Modern Picnic Deck Breakdown

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Slide 1: Intro Slide

The lack of a one-sentence descriptor is glaring. Especially given the lack of design or indication as to what the product might be.

Slide 2: Perspective Framer

10/10 slide here. Very clearly, it tells you the product, its benefits and its intended market. This is something women/people of colour tend to do best. They are used to pitching to VCs who don’t relate to the problems they are solving so they have excellent perspective framers to help those VCs understand how to approach the company.

Slide 3: Table of Contents

I hate this. Lots of research shows that this tanks your pitch. It kills your momentum, takes away from the narrative and tells investors with a pre-disposition when they should/shouldn’t pay attention.

Slide 4: Perspective Framer

Love this slide. Again, it sets the perspective. They wouldn’t need to do this twice if they didn’t have a poor third slide, but you can tell they knew some psychology but didn’t implement it properly.

Slide 5: Perspective Framer

If it weren’t for the fact that I know 99% of these pitches would have been to men (like me) who don’t understand this basic stuff (or at least need to be put in the right mindset to appreciate this product), I’d say it was too much but when pitching a product VCs themselves wouldn’t use, it makes sense to teach them about the target market.

Slide 6: Problem

It took a while to get here (maybe too long) but it’s a clear problem statement that is easy to understand.

Slide 7: Demo

I don’t like the product demo here. It kills the narrative. There could very easily have been the solution slide to continue the narrative, then a demo afterward (or a few slides later). This was a poor choice of placement for a demo.

Slide 8: Product

Because of the placement of the Demo, we’ve completely missed the solution. We’ve gone straight into the product and features.

It seems basic, but a slide that mirrored the rule of three from slide five and directly addressed the problem in slide six to show a solution to a problem that fits the market needs would have made a massive difference to how this narrative landed with investors.

This is a 26-slide deck. The key, as I always say, is the opening narrative. I wanted to spotlight the good and bad from this deck’s opening narrative. If you want to check out the rest of the deck, the link is below.

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📱 Book a Strategy Call to get 1:1 feedback on your pitch, pitch deck and/or fundraising strategy.

Onwards and Upwards,

Liam Gill