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How do you start a new deck from scratch?
Many readers email me because they struggle to go from 0 to 1 when starting their pitch deck. While all the advice I regularly share is great for refining and improving your deck, it doesn’t always make it easy to get started.
Today, I am going to jump into how I like to start working on new pitch decks and why this strategy works best:
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Perspective Framer - I always start by writing out a perspective framer in a Google Doc. This is not always the text that will appear on the screen but what me/my client will be saying as we click through slides 2-4. Here is a sample:
Have you recently been sent a news article or seen a link on Twitter and clicked it just to be hit with a paywall? If so you are not alone. Every day, billions of people like you are blocked from reading the news.
Now, do you remember that headline? Did you share it with someone else? Were you able to verify if it was true?
Today, 76% of publishers use paywalls. They are incentivized to use clickbait headlines to drive purchases. These headlines innocently shared by billions of people just like you are fuelling an epidemic of misinformation causing political instability, promoting violence and in the last few years contributing to the death of millions of people.
If someone could alter the incentives for publishers and make complete news articles affordable for all they would not only revolutionize the $36B news industry but solve a major social crisis.
Problem - Once I’ve finished writing that perspective framer, I stay in a Google Doc and write out the problem slide that will come right after I finish the perspective framer. These two elements of the deck are the most important for getting investors hooked. You need the perspective framer to get them interested in your pitch and excited about the potential, and then you need the problem to make them connect to the pain that you are solving.
Solution - After you’ve presented a painful problem that anyone can relate to , you need to use a matching format to present a solution. I still stay in a Google Doc to do this.
Once you’ve got these three elements then you have the core elements of your deck. I would stop working, take a day off and come back to them to see if they still work for you and still make sense. I’d also have your co-founders and friends look at them to see if they find them impactful.
When you are ready to lock these in, start a deck and begin working on the graphics to go alongside the scripts you have for these three elements. These should be 3-6 slides in total. When completed, you should then start going through all the “mandatory” slides, market, team, traction, product and work on them the same way you would have traditionally for any other deck. Then, I would order them from most to least impressive for beginners. This way, you ensure investors see what will most likely get them to invest. Many founders make the mistake of hiding a great team or traction at the end of a deck in an attempt to recapture attention before their ask. In reality, most investors click off the deck or zone out before they get to that slide.
Do you start your deck creation process with a perspective framer? |
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Are you looking to grow your business? Here is how I can help:
📱 Book a Strategy Call to get 1:1 feedback on your pitch, pitch deck and/or fundraising strategy. (If you need general startup advice, then reply to this email, and I’ll let you know if/how I can help.)
Onwards and Upwards,
