2023 Edition: Ultimate pre-seed pitch deck guide

Here is a summary of what we’ve learned:

Why does a pitch deck matter?

1. Share async over email to get the first meeting OR

2. Share sync in the first meeting to pique investor interest

In order to build conviction, we rely on founders to tell us a compelling story, almost always in the form of slides. We’ve funded companies almost entirely because of the quality of their seed decks. Poor deck? We’ll likely pass on the opportunity. ~ Delian Asparouhov, investor at Khosla Ventures

The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist. Why does the world need your company? Why do we need to be doing what we’re doing and why is it important? You can have a great product, but a compelling story puts the company into motion. The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better you make the strategy better. ~ Ben Horowitz, founder a16z

Overall advice and how to stand out

• 🕊️ Share a story, not just a deck: Keeping in mind the order of sections given below, start off by writing 10-15 headlines that sum up your startup and your story. And then begin building your slides. Remember, narratives are much easier to digest than lots of text, facts, and stats. Investors should be able to relate with your problem and product.

• 🕵️‍♂️ Option to deep-dive where required: Investors often have specific questions they’re looking to answer through your deck - both before and after your live presentation. Ensure that your deck contains answers to the most important questions upfront or in the appendix and can easily be discovered. At the same time, ensure you are not overloading them with too much information. They are spending ~2.5 mins per deck and prefer a summary of key points with the option to get more details where required (as one would do in a live/sync meeting).

• 📬 Include your contact info in the deck: Simple but often missed. Remember that your deck travels - among various investors in a VC and among angel investors. They need an easy way to reach out to you without having to dig deep in the email chain. It is best to mention your contact details on the first and the last page of the deck.

• ⌚ Always updated: The fundraising process generally takes a few months and involves pitching to multiple investors. Through this time, your early stage venture might progress quite a bit. It is good practice to ensure that all metrics, product images, infographics, and milestones are updated and everyone has access to the latest version of the pitch deck. You can also go one step further: Listen to investor feedback and questions after each meeting, identify gaps and update the deck with relevant information before the next chat.

• 💭 Share thoughts and assumptions: Investors recognize that there are many unknowns at the pre-seed and seed level. Therefore they are often testing your logic (e.g., with market sizing) and not that the number itself. At the same time, remember that more generalist the investor, the more detail they may require to understand context (e.g., if revenue expectations are lower in your industry, a generalist might need to hear that).

• 🎯 Practice before you pitch: Do a few rounds of practice run-throughs of the pitch deck with 2-4 people in your network who know and understand the process (investors, founders, ex-founders, etc.) to iron out the key points and eliminate the most obvious mistakes.

Ideal order of sections in a successful pitch deck

Section wise guide into what you should be covering

♥️ Company Purpose (Top 3 in time spent)

Ideal section length: 1 page

Start with the grandest statement you can make about your startup’s impact on the future. The key question to answer is ‘What does the company ultimately aim to do?’ in a single declarative sentence. It is harder than it looks. You should avoid any feature level references and focus on the bigger picture.

 

 

Some founders support this with a personal story voiceover on why they are uniquely placed to achieve this goal.

It is important to be thoughtful and concise as you craft your company purpose as this section now has the third longest viewing time of any pre-seed deck section. Many investors use this as an early filter to form an opinion about the deck and the venture.

 

“If you can’t tell a credible and compelling story about your vision and how your plans will capitalize on broader societal, market, cultural, economic or other trends, you’re dead in the water. I believe my own secret to fundraising success was that I always spoke to the broader changes I saw happening in the world and my conviction about the opportunities they presented.” — Eoghan McCabe, co-founder Intercom

 

⏳ Why now?

