
What we learned from designing 200 pitch decks - technotony
http://www.sketchdeck.com/blog/what-we-learned-from-designing-200-pitch-decks
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Animats
Somebody should run a recursive deep ANN on pitch decks to optimize for money
raised, and see what it comes up with as the optimal pitch deck.

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pcrh
See this thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9687696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9687696)

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lukas
Has anyone here used this service? It looks pretty interesting. I've tried to
get an outside service to improve my pitch decks several times but the results
were never as good as calling a buddy who worked at McKinsey.

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danieltillett
That is a pretty high bar - I may have a misunderstanding of what McKinsey
does, but I thought that they specialized in powerpoint presentations.

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cgio
They do and are pretty good at it (competition here but respect where it is
due.) I bet they do not like it though, and only see it as a necessary part of
their job, not the core of their offering.

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danieltillett
I am sure. I can bet it will cost a lot more than $1100 to get them to make a
pitch deck for you :)

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garagemc2
People spend $1100 getting their decks designed!?

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NeutronBoy
That's barely two days worth of effort for a regular employee. $1100 to get a
deck designed doesn't seem outrageous, considering what's riding on it.

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biot
I just did the same calculation. Put another way: if you're currently at a job
and looking to leave for your own startup, then stay at that job another three
days. With the after-tax money you earn, pay a professional to do a massively
better job than you're likely able to do. Totally worth it.

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lifeisstillgood
My takeaways:

What matters more than anything else is honing down the story to its barest,
honest minimum. Then it can fit in a slide deck quite easily.

Until you understand why your take on the world matters to the rest of the
world, you cannot make a deck no matter how good your design skills are.

Fortunately that came through nice and strong in this article.

Oh, and use blue ...

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andrewbinstock
This article really doesn't say anything about which decks were successful.
They simply state here's what they / their customers did most often.

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timr
From personal experience: a poorly designed slide deck with great growth
numbers beats a well-designed slide deck with bad numbers or no numbers.

The numbers you need, in descending order of preference:

1) profit

2) revenue

3) DAU / MAU (or paying customers)

4) traffic (or some metric for "interested future customers")

Obviously, the less strong/preferable your numbers, the better your
intangibles need to be. If you're walking into the room with a mediocre
traffic growth graph, your story had better be earth-shattering, or otherwise
tickle an investor's private parts in some specific way.

Once you get to series A, your job is to show that those numbers are not only
sustainable (via business metrics), but also that you're ready to make them go
up _faster_ by taking a big pile of money. This is much (probably 10x) harder.
That's why the series A decks have more metrics and slides.

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idlewords
I like products like this because they distill the concept of "investor
storytime" to its essence. Raising a funding round (in my cynical view) is the
ultimate in high-touch enterprise sales. You have a small number of potential
customers, but you only need to land one. It's worth spending an enormous
amount of time and effort closing the sale.

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EGreg
Indeed. Sometimes a startup's first main customer is the lead investor, and
all the early results, market analysis etc is for that. You can approach it
like enterprise sales. The product is the exit. Most of the time this is a
great approach when you are planning to exit soon ("flip" the company) as
opposed to building the next Facebook. The latter is done out of love and not
necessarily profit, which makes it more likely to be self-funded until it gets
big.

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alangfiles
For 'Series A pitch decks are longer than seed decks' graphic, the 18 slide
deck should really be more aligned with the 5th slide, to get a truer sense of
proportion.

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curiousjorge
How about no decks at all? Why not just bootstrap your way to your first 1~10
million dollars and then be in a much more dominant position when it comes to
trading cash for equity?

You could literally be able to walk from any VC. You could ask for absolutely
every set of conditions that puts you in favor. You could have complete
control.

To me I think that is an invaluable asset to have, being the one with control
not your investors whim. They should consider it an honor to be able to invest
in you. You will be able to ask for far more. You run the business for your
vision not theirs. You ultimately have more control over your destiny than
being focused on burning cash fast to keep your investors happy and then
looking for more of them before you run out.

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danieltillett
As someone who bootstrapped themselves to this point (it did take me 15 years
and quite a few detours) I do agree that not having outside investors is very
nice. Having said this it is not an easy or quick way to build a business.

