Lessons from a Failed Pitch Deck

A few weeks ago I read an interesting breakdown (by Linas Beliūnas) of the pitch deck Fast used to raise $125 million in funding before failing, and I followed that up with a read of his article on the Coinbase pitch deck. We had a brief late-night direct message chat, which included me joking that I should write a pitch deck for the Orthoverse, with Linas responding, "Just do it!"

Then Saturday came, and as the weekend around May Day is a bit of a festival in Finland, I decided to take the morning off from other commitments, and write that pitch deck.

Except it didn't end up being a pitch deck. To be honest, at this point I don't really know what it is. A user guide to the Orthoverse, perhaps.

But it did make me think about pitching for the first time in about four years.

A beginners guide to the pitch deck

So what is a pitch deck?

Here's one definition: a short, succinct, and clear set of slides or pages used by a fund-raiser to convince an investor to part with their money in return for a stake in the company - shares, and probably a seat or two on the board. In crypto, tokens usually take the place of shares, and if there's a DAO - well, the tokens also equate to a board seat.

As a result, a pitch deck is a kind of sales tool heavily influenced by marketing, and it has taken on a fairly standard format. Equity in the company is being sold for operating capital.

The typical rookie mistakes made when producing a pitch deck are two-fold:

1. too much information per slide on too many slides (which clouds your pitch), and
2. information that doesn't progress your argument as to why you should be given money (which distracts from your pitch).

A lot of material explaining how technically amazing the company's product is won't help. It will confuse and sidetrack from your main aim. Which is to get bags of money at the best possible terms. Bags of money that you will subsequently blow on hiring more people and more advertising.

You need to think from the investor's perspective, not yours.

The other side

Investors are looking for one specific thing: convincing evidence that their investment is going to yield substantial returns; so substantial that they don't want to miss out on the expected bonanza. So here's a list of slide content that can do just that - just answer these questions:

• why is your idea going to be profitable?
• how profitable is it expected to be?
• who is going to be paying for your product to produce the profit?
• how quickly is that group of paying people expected to grow?
• why is the competition not going to grab that profit instead of you?
• what other risks have you identified in the pursuit of the profit, and how are you planning to mitigate them?
• in what way is your team competent to execute on all of the above?
• what other investors believe in your plan?

See, that's eight slides. With a front slide, and a call to action slide (which is the blatant "this is what you should do, and here's the person to contact in order to do it" slide), you have no more left.

Some investors also like to have some kind of indication as to how you're going to spend the money they are thinking of giving you, and why that is going to help in the production of ... you guessed it ... profits. But we're out of slides.

Of course profits can come in many forms, but the one investors are going to be most interested in is the increase in value of their shares (or tokens, if it's a crypto project).

If you're really cunning, you can tailor your pitch deck to appeal to the specific triggers of an investor. For example, if you know they're passionate about a specific currently non-profitable issue (such as the environment, or uploading your consciousness into a computer) and your project has even a peripheral connection to that issue, then by all means, mention it.

The Orthoverse is doomed

And here's what I produced on that Saturday morning: https://orthoverse.io/orthoverse-pitch-deck.pdf

It's not a pitch deck.

For starters, I'm not looking for funding for the Orthoverse, so I don't need a pitch deck. I'm not looking to get someone to give me money so that I can more effectively convince a group of "someone elses[1]" to pay attention to the project and, more importantly, pay some money (in the form of cryptocurrency) for my NFTs and features of those NFTs. I'm hacking away at the Orthoverse as a hobby, or as it's sometimes called: I'm bootstrapping.

Ah, but when it comes to blockchain projects and their tokens, the tokens are a stake in the project, aren't they? So they are a bit like shares, and as a result the buyers of the tokens expect to be treated somewhat like investors. Or at least the ones who are not purely speculators do.

So perhaps it is a pitch deck?

Speculator or investor?

So what is the different between a speculator and an investor?

An investor is interested in whether the value proposition of a project is convincing enough to drop some money on it. A speculator doesn't care about the value proposition. They care about what the perception of future investors will be. They may even think the idea behind the company or project is ludicrous, but if they feel that further down the line someone else will think it is of value, then they'll buy in now.

Oh, and an angel investor is a speculator who is either your rich indulgent uncle, or very good at suspending their disbelief.

