The Art of the Pitch Deck

During the majority of startup journeys, pitch decks will feature. The stage of the business may vary, but at some point, founders will encounter the need to raise investment. This could occur early - as soon as you have a minimum viable product or, when your business is more mature and needs to take advantage of an opportunity to scale.

Here, Dragon Argent outline some of the fundamental principles of creating impactful pitch decks covering the purpose, design and content, to ensure that when it comes to raise, you can present the opportunity in as compelling a way as possible. 

Narrative

First, it’s important to understand the purpose of the pitch deck. What is the objective of creating a pitch deck in the first instance? You are trying to convey the story of your business and the story of you as a founder in an engaging, easy to digest manner. 

Why you, why now and how are you going to deliver on your potential.

If you think of your pitch deck as a vehicle through which to deliver a concise, impactful, and linear story, then that will inform everything that follows. But as we’ll cover later – it is only the beginning of the conversation… 

Design

The design of your pitch deck should reflect you and your business. But, the design also needs to be engaging and hold the reader’s attention. It should facilitate the linear story of the business, building up the picture of the opportunity in the readers’ mind. It should reflect the credibility of you as a founder(s).

The best pitch decks employ design principles that result in simple, clean and consistent decks. Some golden rules include:

• Each slide should have a single purpose or message and should be clearly labelled. The content of the slide should only serve to reinforce that message
• Text heavy slides should be avoided in favour of concise, impactful statements, often employing the humble bullet point
• Use the minimum number of fonts and sizing and include infographics or images to break up the visual content.
• Try to stick to a primary and secondary colour only throughout the deck. This will help to make the deck feel clean and consistent
• Ensure any images or logos used throughout your deck are consistent with your brand and values
• The content of each slide should be aligned so that the information appears in clean, consistent lines
• But change the way information is laid out from slide to slide. If you retain the same colours, fonts and styling throughout, simply changing the layout can help retain focus

If you consider that the individuals that are going to review your deck are likely to read hundreds in a given year and will probably skim the contents, you need to ensure that, yes - the design you use says something about your business, but crucially allows information to be distilled and understood quickly and efficiently.

Content

So, you’ve settled on a great looking design that is simple but elegant and reflects your business, so what do you include in the contents? 

The first principle is that good decks explain difficult or complex ideas in simple terms. That’s why having one idea per slide and telling a story in a linear fashion is so important. The story any investor is interested in can be summarised as:

What is the problem > how are you going to solve it > why are you the right people to solve that problem now

Once you have captured interest by telling the “problem, solution, us” story in a personable, compelling way, then you can underpin that with the kind of information that lets investors know you are credible and serious. This will likely include:

1. The size of the market and your points of differentiation from competitors
2.  Defensible assumptions on growth, costs, clients, and milestones
3. The KPIs that will measure your success 
4. The financial model of the business
5. A credible valuation of the business

If you can deliver the story and underpin it with a credible overview of those 5 points, then you have a reasonable chance of continuing the conversation. Only include information that you can defend and that holds up to scrutiny.

For me there is one, golden takeaway about creating pitch decks. They are only the start of the conversation, not the entire conversation. You need to capture an investors interest and engender a motivation to find out more. You don’t need to include everything you know about your business and market. 

If you need help or advice in putting together and investment deck, please contact Dragon Argent as we’d love to help. 

James Taylor

Chief Commercial Officer I Dragon Argent

[email protected]