Competent entrepreneurs can explain their company in terms of what the product does. Good entrepreneurs can explain their company in terms of their customer and their market. Funded entrepreneurs can pitch their company in terms that an investor can relate to.
What’s Your Story? Pitch Deck Flow
Career Advice – Grad School Angst
Not everybody I deal with in the start-up world knows of my secret past-life. To frame this post, it is necessary to come clean and fess up that I am a recovered corporate and securities lawyer. Because I am one of the ones “who got out,” I get a ton of requests give career advice to grad students or speak on career panels. I was even a chapter in a terrific book on the subject.
Since it feels inefficient to repeat myself, and I can help more people by putting it out there in writing, here’s one recent exchange that is so complete and contains so many concepts I repeatedly touch on over and over (including big cosmic themes at the end), that it is worth just republishing verbatim and unedited (except to hide real names). [Read more…]
Pitch Deck Basics
Creating and delivering a great pitch requires both using the right building blocks and putting them together properly. I cover the more advanced topic of crafting an effective deck here, but first you need to understand the building blocks. (If executive summaries are your hang-up, I dealt with them here, and I’ve talked about the importance of keeping a pitch deck lean here, and about the importance of practicing your delivery here.)
Reminder – You Need Two Versions
Before we do anything, we need to be clear about one thing: you should have two different versions of your deck – one that has lots of white space and relatively few words that you use as a back-drop to a live presentation, and one that has enough words that it can stand on its own if you need to email it to someone. Never email the first type or present from the second type. And don’t try to get by on just one version. Both mistakes are going to lead to bad results.
MetaData
Probably the single most important data to include in your deck is your contact info – list every single means of getting in touch with you. Sounds like a given, but the stories I could tell you… Second helpful thing to consider is a small compact box somewhere with some basic metadata about the company: website, stage of development, capital raised, capital seeking, lawyers, accountants, key investors, date founded. That meta data can be at the end, but it is pretty handy right at the beginning in a quick facts slide or quick facts box.
Main Contents of Your Deck
What does the deck need to have in it? The deck should talk about the following items – no more, no less. Any order you think makes sense. And it should cover them in a 10-15 slide deck that can be delivered in 10- 15 minutes:
1. Customer Problem
- description of customer pain
- how you solve it – concept & key elements
2. Overview of your Product/Solution
- what you do & for whom
- why it’s compelling
3. Key Players:
- founders & key team members
- key advisors
- industry backgrounds, expertise
4. Market Opportunity:
- market size
- market growth characteristics
- market segmentation
- why you can grow faster than the market and the competition
5. Competitive Landscape
- current and future competitors
- detailed chart on competitive feature sets
- summary of your sustainable competitive advantages
6. Go-To-Market Strategy
- how you will sell your product/solution
7. Stage of Development & Key Milestones
- product development
- customer acquisition
- partner relationships
8. Critical Risks & Challenges
- what can go wrong and how you plan to manage it
9. Financial Projections
- five years out (and you must show Yr5 mid-case, worst case and best case with key assumptions)
- how much time & money it will take to get to cash flow break-even
10. Exit Options
- categories of likely buyers
- rationales
- list of specific likely buyers
- comparables with valuation multiples
11. Funding Requirements
- how much you presently seek
- how much runway it will give you
- what you are going to use it for
- what milestones it will allow you to achieve
- why your company will be more valuable when you reach each milestone
Beyond that, you really don’t want or need much. You can add an appendix covering some details on certain subjects you want to have handy in case you get asked, but that is about it. Trying to do much more is not going to make your pitch more effective, it is going to merely draw it out and increase the likelihood that you will not get through it, which can be the kiss of death. Remember details can be drawn out in the Q&A and during subsequent due diligence, so it is not appropriate to go into depth in the pitch; instead you should focus on covering all of the key elements so you get the next meeting.
Couple Final Notes on Mechanical Construction and Delivery
Do not use complicated animations or builds in your deck – they make it very hard to go backwards if you need to. Do not build in any internet-dependent content such as demos or videos – the projecting machine may not be connected to the internet and even if it does have a nice fast connection it may not have a player for your codec or there may be no provision for audio. You should also plan ahead to avoid last minute changes to your deck – planning to “swap in a newer draft” when you arrive can be a mess – AV fumbling while everyone waits for you makes an unprofessional first impression and wastes your presentation time.
You may want to avoid exotic presentation programs like Prezi. Even PowerPoint can be pretty buggy on some machines. Consider converting your deck into PDF format and sending both that and PPT, but check the PDF conversion before sending to make sure it didn’t introduce any embarrassing font substitutions or wacky line breaks. Keep it simple – this pitch is about you as much as anything. Do not plan to spend time on product demos – perhaps a couple screenshots if necessary to understand the product, but you do not have time for demos. Plan for the worst in terms of screen size: do not use any small font sizes – keep it large and legible. And finally, bring multiple copies of your presentation different memory sticks, just in case, as well as your own remote control – one you are familiar with. If it makes more sense to use one that is provided, get familiar with it before starting so you don’t get flustered and make a hash out of your presentation.
Now you can go read about the crafting of an effective and compelling deck.
Comments, questions or reactions to this post? Leave a note below and I will respond to your questions.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my other posts on Angel Investing, Communication, Entrepreneurship, Video Interview Series, or my recent curated links you might have missed on: Investing & Entrepreneurship.
