Crafting the Perfect Pitch Deck Structure: A Comprehensive Guide

Creating a compelling pitch deck is crucial for startups seeking investment. Forget the old rules about slide counts and focus on telling a clear, concise story that answers key questions for investors. This comprehensive guide dives into the essential elements of a winning pitch deck structure, providing actionable tips to help you nail your presentation and secure funding. A well-structured pitch deck demonstrates not only the potential of your business but also your understanding of the market and your vision for the future.

The Four Pillars of a Compelling Pitch Deck

A pitch deck needs to answer four fundamental questions that investors will have before investing. These questions help to give the investor the full picture of what you’re building, the value you bring to your customer, and how you will make that value profitable. These four questions can be matched to the different sections of your deck, to help you make sure you answer these questions clearly and concisely.

• What opportunity have you discovered in the market? This question is addressed in the Status Quo Section of your pitch deck.
• What is the company building to tackle it? This question is answered in the Solution Section of your pitch deck.
• How much will the company grow? This question is answered by the Market Section of your pitch deck.
• Why are you and your team the best team to change the status quo? This question is answered by the Why Us Section of your pitch deck.

The Introduction Section: Making a Strong First Impression

The Introduction is where you make your first impression! Make sure the cover slide includes a quick, concise blurb about what your company does. It’s an explainer, not a marketing slogan and only needs to be five to seven words.

The best intro is as easy to grasp as possible, so make sure you practice it with people unfamiliar with your project so they can provide feedback. You want them to grasp the essentials of your service in a brief explanation. You can also include a Traction Teaser Slide to catch an investor's attention immediately. These can give them a perspective on the exciting opportunity you are showcasing, and can include a chart as opposed to hard numbers. A Chart tells a story, where numbers only show a shot in time.

The Status Quo Section: Defining the Opportunity

The Status Quo Section is where you’ll answer the question “What opportunity have you discovered in the market?” You can approach this in one to three slides.

These sections should be a market overview, a statement of the problem that is going unsolved, and the business opportunity it leaves open. The problem slide is your opportunity to show your customer’s experience. Investors need to be able to see that your customer is experiencing a painful inconvenience to your potential customers, whether that is money wasted, or time wasted. For best effect, use short lines with undeniable statements to create a powerful problem statement and provide context with market overview.

The Solution Section: Presenting Your Platform or Services

In this section you’re answering the question: what is the company building to solve these problems? However, you also don’t want to spend too much time speaking about the product.

In the Solution section you don’t want to get caught up talking about your product, but rather about your platform in the abstract, and how your service solves that problem. Then, follow with a product slide. On the product slide, you want to maximize the space to showcase what the product looks like and highlight its major features, maybe across multiple slides. If you want to also touch on how the service works, or breakthrough tech, add some slides that touch on those as well.

It’s also noted that the creator is not a big fan of video demos, because many decks are reviewed on the phone, and there’s no guarantee that a potential investor will watch them. Video demonstrations can be a great option for certain businesses, but you want to make sure the core features of the program are clear if they can’t see the video.

For certain companies, the extra context of a market overview is crucial for the investors to understand the value you bring, and what trends you are trying to capitalize on.

The Market Section: Growth Strategies and Potential

The question you’re answering here is “How much is your business going to grow?”

The two most important points here are to show Tractions, and include TAM, or Total Addressable Market. Your go-to-market slides must show the unique growth strategies you have developed to grow your business, and showcase unique ways that your potential customers can convert with that strategy. Do not just list five to nine different basic marketing tactics!

If you’re a pre-seed company, then you might not have a growth metric, so you have to tell investors how you plan to gain your first customers, to get to a point where you have a growing number of customers. This is crucial, because that shows you have a plan and a vision. It also shows your investor where their money is going. If you’re a pre-seed, make sure you show how that money will allow you to reach the next stage of growth.

For the TAM (Total Addressable Market) slide. Some people get caught up calculating their obtainable and serviceable market, but those are completely unnecessary.

To calculate, it sounds simple, but it's easy to get wrong! Take your customers, and multiply them by your revenue per user for your TAM. It helps to first focus on who your real customer is first. That helps you keep in check. Then validate the numbers with real customers.

The 'Why Us' Section: Team Skills and Execution

Now that investors see all the pieces of your business, the "Why Us" section confirms that your team has what it takes to do what you set out to make! Reinforce what you've talked about to make it clear that your team can get the job done! It's important that your team slide focuses on core skills to accomplishing your goals, whether its product, development, marketing, or operations. Make sure that anyone you put on this slide can show to investors the skills they provide. It’s important to have the right players in place. You don't raise money to recruit core skills, but to execute with skills you already have!

Use These Guiding Questions

If you already have a pitch deck in progress, it can help to take the questions laid out in this article and match them to your slides to see if your pitch deck is already answering them. If not, that's a great place to start! Alternatively, if you don’t have a pitch deck, it can be very valuable to write out the answers to these questions, and use them to create your deck.

It’s easy to get caught up in the copy or some detail. So, take a step back and see whether the questions are answered effectively.