Ideal section length: 1-2 pages

Use this section to highlight if there are any direct and relevant trends that either create a unique opportunity (e.g., Fast internet for Netflix) OR a new need (e.g.,Rise in the number of devices for Dropbox). If you do not have direct and relevant market conditions fostering your solution, feel free to EXCLUDE this section from the deck. (Only ~60% of successful pre-seed decks have this section in the deck)

 

Here are five sources of why now identified by Lenny Rachitsky:

1. Ubiquity of a new technology (e.g., WebGL for Figma)

2. Newly available data or APIs (e.g., Gmail APIs for Superhuman)

3. Changes in regulation (e.g., Change in telemedicine laws for hims)

4. Change in people’s behavior (e.g., Rise of e-sports for Twitch)

5. Change in people’s beliefs (e.g., Reducing trust in big banks for Robinhood)

 

🏔️ Market size

Ideal section length: 1-2 pages

Showcase the current market size and the estimated potential for the company over the next 5-10 years. It is recommended to cover all three - TAM, SAM, SOM - in your analysis. Demonstrate that you are solving a big problem and the addressable market is big enough to warrant venture funding (Caveat: VCs have seen enough to know that TAM can expand over time and do not pass on this alone).

 

TAM (Total Addressable Market): How big is the largest market you could ever capture?

SAM (Serviceable Available Market): How big is the market you can capture in the medium term (keeping in mind geographical, resource, product constraints)

SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market): How big is the market you can capture in the short term (keeping in mind geographical, resource, product constraints)

 

✨

At the seed round, Docsend found that the market size section tends to be very closely linked to the purpose/problem/solution sections--these four should be thought of as tightly interwoven when hooking investors with your opening slides. Keep calculations handy so that you can share them with investors when required. Ideally, you can link your Excel sheet to your pitch deck, so that investors have dive deep if they desire.

 

Further reading:

TAM SAM SOM

Double your ML performance with Surge AI - a data labeling platform for AI - used by Google, Twitch, and Stanford. We provide the tools and an elite workforce in 20+ languages so you can stop managing labeling projects or labeling data yourself and ship great products.

https://productmindset.substack.com/p/tam-sam-som

Market Sizing Guide - Pear VC

A startup's potential scale is bound by its future market size, and consequently "what is your market size?" is one of the determining questions that most VCs ask early stage entrepreneurs. Why does market size matter? How to estimate your market size? What is the exact definition of market size?

https://pear.vc/market-sizing-guide/

🚀 Traction

Ideal section length: 1-3 pages

Traction helps investors solidify conviction. Notable traction at the pre-seed stage can put you in the driving seat during investor conversations. It is NOT necessary to have users using your actual product, but even 50-70 active users can make an exponential difference to the outcome of the investment discussion.

• If you don’t have a working prototype: You can showcase feedback on early wireframes, letters of intent, community response, and strength of the waitlist (A combination of #people and relevant personas)

• If you have a product/working prototype: You can showcase user testimonials, beta feedback, customer product usage analysis, results of any alpha/beta tests.

 

Note: If you are sharing about your waitlist it is good to share how you grew that waitlist, how you will work through that waitlist, and how you will grow it in a repeatable manner.

 

Further reading:

Pitch Deck Pointers Part 8: The Traction Slide

At Innovation Bay, we've seen thousands of pitch decks. We've hosted hundreds of pitch events and always work with founders to hone their deck before presenting to investors. These experiences sparked the creation of the Pitch Deck Pointers series. We wanted to reach founders outside of our events and help them perfect their pitches.

https://innovationbay.medium.com/pitch-deck-pointers-part-8-the-traction-slide-ac387e0778c6

🔍 Competition

Ideal section length: 1 page

Investors want to understand both the direct and indirect competition for your product. Use this section to highlight your key differences with each cluster of competitors without going into too much feature-level detail. The investors want to understand HOW your solution is unique and IF it can be a 10x improvement as compared to existing alternatives.

 

One way to showcase this is a competition landscape. It receives some ridicule on social media, but helps showcase the two to three key ways in which you will differentiate your solution compared to competition. Another is to use a table to include all competitors and mark the key value propositions with a check mark.

 

Reference: You can create a standard chart or try something completely new

How do you build an enduring multi billion dollar business: 10x product experience

🤝 The Ask

Ideal section length: 1 page

This is the last page of the deck. And your opportunity to close on a high by showcasing that you are thoughtful and strategic. Use this section to demonstrate:

• HOW MUCH you plan to raise in the round → Tied to the key metric that you plan to reach with it (e.g., 1000 paid users, 10k DAUs, High NPS etc.)