Subscribe – To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe to the RSS feed here, or to receive them via email enter your address in the box in the upper right or go here and enter your email address in the box in the upper right. You can also follow me on Twitter @cmirabile and on Google+.
Start-Up Marketing (Guest Post – Seven in a Series)
Jeff Berman has agreed to contribute a series on marketing for startups to the Scratchpaper community. This is the seventh in the series (table of contents here). Stay tuned for more.
How to Botch Marketing #6:
Your Positioning vs. Your Why
The Story of Positioning
Fifty year ago, Ivory Soap dominated its category with its “99.44/100% pure” line. No one could compete with Ivory on clean, and so everyone else was fighting for 2nd place. Then, along came Ted Bates & Co., who positioned Dove Soap around moisturizing rather than cleanliness. Dove became the #1 brand in a blink, suddenly every marketer was scrambling to define their Unique Selling Proposition, and the idea of positioning became the rage.
What the Positioning Story Misses [Read more…]
The Why and How of Updating Your Angel Investors (Guest Post)
Ty Danco and Dharmesh Shah recently published an excellent guide for entrepreneurs on communicating with investors. They have given me their permission to share it here.
The Why and How of Updating Your Angel Investors
There’s a massive amount available on the interwebs on how to improve the odds for success in new ventures. But almost nothing concrete is available on the care and feeding of your investors. You can do all of the Lean Startup experimentation you want, but we’re here to tell you that one of the the easiest and most underrated skills that a startup CEO needs is knowing how to keep your investors updated, excited and engaged.
The reason is: The CEO is the investor’s user interface into the business. It’s how investors see what’s going on, and in some minimal ways, interact with the business.
We polled several early stage investors (including ourselves) that have 30+ investments each under their belts, and asked them their advice for entrepreneurs on how best to communicate with them and update them on the business. Here are the results. [Read more…]
Dave McClure – Angel Video Interview Series
[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community – see a list of links to the full series here.]
If you have seen Dave McClure do any public speaking, you have been in a room of people at least mildly shocked by what he had to say. Dave is nothing if not colorful in terms of how he expresses himself, both in person and in writing. I always get a kick out of watching him do his stuff, so it was a natural priority to add him to the Angel Video Interview Series.
Dave is a very well-known super-angel and the founder and general parter of 500 Startups, an internet seed fund and accelerator based in Mountain View, California. He’s an engineer and a marketer, working in both roles at PayPal, and has personally invested in 60-70 companies on his own, including some big name companies: Mint, SlideShare, Twilio, Bit.ly, and Jambool. Through 500 Startups, he has done almost another 500 or so more.
Dave spent some time running the seed activities at Founders Fund and running the Facebook Fund fbFund. In recent years Dave has turned his focus to the international market announcing 500 Startups expansion into Mexico and India. For a globe trotting venture captialist, he is a pretty fun, hilarious and down-to-earth guy. We talked in April 2013 in San Francisco. Here’s what he had to say. (Email subscribers, click here for the video).
Comments, questions or reactions to this post? Leave a note below and I will respond to your questions.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy: Angel Video Interview Series, The Long Road to Instant Success, Thoughts on Crowdfunding, The Crowdfunding Interview (Frank Peters Show), Pattern Matching Can Cause Blindspots, Getting Off The Ground; Early Formation Economics, Pitch Clinic at MassChallenge (Video), Why Angels Chase Electrons, Boards vs. Advisory Boards, Delusional Economics, Ten Rules For Navigating in The Age of Outrage, That Vision Thing, The Power of An Advisory Board, Loch Ness, Unicorns & The First-Mover Advantage, Are Entrepreneurs Wild Risk-Takers?, Top 20 Dos & Don’ts with Angel Groups & Early Stage Financing, What I Look For In An Entrepreneur, The Overture, Do The Right Thing, Open Forum with Angel, Seed and VC Investors (Video), Should I Wait For A Technical Co-Founder?, and 20 Bootstrapping Ideas.
Subscribe – To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe to the RSS feed here, or to receive them via email enter your address in the box in the upper right or go here and enter your email address in the box in the upper right. You can also follow me on Twitter @cmirabile and on Google+.
Start-Up Marketing (Guest Post – Six in a Series)
My good friend Jeff Berman has agreed to contribute a series on marketing for startups to the Scratchpaper community. This is the sixth in the series (table of contents here). Stay tuned for more.
How to Botch Marketing #5: Just Copy What The Category Leader Says
Hey, if it works for the #1 brand in the category, it will work for you, right?
Before deciding on a me-too marketing strategy, try this thought experiment: [Read more…]
Start-Up Marketing (Guest Post – Five in a Series)
My good friend Jeff Berman has agreed to contribute a series on marketing for startups to the Scratchpaper community. This is the fifth in the series (table of contents here). Stay tuned for more.
How to Botch Marketing #4:
Start By Telling People How It Works
The whole point of marketing is to get your prospects to pay attention to your message, to sit up in their chairs and turn on the front part of their brains and take in what you have to say. You need to constantly remind yourself that most people are actively trying to tune you out.
Marketing is getting people pay attention to you when they would rather not.
The Problem With How-It-Works Messages [Read more…]
Nailing The One Minute Pitch
A couple weeks ago I was asked to speak to a large group of entrepreneurs about building a good one minute pitch.
First point I made was about the mechanics: the bare bones every thorough pitch must include: [Read more…]