5 HUGE investor pitch deck mistakes to AVOID!
You’ve come up with an idea for the next game changing business or concept. Excellent! Perhaps you’ve already put a beta-test into action or been running the project, business or venture for a while and are ready to jet propel it. Exciting! Or maybe, like Jeff Bezos in the earlier days of Amazon, you know that without a big increase in available growth capital, you’re due to grind to a halt? Nail biting! Or maybe, just maybe, after years of doing the hard yards of building and growing a profitable business, you’re ready to sell a bit of it off to an outside investor and exit some of that sweet company value in the form of a tidy little pot of cash. Good for you!
Whichever of these situations you currently find yourself in (and for a host of other reasons too varied to mention), you need one final piece of the puzzle to make your dream a solid, tangible reality. You need an investor pitch deck! Yet, as a sage business philosopher more than likely waxed lyrical somewhere on the internet – potentially on their ‘free seminar’, designed to upsell you to the $10,000 dollar a ticket version – “no two investor pitch decks were created equal”. Not only is this article designed to save you that $10K learning curve, but better still, it will attempt to do so in five simple steps. Without realising it, you’ve just encountered one of them, albeit subliminally. Mystical, huh?
What follows are the 5 HUGE (yes, they are that big!!) mistakes that start-ups make when creating their investor pitch decks. Yes, it would’ve been far more upbeat and positive to have named this, ‘the 5 best things to include in your investor pitch deck’, but let’s be honest – you never would have clicked that, right? Grabbing attention through hyperbole alone is a sure-fire way to lose credibility, be it with an investor, client or even your therapist - and if you don’t have one of those yet, don’t worry, bringing on venture capital money will speed that process along. However, grabbing attention and then backing it up with both style and substance is the name of the game when it comes to great investor pitch decks. So, with that in mind, let’s get to our list - as I attempt to maintain my own credibility with you in the process. Wish me luck!
Number 1: Missing the opportunity to tell a great story
Be it a Ted Talk or even a job interview, getting your target audience invested from the offset is vital for building both interest and rapport. Most humans subconsciously connect to narrative far easier than they do to cold, hard facts alone. From cave paintings to religion, all the way to the nightly news, stories can be found literally everywhere. Not to mention that their effectiveness in getting across big ideas (like, the biggest of all ideas) should be underestimated be absolutely no one! Alas, it is here where many a budding entrepreneur falls short in creating an investor pitch deck and subsequent VC fund raising presentation that leaves their audience speechless – and for all the right reasons.
Even in the world of sales (which you’re entering as soon as you pitch an investor with your deck), you’ll find a version of this notion taught. In the widely used sales technique ‘feel, felt, found’, the seller uses a system of narrative (either real or fictional) to address a buyer’s fears or apprehensions about purchasing a service or product. In this approach, rather than coldly countering the buyers concerns by stating that they are unfounded, the seller will do something very different. First the seller will express that they understand how the buyer feels. Then they will talk about another customer who had the same problem (the narrative begins) and detail how that person felt. Finally, the salesperson will conclude with what this external person (often a figment of their own imagination) found as a result. Spoiler alert – they found that the potential buyers perceived issue was incorrect all along and are now delighted that they made the purchase. That sound you hear in the distance is someone else reading this at the same time as you and taking a hammer to their newly acquired double glazing.
In short, far too many entrepreneurs forget that behind all good investment pitches and snazzy investor pitch decks is a sales proposition. A sales proposition with a far higher rate of success when peppered with the added assist of a little storytelling. Regardless of if that simply means adequately summing up the current market and a gap that you’ve found, an average potential customer’s current issue with your rival, or a new discovery you’ve stumbled upon which could change the world – make your audience feel it, not just think it. In this endeavour, an engrossing yet succinct narrative is invariably your new best friend.
Oh, and your investor pitch deck design itself should be a continuation of this approach too. All good stories should have a beginning, middle and an end - leaving room here and there for the audience to take a much-needed breather and gather their thoughts. If the start of the movie is too slow, the audience might give up on it early. If the middle is overly dull, they could fall asleep. If the ending is flat, they may leave the theatre feeling disappointed. Regularly get the audience on the edge of their seat but not for so long or that they fall off it – just like all really good stories should do. This fundamental rule of viewer engagement applies regardless of if you’re presenting in person, or simply sending your investor pitch deck via email attachment. Sure, you might not be making the next Avatar. Yet this deck is still the storyboard of your entire future business.
Number 2: Not enough attention to a wider vision
Now that you’ve got them hooked with a great story (felt), this is the moment to illustrate what you’ve found. Or, put another way, to sell them the vision. As we’ve already covered (see religion), a great narrative structure, along with an equally compelling vision, can move mountains - or at least continents and vast swathes of people. Irrespective of if you’re pitching an investor to come onboard with your ground-breaking, web3 innovation, or a local village bakery, the same rule applies – money flows, where vision goes. Expect to hear that in an online seminar near you soon!
Investors care about details, sure. However, at the pitch deck stage, this is far less important than most budding start-ups might first assume. I personally know investors that read upwards of five hundred decks per year. Out of those five hundred, only around twenty percent make it to the stage where deep, granular detail is truly needed. To even reach this more meticulous stage of assessment (known as due diligence), a pitch deck, idea or business needs to stand out. The premier tool for doing so is called… vision. Having it, utilising it and then clearly articulating it. Having just one or two of these, without the full set being present, is a major reason for many a great pitch deck ending up in the digital dustbin.