• HOW do you plan to spend that money → Keep it high level (e.g., talent, marketing, R&D)

• TIMELINE for your next few milestones → To show that you are utilizing the money well and will get to the next funding round with enough money in the bank (Here’s some reference on how long it takes to find product market fit)

 

Further reference:

Pitch Deck Pointers Part 10: The Ask Slide

The finish line is in sight: we've reached the last slide in our Pitch Deck Pointers series. At Innovation Bay, our mission is to help startup founders along their journey, and we hope that this series has proved a useful fundraising resource. Thanks to our many friends in venture capital who contributed their expertise to Pitch Deck Pointers.

https://innovationbay.medium.com/pitch-deck-pointers-part-10-the-ask-slide-ea02407fa356

The 2023 pitch investor pack (Pro max version!)

1. 📧 The first email communication: Most investors have a few hygiene questions to answer before they invest more time. Share a short blurb about your startup (covering what it does, key traction numbers if any, and details about the team). Along with this share a short teaser deck or Notion doc (covering problem, solution, product, team, competition, FAQs etc.). Some founders choose to attach a short 3-5 min Loom video showcasing the product. Remember that the pitch deck is your first impression, an opportunity to get a foot-in-the-door and not a place to ‘reveal all your cards’.

2. 🤝 The live pitch presentation: A longer presentation deck (10-15 slides) with non-critical sections in the appendix. Most investors would have already referred to your material, formed an opinion, and decided on the themes that they want to discuss with you live. Unless there are big knowledge gaps to get over - most investors focus on building a relationship and promote organic conversation and so the pitch deck is an aid, not the focus. It is recommended to keep majority of the time for open discussion than a pitching exercise.

3. 🗃️ The post-pitch share: You will have discussed a few topics in-depth during the live pitch. It is good practice to share a more thoughtful answer to those already-answered critical questions and/or answer any open questions which weren’t fully covered in the chat. You can also update your original pitch deck basis the questions you receive from investors most frequently. Sometimes you will get asked for your supporting numbers, sometimes not (e.g., market size, market wedge opportunity, traction, etc.). It helps if you ask your prospective investors in the first meeting whether they need it.

Some more resources to refer and get inspiration

A playbook for fundraising

Hello, I'm Lenny and welcome to a free monthly edition of my weekly newsletter. Each week I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that's stressing you out at the office. If you're not a paid subscriber, here's what you missed this month: P.S.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-playbook-for-fundraising

30 Legendary Startup Pitch Decks (+10 Free Templates)

MapMe allows users to create universally accessible (i.e., on smartphones, tablets, and computers) maps of anywhere they want with no coding required. This deck was used to raise their $1 million in seed funding. Social proof almost always work. The deck showed that the startup had over 20,000 unique visitors, 18,000 monthly alerts, 12 minutes average sessions on the site.

https://piktochart.com/blog/startup-pitch-decks-what-you-can-learn/

How to raise money before launch

An analogy we use at KV is that building a company is like laying cement. Early on the cement is liquid and malleable - you can stir it around with your hands. As time passes, the cement hardens. Once it solidifies, adjustments require a jackhammer. And jackhammering leads to cracks and lots of noise.

https://medium.com/@zebulgar/how-to-raise-money-before-launch-a3544ef4dba6

The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen

A few months ago, my friend Tim took a new sales job at a Series C tech company that had raised over $60 million from A-list investors. He's one of the best salespeople I know, but soon after starting, he emailed me to say he was struggling.

https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-ever-seen-4f4ef3391ba0

Starting your fundraising pitch deck

Nobody starts a company because they love fundraising. But for many companies, accelerating a venture-scale business requires millions-or billions-of dollars worth of capital. Unfortunately, building fundraising decks and pitching investors are not skills that founders develop before starting a company; they're learned by doing.

https://stripe.com/en-in/guides/atlas/pitchdeck