“Brace and Embrace” - Unleashing the Power of ChatGPT and Other AI Tools to Enhance your Investor Pitch Deck

Last week I had the opportunity to hear the Chief Scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, speak about AI and how it will change everything. I mean EVERYTHING. If you’re not yet thinking about AI and your product/offering/solution - it’s time to start, now!

And it got me thinking about AI and Startup pitching, even more than I already have been thinking. My new motto is “Brace and Embrace” - brace for the massive change happening - but embrace it and see how you can utilize it to improve. I basically have been "DonnaGPT" for nearly 2 decades now, ingesting copious amounts of data and in real time, spinning it into powerful messages. But now I have the opportunity to blend my "H/AI" with the new GenAI tools.

As many of you may know, I have been authoring and updating the ultimate guide to creating a winning investor deck since 2016. It’s been downloaded and used by tens of thousands of startups around the world, and it thrills me to no end that the words I wrote have been successful and instrumental in raising over $1.5B! It was also one of the first building blocks in writing my first best-seller “Sticking to my Story” - The Alchemy of Storytelling for Startups. As Tim Draper writes in the foreword:?

“It’s the A-Z recipe for how to create a powerful pitch deck, with all the right ingredients.”

In the final chapter of the book, I brought on a “co-writer” to write about "The Future of Storytelling for Startups." That co-writer was none other than ChatGPT - who made its debut as I was wrapping up the writing of my book. ChatGPT’s take on it is:?

“As text generators become more sophisticated, they will become even more useful for a variety of tasks. In the future, they could be used to create entire documents from scratch, or to automatically translate between languages.?

While AI systems may be able to assist humans in the storytelling process, it is unlikely that they will be able to fully replace human storytellers in the foreseeable future.?AI technology has advanced significantly in recent years. And while it is now capable of generating text that is difficult for humans to distinguish from text written by other humans, storytelling is a complex and nuanced art that involves more than just the ability to generate text.?

Storytelling involves creating a narrative that engages and captivates an audience, and this requires a level of creativity, empathy, and emotional intelligence that AI systems currently lack. Additionally, storytelling often involves drawing on personal experiences and emotions, which AI systems are not capable of doing.”

So even if AI technology is not yet capable of writing your pitch deck for you, it can help startups create better pitch decks in several ways. For example, AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) tools can be used to help identify and highlight key information and insights within large datasets, making it easier for startups to identify potential investors, and tailor their pitch decks to their specific needs and goals.

Today, I'm excited to share my insights on utilizing AI to help you elevate your pitch deck to new heights.

While my guide outlines the structure of an investor deck by breaking it down into slides, this article focuses on tips and tricks to refine each element of your deck. I recommend reading the original guide first, then returning here to dive deeper.

General tips:

• Always fact-check - Though its writing seems flawless and very persuasive, AI can generate false information, and also, ChatGPT trained on data sets relevant to 2021, so it might not be accurate. Please verify all details before presenting them to investors.
• AI is constantly evolving - These tips are relevant for the time I’m writing this. I'll be updating this article with new, relevant tips as often as I can, but some techniques may become outdated or replaced by new tools, FAST.
• Experiment and iterate - As long as you remember that you are the Founder of the startup and you still must be the master of all of the content, see what you can do to incorporate AI into your messages - you've got nothing to lose!

Suggested Uses of AI Tools for Your Startup’s Pitch Deck:

