These are the pitch decks that made companies like Airbnb, Uber and Facebook, the giants they are today. Telling a success story about your idea, team and business model is what will ultimately determine if your deck is appealing or not and these decks have helped companies raise millions of dollars.
Think of FounderHub as tools for starting a business, all conveniently located in the same place, and curated by the same people that used them to build and grow their startup.
A pitch deck is usually a 10-20 slide presentation designed to give a short summary of your company, your business plan and your startup vision. Pitch decks also serve very different purposes, from trying to get a meeting with a new investor, to presenting in front of a stage, and each one of them should follow a different structure.
After round 8.2 of Startup Chile, we finally got to find out what our fellow suppers were doing. So, instead of trashing out their presentations, we are providing useful feedback so everyone can see on what they need to work on to improve their slides, even if you don't end up using our presentation app!
We are launching a new product at the end of March, and this time we decided to do so with an ad. Our budget for this was roughly $15,000 for production + distribution (ads).
We are super lucky to have 4 people with a video production background in our staff. While we don’t do that in Slidebean, we can join forces to produce ads at a fraction of what they would cost when outsourced.
Our last production probably cost us around $5,000. About $1,000 for actors, sound,… And ~$4,000 in the time that it took our team to plan and execute (though this wasn’t ‘extra’ time, just the cost of the people on staff).
This is INSANELY cheap. We borrowed the sets for free, owned most of the gear we needed, etc…
Huge brand awareness. We are doing pre-roll ads on Youtube at ~$0.05 per (30 second) view. This means even if the ad sucks and doesn’t get any shares, we should be looking at ~200,000 30 second views, and probably +1,000,000 impressions.
Not expecting conversions for now. We don’t know how video-ad to conversion actually works, so we can’t guarantee that we’ll see a direct ROI in users.
Just to clarify- even though the ad is rather fun we are not expecting it to ‘go viral’. You should never expect that out of any campaign.
What software do you guys use for the creation of that video Ad?
Editing in Final Cut Pro ($299). Post Production on After Effects ($49/mo). But that’s the ‘easy’ part. Developing the concept, script, and shooting it was by far the hardest part.
What if I wanted to do an interactive animated video, would VidIQ be the best option?
After Effects would be the way to go. VidIQ is mostly for YouTube stats and SEO.
We started experimenting with Youtube as a content marketing channel a couple of years ago. Came up with a few series concepts, including;
Startups and Spirits: conversations with investors and key startup people over drinks.
Blog to Vlog: a video-version of our most successful blog articles.
The Good, the Bad and the Tip: inspired by the legendary (and discontinued) ‘Winners and Losers’ by L2Inc, but adapted to presentations and design- related topics.
The (Startup) Office: A weekly 3-minute sitcom of mostly real stories from our office.
All of these FAILED. Why?
The views weren’t there. There was no organic visibility, needless to say virality.
No direct route to conversion.
Expensive compared to other brand awareness campaigns.
That’s until we tapped into this video:
THOUSANDS of people watch this video every month, and we can very clearly track how it has affected conversions, and of course the ROI of the production.
More importantly, it’s a constant, no-maintenance source of traffic and customers. While the initial investment is high, it’s ROI exists in perpetuity.
A script made FOR Youtube.
Production value: The green screen/digital animation background makes people stick around.
SEO, SEO, SEO: We wrote this script to target this specific keyword, and made it to the top! We now rank #1 for ‘pitch deck’ searches on Youtube (which happens to be the second most popular search engine on the Internet).
Team:
Producing a weekly video like this requires at least 2-3 people:
I write the scripts and show my face (about 8 hours of work per week).
Paula handles the shooting/production and first editing cut (about 16 hours per week).
Elena does the digital animation. That takes most of her time. She can do one video per week with little time for any other tasks.
Then the rest of our marketing team handle the distribution, subtitles, covers and launch, probably 8-16 hours of work.
Tools:
VidIQ to find keywords and track success.
Final Cut Pro for editing.
Adobe After Effects for post.
Great info on what you did right and the resources required!! Any advice for companies who don’t have the manpower to pull that off? Where would you save time if you had to? Anyone used firms or freelancers that they could refer?
Weekly is not necessary, it’s certainly hard to pull off.
Youtube is all about SEO- otherwise videos won’t rank.
I started a Youtube channel of my one (shameless plug) which I manage on my free time :slightly_smiling_face: - While this is non-business content, I’ve seen very similar behavior and the content/script formula replicated.
If you search for ‘Pitch Deck’ on Google, our video shows up now, as well as our landing pages. More real estate for our valuable keywords (run the search in your own geos and let me know if it shows up).
How do do it cheaper?
DIY is the cheaper, certainly. All you need is a decent camera ($500), some lights ($100) and time ($??).
I know a couple people that could handle the animation stuff as freelance. I can share that over DM.
Any stats you can share on ROI of your top blogs vs this video
This is one of our best performing blog posts:
You can check out this article on how we managed to rank there: The REAL cost of content marketing: turning $70K into $200K
There are thousands of articles online on how to grow your SEO, that are obviously focusing on their own SEO, among with stories of influencers making a living from it. Yet, nobody seems to be looking at the real cost behind it. But, worry not, we're going to do that right here, right now.
So that article, alone, has brought at least 392 paid users. That’s already hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
Revenue from customers that came from Youtube:
We’ve created a new platform called FounderHub to help these companies navigate the process of starting a business and raising capital. This 30-second startup fundraising test will help answer the question on whether your startup is ready to raise capital.
Demo days are often the first chance a startup gets at getting in front of investors. For most startup accelerators, this is your graduation event, and a lot of work goes into preparing those slides and those pitches.
