Craft standout pitch and investor decks, master your presentation, and avoid common fundraising pitfalls.
1. The Fastest Way to Build a Repeatable Pitch
Investors love ‘pitches’ - especially for early stage businesses.
Investors, Angel Groups and Startup Accelerator programmes may even run ‘pitch nights’ where they invite multiple founders to come and pitch their business in the hope of getting investment.
Pitches tend to take the form of a 5-6 minute presentation, where you educate and get them excited about your business.
‘Pitch’ events are different from the sit-down meetings you might have with a handful of representatives from the same investment fund, and so they require different content.
What do you need to create and how do you do it?
To prepare for a Pitch event, you’ll need two things - some sort of slide show, presentation, or visuals, and a script of your pitch.
The two go together hand in hand, but the content is different between them.
There are many different ways people like to pitch - some founders use practical demonstrations, some just put images up on slides with no other content and talk candidly to the audience, and others like to go for the traditional ‘7-10 slides and a script’ approach.
James’ 10 Step Process to the Most Efficient Pitch
The latter is the most common, so let’s break down the iterative 10-Step process of how to go about putting it those together:
What to avoid doing:
What | Why |
Adding too many animations on your slides, or using overly complex timings, types of animations or transitions. | Keep yourself to the ‘Appear OnClick’ animations rather than using motion animations, because having to exactly time your script to align with things appearing on the screen automatically will be painful |
Having a script that just reads out what’s on the slides, or making slides that have bullet points or small text on them. | In a large room, no-one at the back will be able to read anything small on your slides - so don’t waste slides by writing too much on them. |
Missing the opportunity to have your slides showcase your brand. | Your slides need to be bold, memorable and reflect your business’ overall brand and style. |
Inserting videos or product demos into your slides. | Whilst for some businesses, this is a good way to showcase your product, the audience is there to hear from you, about your business - they can sit and watch videos at home |
Using negative words in your pitch when talking about anything to do with your business | Your pitch is all about convincing people to get excited - so consider your tone throughout. Negative words like ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘challenge’ or ‘‘difficult’ could subliminally put people off. Use positive words like ‘opportunity’, ‘exciting’, ‘potential’ instead. |
Doing anything unorthodox with the formatting or aspect ratio of your slides | Chances are your presentation will be concatenated with other founders’ presentation slides by the organisers, to make one consistent deck for the pitch event. If you’re the odd one out, your presentation won’t seem as slick as the others’. |
Giving away confidential information about your business | Far too many pitches give away intellectual property in the form of detailed strategies, specific go-to-market tactics or technical details. There may be members of the audience who work with competitor businesses - so it always pays to make sure you’re not giving away your secret sauce. Keeping some things to yourself gives you the opportunity to engage with investors after the pitch, to give them more detail |
2. Investor Decks
When you are meeting with potential investors, they will often ask if you have some information you can share with them about the business, and about your current capital raise. These tend to be known as ‘Investor Decks’ or ‘Investor Summaries’.
Investor Decks are far more detailed than Pitch Decks, may follow a slightly different structure, but cover most of the same topics. You might be asked to come and walk through your Investor Deck with few members of a VC fund’s team, and to share that information with them afterwards.
Having a good Investor Deck is absolutely fundamental to any capital raise. It’s a document that on its own, without any voice over from you, should be able to get a potential investor excited enough to call you for more information. When raising capital, you may not necessarily have to create a Pitch Deck, but you will almost certainly have to create an Investor Deck.
What do you need to create and how do you do it?
Your investor deck will need to be around 10-15 landscape orientation slides, exported as a PDF format, that can be easily printed to A4 should someone wish to.
The deck needs well-formatted, and contain detailed information about the core aspects of your business.
Let’s walk through the 5-step process of creating your Investor Deck:
What to avoid doing?
What | Why |
Adding any sort of animations | This deck will likely be sent to the investor as a PDF, and so animations are pointless. Even if you’re walking through the deck in person with them, don’t bother wasting time adding animations as it will distract from the content. |
Faking your numbers or trying to cover over obvious shortcomings | If the investor gets interested enough to get into Due Diligence, and you’ve made things up, your credibility will be shot. |
Missing the opportunity to have your slides showcase your brand | Your slides need to be bold, memorable and reflect your business’ overall brand and style. |
Providing too much detailed information | I once created an investor summary that was an exquisite Google Doc 45 pages long, with charts and data and long paragraphs. It was practically a thesis on our business. I’d written so much because I felt as though investors needed something that answered every question they could ever have. It actually had the opposite effect - it was so long that investors never bothered to read it in full. Your investor deck needs to be detailed enough to give them comfort in your numbers, but light enough to be readable and to give them a need to speak to you to find out more. |
Giving away confidential company information | Much like a Pitch Deck, it can be an own goal to give away confidential information in your Investor Deck. It is very common for Investors to share decks with others, even those outside their own firm - and so you need to be comfortable that at some stage, your Investor Deck may go in front of someone you don’t necessarily want to see it - such as a member of the public or even a competitor business. Don’t send your Investor Deck to everyone - only send it to people who you think have a serious interest in putting money in to your business, and those who you have a serious desire to take money from. This will limit the ‘spread’ of your deck within investor circles |
Pro Tip: Watermark or stamp onto each slide of your deck (using the Master template feature of Google Slides), the name and contact details of the person or firm that the copy of the deck is being sent to. This will not only discourage them from sharing the deck with unauthorised third parties due to them being ‘named and shamed’, but if the deck ever did fall into the wrong hands and it gets back to you, you can see exactly who ‘leaked’ the deck to other people. By the time you find out, the damage is already done, but at least you’ll be able to know who not to trust in future.
3. Ready to Put it Into Practice? Pitch Deck Templates
Fundraising isn’t just about what you say — it’s about how you say it. The frameworks above give you the process. Our pitch deck templates give you the structure.
With tailored guidance for D2C, B2B SaaS, and Deep Tech, each template shows you:
- The core question investors are asking on every slide.
- Practical examples from fictional startups to make theory tangible.
- Suggested visuals so your deck looks as strong as it sounds.
Deep Tech Pitch Deck Template
Balance breakthrough science with a clear commercialisation strategy.
B2B SaaS Pitch Deck Template
Stand out in a crowded SaaS market and prove scalable revenue.
D2C Pitch Deck Template
Show investors you can acquire, retain, and monetise customers.
4. Investment Memorandum / Information Memorandum (IM)
Don’t fall into the trap of writing a 45-page IM for your early stage business, when a 10-15 page Investor Deck will more than suffice.
Some investors will ask for an ‘IM’ rather than asking for an ‘Investor Overview Deck’. IMs tend to be longer form documents that are more traditionally used in larger, more mature businesses as an ‘Investor Prospectus’ of sorts - to be used by potential acquirers to get incredibly detailed financial statements, market analysis, strategy and growth numbers for a large business.
Usually this level of detail is unnecessary for early stage startups - particularly as most venture investors will expect a detailed Investor Deck instead, based on which they may ask for further information as part of early Due Diligence.
If an investor asks you for an IM, just send them the Investor Deck. If they need any further detailed information, they can request it as part of their DD process.
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