Number 3: Far too much information
Ok, so this might feel like cheating a little, as in some ways it’s an extension of what just came before it. However, it’s so important that it truly needs its own section – reiteration or not. Have you heard of the ‘too, too, too’ principle? I hope not. I just made it up this second. Yet, if it were to exist, it would go a little something like this.
Too many pitch decks spend too much time forcibly inserting too much information.
I didn’t claim to be Shakespeare. Yet hopefully I still managed to make my point in one fell swoop. Or even a foul one, whichever you prefer. Yes, key information is critical for making sure that your vision appears more than a mere (midsummer nights) daydream. Yet too much information and your audience will be left feeling like they just watched Hamlet. For context, it’s four freaking hours!! As this Shakespeare diatribe has hopefully proven, knowing when to shut up and move on is key to keeping an engaged audience.
For those of you that are still reading – thanks! Remember, any investor worth their salt will have their own due diligence team, who LOVE reading all the gory details. The point of your pitch deck is not to cater to them but…to even get to them in the first place. If your pitch deck operates like a magic spell that puts its readers into a coma, that ‘fun’ part won’t happen. In closing, finding the right balance between no specifics at all and far too many, is vital. Thus, the lack of such equanimity (balance for show offs) is often where many aspiring Steve Job’s come, unstuck or worse still, ignored by their desired investment target altogether.
Number 4: The wrong balance of style versus substance
The subject of balance rears its head again here, but this time under a different, yet equally critical guise. I’ve heard experienced investors describe a pitch deck they just viewed as, “nothing more than a glorified picture book”. Unless the business being pitched is one that creates picture books, this is obviously not a compliment. On the other hand, I’ve also heard investors (sometimes the exact same ones) describe a pitch deck as ‘too dry’ or ‘mind-numbingly drab’. Once again… not the feedback you desire. The answer, my entrepreneurial friends, is to expertly walk the line between both style and substance simultaneously.
As we’ve already discovered, the style is where you can best focus on elements such as narrative or vision. In fact, the entire look and feel of your brand or business should literally be dripping off every page. Yet, flawlessly interspersed amongst your eye-catching pictures, imaginative info graphics and textbook colour scheme integration, should be something else - details, facts and text that REALLY matter! The size of the market. The number of Google searches for a specific product. Your revenue targets or current income - unless it’s tiny. All of these kinds of detail are perfect for some big, bold text. Then, use your smaller text beneath it for the relevant context to each headline. Just make it count! Think about a newspaper or even this article when doing so and remember these four simple steps.
- Grab their attention with style
- Pique their interest with headlines
- Gain their buy-in with substance
- Don’t bore them with minutia
Number 5: Showing that you can’t actually follow-through
OK, now this is the part where I need to clearly state a conflict of interest. Yes, I myself create pitch decks. However, that’s not my main business. My main business is to both create my own businesses in various sectors and also, invest into others. This means that while I may sound like I’m merely selling you a service, I’m in fact sharing my experience from being on all sides of investor/investee equation. In fact, I only learned how to make my own pitch decks because they were costing me so much to pay someone else to do - designers who often couldn’t fully grasp what I needed the pitch deck to say, through their lack of real world business experience. Worse still, were the countless clients which I lost out on, simply because I couldn’t justify spending thousands of pounds, often on a punt, to try and win them over. Learning how to make my own decks solved this. Although, for full transparency, I had been involved in working alongside graphic designers for decades, co-creating artwork that lured in millions of customers over that time period, meaning that I did have a head start of sorts – even if I’d never made an actual pitch deck before. Yes, I’m writing this for a website that makes pitch decks for people just like you, but hopefully as you’ll see from my other articles, I’m not going to tell you that you need to spend fortunes on one if you don’t really need to do so.
So, with that out of the way, please take what I’m about to say as an extension of this list and not dubious sales patter with an ulterior motive. I’ve invested in several businesses myself without ever seeing a pitch deck – true story. I’ve also turned down many that have had a great one. To say that you can’t get investment without an investor pitch deck is demonstrably untrue. However… as current business norms go, by and large, a pitch deck is what’s expected and as such, this is basis of my final point.
If you short-change your deck, throwing something of substandard quality together with little thought, effort or vision, you’re inadvertently sending a very negative signal to investors. It’s sadly a signal about a lack of effort or real follow-through. Think about it for a moment. Why would I trust you to value my money, when you can’t be bothered to spell check? Why do I think you’ll put effort into building a lasting brand with customers (which takes years) when you couldn’t be motivated to create an engaging pitch deck for me – which only takes hours or days at most? No matter what business you’re pitching, all businesses involve selling. Nothing speaks louder about a founder’s ability to sell, than the way in which they sell their own business to a potential investor. A pitch deck is frequently the clearest indicator a venture capital fund manager has of ascertaining your ability to sell them on what you later hope to sell to your customers. Don’t underestimate its power to speak just as loudly as any audible word ever can. GET IT RIGHT!
If you want to know what YOU should be paying for an investor pitch deck or even if it’s better to have a crack for yourself, read my article about that exact subject on this website.
Also, if you want to co-create your pitch deck with guidance, an experienced business person and not just a graphic designer, mock-pitch to real VC investors and get crucial, real-world feedback or even have introductions to the very people who can fund your business today, check out our services page here at WayAboveDeck.com
Until next time, I’ve been Deckster Jobs. Happy pitching!
