Remember: Your investors aren't buying your product.

A slightly emotional moment for me this week, as the 100th Pitch Deck Teardown rolls off the TechCrunch presses - and that's the end of our series for now!

When you’ve found a way to solve a problem that bugs people, and you reckon that you can do it with elegance and efficiency, of course you’re going to be proud of it and want to shout about it. It’s natural, and it’s also vital for your marketing efforts. But the thing is, your pitch deck isn’t about trying to sell your product to investors. It’s about selling your company–and your team–to investors. That means you really don’t need to devote four slides of your deck to your product, which is what MegaMod did in this week’s Pitch Deck Teardown. There are other things you need to focus on, which outline in the teardown.

You can find all 100 pitch deck teardowns here, broken down by fundraising amount, industry, and much more.

This week’s Pitch Guide deep dive

The concept of the concierge MVP popped in my last live pitch deck review. When you’re trying to establish quickly and cheaply if your problem-solving idea will sink or swim, using a concierge MVP can be just the thing. I explain what they are and how to use them.

3 top fundraising tips

1. Why you need a pitch deck: Pitches are conversations. But sometimes you need a mechanism to help illustrate your ideas or set out your statistics in a digestible format. That’s where your pitch deck comes in. No two decks are the same, and neither should they be. They all, however, serve to help you raise funding.
2. Are you B2B or B2C?: Depending on whether you are a B2B or B2C company, how you operate, how you find leads, make sales, and generate revenue, will vary enormously. As a startup, it’s not possible to have a foot in both camps. You have to pick one–so which one is for you? Are you B2B or B2C?
3. What does pre-revenue traction look like?: Traction is the key to all fundraising. The best form of traction is revenue. So what do you do when your company is pre-revenue? There are plenty of metrics that you can use to show how you’ve de-risked your business and made it a more attractive proposition for investors. You just have to look for them.

Events!

We have two upcoming events that you might want to put in your calendars.

Subscriber Q&A

Tuesday 2 July 2024 - NOTE THE DAY CHANGE!

08:00 Pacific | See your local time here

Get together with other Pitch.Guide subscribers for a Q&A session with me. I’m on hand to answer questions ranging from how much is too much to raise to what should I do about soft nos??

This is a Pitch.Guide subscribers-only event. You can subscribe to Pitch.Guide here (a bargain at $29.99/month) and to the Q&A here!

Live Pitch Deck Tear Down

Friday 19 July 2024?

08:00 Pacific | See your local time here

Join me as I look at two pitch decks and analyze them with my investor hat on. You get to see in real time what works and what doesn’t work when a VC looks at a deck.

This event is open to all Pitch.Guide members. Sign up here.

And if you want a taste of what a live tear down looks like, you can see the June tear down here.

Need some tailored support?

If you are raising money for your startup, and you want a private pitch deck review from Haje, that’s possible! See haje.pub/pdr for more information. Because you are a newsletter subscriber, we’ll even give you a 10% discount! Use the booking link and promo code NL10 to claim your discount!