?
A lot of my clients come to me and ask if I can help them with the graphical design of a pitch deck. The answer is “no”—you don’t want me anywhere near the crayons. At least, not if you wish to have a beautiful pitch deck. Lack of design skills aside, the importance of the design of pitch decks is often vastly overstated.
Think about your business as a whole—is design important? In the abstract, yes—there is no excuse for actively bad design, ever. But if you use a good pitch deck template, it’s pretty hard to have an aggressively lousy design. It doesn’t matter if you choose to use Keynote, PowerPoint, Google Slides, or any of the other tools out there; there are thousands of great pitch templates. Do some research, and find something that looks good to you. Is it possible that you end up pitching with a design that someone else has used to pitch your VCs? Sure. Does it matter? Probably not.
A pitch deck is all about conveying information. I’ve seen a bunch of extraordinarily effective pitches that had an extremely minimal design. I’ve also seen some rotten pitches where the pitch deck design was exquisite.
A simple, clean, no-frills design can work great. It gets the point across without distracting the viewer
A more visual approach can work well, too—as long as it helps tell part of the story. Image Source: sommersby/stock.adobe.com
Whether or not you invest in design at all depends on the kind of company you are running. If you are trying to raise money for a high-end consumer fashion brand or a luxury home automation brand aimed at consumers, your design had better be awesome. In those examples, great design is going to be an essential factor of whether or not your company is going to be successful. Lead with your strengths; make sure your pitch deck looks beautiful. If you are doing something more behind the scenes, the chances are that design plays a less important role in your business as a whole. Here are a couple of examples: Perhaps your company manufactures specialized computer chips for sub-sea cables, or you are creating a new type of insulation for industrial use. It would be prudent to invest in engineering rather than beautiful design in those cases, and nobody would hold it against you if your pitch deck were more straightforward.
If your company has a graphic designer as one of its first hires, you should probably have a beautiful pitch deck. If you do have access to design resources, you may as well use them. More importantly, the fact that you hired a designer in the first place indicates that design is a crucial aspect of your business, and it means it’s probably worth investing a bit of extra care and attention to the design aesthetic of the deck.
I should point out as well that deck design can be a pretty different discipline than many other forms of design. With my clients, I have seen deck design cause friction. A founder might assign the design to a skilled designer with little or no experience in this field. I encourage you to leave your designer the space to say “no” or to work with an external resource if they need to.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the design of everything you do should be stage appropriate. There is a considerable difference between if you are two people operating out of a co-working space, trying to scrape together a $250k pre-seed round, and if you are a 300-person company raising an $80m series B.
If you don’t have design resources in-house, I wouldn’t invest a lot in getting someone to design a beautiful deck. Why? Because investors aren’t stupid, and a well-designed presentation can be a contraindicator. In my experience, an extraordinarily beautiful pitch deck often tries to “hide” that there are holes in the business model or the pitch itself. Put differently, investors will gladly suffer a mediocre deck design that tells a fantastic story of a compelling startup. They won’t be fooled by a beautiful deck where the content (i.e., the business itself, or aspects of the company) is terrible.
What are the critical design points?
The basics of good deck design are pretty simple: Use simple colors. If you include photography, make sure they are of high quality. Avoid stock photography if you can—or if you have to use it, try to find photos that don’t look like they came straight out of a library. Eyeem.com is an excellent option for this; it means you can access a substantial Instagram-like library of “real” photography from talented photographers.
Use consistent fonts and font sizes—and bear in mind that you are probably tempted to include too much text on the slides. In Chapter 17, we will talk about the difference between a send-ahead deck and a presentation deck—know that there can be a lot of difference between the two.
As a rule of thumb, most slides should have fewer than 30 or so words on them. Make sure that the fonts are large—readable from across the room without squinting. In general, that means that if you have font sizes smaller than 30 points on your slide, think hard about whether that makes sense.
If you are creating a product, make sure you include recent product photography. If you’re making a SaaS product, include screenshots. Think carefully about how you present graphs and figures, too—when you are busy pitching, the investors will be studying the graphs, not listen to your pitch.
If you are going to include screenshots in your pitch, try to show them in context—on a computer, phone, or tablet, in the way the end user will be using them. These types of screenshots take a bit more time to produce, but it helps things come to live much better.
Should you include “builds”?
A novice mistake I see a lot is very complicated slide decks, where every slide has a lot of different “builds” or “reveals” in it. That makes sense when you are doing a keynote; being able to reveal content as you tell your story is helpful. In a pitch, however, that doesn’t really work.
Think about how you are using your pitch deck; it’s not a keynote. Your presentation is a conversation. I’ve never seen a pitch where a founder didn’t flick back and forth between slides regularly, to go back to a chart or graph, or to point out a detail of the product, or to flick to the appendix to tell an auxiliary part of the story. If your slide deck is 20 slides long, you are only ever 19 clicks away from the slide you are looking for. Complicated builds mean that you may have to click “next” dozens, if not hundreds, of times. That’s extremely stressful, and it gets in the way of having a good conversation. In short, don’t.
How to begin, and how to close
A closing slide or “any questions” slide is helpful, because your investors are probably going to be staring at it for a while as the discussion continues. Image Source: Fxquadro/stock.adobe.com
Make sure you have a final slide, too (Figure 3-3). It can be as simple as “Thank you” or “Any Questions?” with your contact details on it. The purpose of this slide is to make sure your investors aren’t looking at your final slide when they are thinking of what they are asking questions about. As we will talk about later in this book, your first slides will be your strong points. The corollary is that your final slides will be weaker. If your very last slide, which is your go-to-market slide, is weak, and it’s what is in front of people’s faces as they are asking questions, guess what, you’re going to get grilled on!