How to create the best pitch deck your investors have ever seen!

Pitching has been a critical component of my upbringing as an entrepreneur.

I remember my first pitch while still a student. I remember my first elevator pitch -failed- to a high VC profile at a conference. I remember my first time on a stage in front of hundreds. I also remember pitching my now-cofounders, my partner, my parents. I remember meeting each one of my now teammates for the first time and trying to onboard them in the big vision, the big story that makes me excited to operate Upflowy every day.

I reflect back on why these key pitching moments have remained so vivid in my memory and what comes to my mind first is the clear recollection of how these people reacted when they finally connected with the larger idea behind the business, behind the opportunity. Sometimes it was a look, sometimes a silent pause.?

But I learned over time one thing…?

It’s all about the story?

I’ve been spending countless hours advising, investing in, and working for entrepreneurs over the past 15 years, and more often than not, I’ve been focusing on helping them achieve similar defining moments with their own audience. The secret sauce behind it won’t come as a surprise:

Tell the right story. Stories have helped visionaries engage with their audience since the dawn of time. While this millenary art has been analyzed and taught by so many, I find that every new context in which storytelling can prove useful needs its own set of tools and recipes.

However, in the context of pitching investors, I’ve come to realize that most early stage founders tend to rely on a set of inhomogeneous templates, with specific headlines for each slide articulated around a seemingly arbitrary order, without realizing that what underlies every great investor pitch is a great story.

I’m trying in this article to try to break down the key components of a great story when it comes to building a great pitch deck. How to craft the narrative to bring investors on a journey to create a solution to a problem. To serve a pain point.?

The 7 Elements of a great pitch deck?

We believe that to tell the right story, your pitch needs to?include the 7 elements that you see in the below graphic. They make up ‘Market, Key learnings, Big vision (also named “Winners and Losers”), Product, Proof of Concept, Early traction and finally Go to market’.?

This narrative follows the very efficient “bowtie” structure.

It initially positions your audience in the wide frame of what they know, giving them some familiar elements to relate to (Market). It then focuses on a specific pain, using key learnings that they will be grateful for you to share (Key Learnings), to finally narrow down on a distant but powerful vision (the Big Vision) that finds its closure in the central keystone of your story: your Product.

From this narrow point of focus, it then expands back again towards the potentiality of success of your innovation, creating the right degree of trust that it is feasible (Proof of Concept), then the early signs of greatness (Early Traction) and finally the bright road ahead (Go to Market).

Would you like to learn how these 7 elements create a great pitch deck? I have all of this mapped out in detail in my latest article. You can find it at Upflowy here:

https://www.upflowy.com/blog/how-to-create-the-best-pitch-deck-your-investors-have-ever-seen

Make sure you comment below and let me know what you think!?