1. Company name: You should have a company or product name before crafting your pitch deck. If you're still undecided, ChatGPT can help generate unique names and corresponding domain names. Provide a detailed description of your business, target audience, and desired vibe. Keep it simple, easy to spell, short, and memorable. Consider trademark potential and avoid names that resemble competitors'.
2. Logo: There's an abundance of free AI tools to create logos. Check out this article on using Midjourney for logo design: Don't forget to tailor the logo to your target audience and convert the final design into vector (.SVG) and transparent (.PNG) formats for various use cases.
3. Tagline: ChatGPT is fantastic for generating taglines or refining existing ones. Provide information about your startup, such as its name, main product or service, and unique selling points. The more detail you provide, the better the AI can understand your brand and create a tagline that resonates with your target audience.
4. The Problem: Use ChatGPT to emphasize the pain points your solution addresses. Find articles or quotes discussing the issue and its impact, and then verify the information with a second source to ensure accuracy.
5. The Solution: Input a detailed description of your offering into ChatGPT and request a solution statement using my “Simple Solution Statement” framework. The prompt can be something like: "Turn this description into a short statement: We're doing X (solving a problem) for Y (for a specific audience) by Z (in a nutshell, what are you? A platform/app/solution/tool/etc.) with secret sauce S." Iterate and generate multiple versions until you're satisfied with the result.
6. Demo: AI can't create a full blown product demo, yet. GPT-4 can help you get closer by generating React code based on sketches of your screens. Use Midjourney to create polished app screenshots or find inspiration from existing apps. ChatGPT can also generate usernames, addresses, and profile images to populate your demo and user story.
7. Benefits: ChatGPT can generate a list of benefits for your solution or compare your offering to competitors' features. For each benefit, ask ChatGPT to provide examples of the impact on your target audience when the benefit is absent.
8. Competition: This is a true gamechanger. Startups I work with often struggle to find competitors, especially the early stage startups. Now, you can use ChatGPT to quickly create a list of direct and indirect competitors, along with their websites and service comparisons. Soon, you might even be able to ask ChatGPT to create a competition slide featuring competitors' logos on a chart with two axes.
9. Market Analysis: While it’s the most tempting piece to utilize ChatGPT for, again, please be cautious when using ChatGPT for market analysis, as AI can sometimes produce false or outdated information. Make sure you verify all generated statistics and data points.
10. Trends and Opportunities: This is what I call the “Silver Bullet” of a Pitch Deck. Finding trends and opportunities that increase the urgency, or the “why us/why now” fundability factor. ChatGPT can help identify supporting facts, events, and numbers for various trends or opportunities. Always double-check the information to ensure accuracy.
11. Go-to-Market Strategies: With PLG, or Product Led Growth growing in popularity, you might consider building a waiting list of potential clients to impress investors. Use auto-GPT to generate a list of prospects and approach them with an email invitation to join your waiting list.
12. Team: Use ChatGPT to summarize each team member's LinkedIn profile, showcasing their suitability for the specific product and emphasizing the founder-market fit. Strengthen your written content to truly highlight your team's capabilities. And this is a great opportunity to ensure that all of your teams’ Linkedin profiles are up to date, have the right titles and a summary that speaks to their founder-market fit for your startup
13. Key Investment Merits: After having listened to you for a good half hour, it’s time to remind them why you are a desirable investment opportunity. A fantastic approach is to input your entire pitch deck text into ChatGPT and ask it to generate 3 to 10 concise bullet points outlining why investors should back your startup. While this may not be the final version of your key investment merits, it serves as an excellent starting point.

A Note on Slide Design: With tools like PowerPoint Designer, Google Slides, Midjourney, and Stable-Diffusion at your disposal, there's no longer ANY excuse for a lackluster pitch deck. Ensure your deck design looks as impressive as your product or even better.

In Conclusion: As ChatGPT further said in my book:

“Creating a successful investor deck is a complex task that involves more than just generating text. It also involves understanding the needs and goals of the investors, creating a compelling narrative, and presenting information in a clear and concise manner.?

While GPT-3 may be able to assist in the process of creating an investor deck, it is unlikely that it would be able to produce a successful deck on its own without human input and guidance. Ultimately, the success of an investor deck will depend on the ability of the startup team to effectively communicate their vision and persuade investors to invest in their company. It is unlikely AI systems will be able to replace human involvement completely in the foreseeable future.”?

So if you still need help in creating your unique investment story, DonnaGPT is here for you ;)