Back to the Orthoverse. I'm not looking for speculators or investors. I'm looking for people who think it would be fun to join in with the fun. It would be nice if at the end of the ride the tokens were changing hands for 100 ETH a pop like Bored Apes, with me getting 2.5% of each transaction, but it isn't the aim of the project.

And that's going to be a problem. Unless you're pitching "bouncy castles as a service", fun is not usually on the table.

Slide one: mistake one

And after all that, here is slide number one:

It uses some NFT lingo (degen), but doesn't present the usual "The Orthoverse Is Doomed" phrase that I've been pushing in all the previous videos and articles, and that's a mistake. There's a lack of branding consistency there, although at least the iconic eighties sci-fi font (Pirulen) is still used.

And above all, the title only appeals to a small group of people. On the other hand, at least they are the small group most likely to part with cash (or rather, crypto) for NFTs.

Still - the first slide is a pitch deck fail.

Slides two and three: what is the aim?

Slides two and three explain what the Orthoverse is, but not why you should want it. And there's a reason for that.

The Orthoverse started out as an experiment to prove that Richard (also known as #theOtherGuy) and I could produce a smart contract on Ethereum in which every single wallet address owned an NFT without doing anything, making it the mother of all airdrops.

And we did just that. In the process we discovered that a) we really enjoyed working with each other, and b) we wanted to push the idea as far as we could while continuing to have fun.

But saying, "#BlockchainGandalf and #theOtherGuy are two hip dudes who really know where their towels are" is not going to get an investor fired up by a project like this.

It's just confusing.

Slides four and five: features

The next slides describe some of the functionality we added to the Orthoverse token and how it is interpreted in the off-chain wibbly-wobbly web3 world.

By doing so I am once again breaking a simple pitch deck rule - feature lists do not help unless you can explicitly point to reasons why the features will get you more users or more revenue.

And this slide doesn't do that.

Furthermore, web3 and the Metaverse weren't even mentioned!

Out of time

Trying to predict the future is difficult, especially when those predictions involve the actions of people you have no direct control over. Unfortunately, venture capitalists like any data presented concerning the future to be backed up by numbers, calculations, and convincing justifications, even though most financial estimates are going to be educated guesses.

The product development plan, on the other hand - well, there are plenty of tools you can use to predict how long a software feature will take to implement. And everyone knows that the times quoted are going to be out by a fact of 2x to 4x, so that can be taken into account.

In my limited experience, investors are pretty good at poking holes in market research and financials, although give the crazy returns some that cryptocurrency and NFT projects have produced (and the dismal collapse of others), that game has become a little bit harder for them.

But numbers? With the Orthoverse, I just couldn't be bothered.

If the investor has managed to read this far, when presented with the above timeline they are surely going to bail, and probably with an angry "stop wasting my time" at that.

Cast list

And so we come to the final slide, in which "the team" is put on display. But there is no summary of our achievements or skill sets, and there are no references to the remarkable companies or amazing prior projects we have worked on in the past.

Even if a potential investor clicked on either of our LinkedIn profile lists, are they really going to be confronted with resumes that will make them think, "Yes! These are the guys I want to back! Where's my checkbook?"

Unlikely. Well, in Richard's case, perhaps. But that BlockchainGandalf chap who makes videos about blockchain while walking in the woods wearing a wizard hat? Seriously?

Although this is probably the least failingly[2] failing slide, it's still a fail.

We're doxxed though, so that must count for something.

Summary

So what have we learned? Writing pitch decks is hard because you have to:

• be concise, clear, and convincing
• think from the perspective of the potential investor
• focus on the expected profitability

Experience shows that none of these come naturally. They require practice and refinement. You might even want to consider hiring a competent copywriter to help you write your pitch deck.

Did we learn anything else? Yes: the Orthoverse is impossible to pitch.

Or is it? Now I'm not so sure, so keep your eyes peeled for a future installment.

Challenge ... accepted.

Call to action

Now go and reveal an Orthoverse token.

Go on - it's only a few dollars, and who knows, they might be trading for mega-ethers in the future, and in the meantime you'll be a genuine card-carrying (or rather, token-holding) part of the craziness that is the Orthoverse.

Probably not, though.

________

[1] "else" is an adverb and so cannot be pluralized, and yet I just did.

[2] that's also not a word.