In this article, we are going to talk about Idwall Series A pitch deck, and how they managed to raise more than $3MM.

Idwall was founded in 2016 by Brazillian entrepreneurs Lincoln Ando and Raphael Melo. The company is looking to put an end to online credential frauds and security breaches. They developed a full-stack solution that validates documents in an automated way.

Last year, idWall raised more than 9 million Brazillian reals (2MM+) in a Series A with their pitch deck. The team now has over 80 people working with them and the company is one of Brazil’s top rising startups.

Funny side note here: Lincoln was part of 500 Startups with a previous company. The same year we were admitted to the program.  We went through the accelerator together and became friends ever since. We asked Lincoln if we could redesign his slides and he agreed!

Reviewing idWall Series A Pitch Deck:

This is a great presentation to analyze because it is short and simple. Lincoln covered all 14 slides in little over 2 minutes, so this is almost an elevator pitch. (You can see how to master those in one of our latest videos by Caya).

The pitch deck is pretty well constructed for several reasons:

1. It establishes a real problem and its monetary consequences. If you have to put your energy into one single slide, I would say invest it the problem slide. You need to plant this idea deep inside people’s minds.
2. Validation. The biggest selling point of your company is the numbers that prove your success so far and potential growth in the future. After just a couple of months, IdWall already had big companies backing them up. And they were making more than a hundred thousand dollars in Annual Recurring Revenue. These are the kind of numbers that get investors interested, so drop the bomb early into the conversation.
3. There’s very little content on each slide, which makes it easier to digest the pitch deck. Short sentences with complementary images and icons make these slides attractive and the ideas in them easier to understand.

Lincoln explained the solution with a couple of key features. These make up the wow effect and need to be carefully chosen. You don’t want to get into too many details just yet. This is just a teaser that can be explained in depth later on.

Don’t you just love a short pitch? It forces people to cut the crap and get to the point in just a few words. Two minutes, that’s it. These kinds of interactions are super valuable if done right! Bonus points for the super short recap at the end of the presentation. It reminds people of the problem, traction, and market validation.

Finally, the closing slide is the last opportunity to drill your tagline into people’s minds. Also, remind them who you are, and even your company’s name, since they’ll most likely forget it by the time you finish your slides.

Recommended article: How to create a pitch deck for investors

Redesigning the presentation:

After reviewing the entire presentation, and watching Lincoln's video, the only thing I thought could have improved his pitch deck was including more hints to the product itself.

He talks about a full-stack solution, a beta product, but those concepts remain a bit abstract throughout the deck. Especially for people who might not be too familiar with those terms. It’s always good to make things easy to imagine. Assume people don’t know anything and take them by the hand in understanding your solution.

So jumping right into the slides, let’s see what I did to improve these slides:

The first thing I want to do is refresh these slides with idWall’s new brand identity. Their new look and color palette are way more vibrant and polished, and I want these slides to shine with a new light!

I went ahead and created two color sets:

One with a white background, black font, and a purple highlight. And a more bold color set with a purple gradient for the background. This second color set works better with slides that have less text and bigger fonts. You don’t want people’s eyes to get tired with overtly saturated slides so use them with caution and always try to alternate with a simpler combination to give people’s eyes a rest.

The next thing I did was adding more images that made the slides look brighter. The original pitch deck is a little dark and none of the images stood out. By using cleaner and more modern images, we can accomplish more interesting slide compositions.

I updated the interface mockups used on the features’ slides.

Devices get outdated pretty fast, so make sure you always use the latest version on your pitch deck. You can easily find royalty-free mockups online, or, you can pay for product mockup tools like Placeit.net

Another detail I wanted to take care of is the all-caps phrases.

I see this quite a lot on pitch decks and websites, and I keep wondering why people do this? My guess is people want to emphasize a specific word, make it bigger and more noticeable. But all caps words and phrases are harder to read and can make your slides look saturated. I simply used a bigger font with some nice effects here and there, like the long shadow effect on these phrases. This makes the phrases stand out without compromising readability.

The Team Slide

For some reason, the team slide (or in this case, the Advisors slide), always has the worst photos. When it should be the complete opposite! This slide needs to look super professional and convey trust and credibility. Especially for idWall, since they had big names backing them up. I replaced the old photos with higher quality portraits and the result looks so much better.

Final Touch

Finally, I played around with a mostly symmetrical layout, but switched between a one, two and three column scheme in order to keep things interesting.

A little side note here: you can always break your own layout pattern if it helps to accommodate information better.

A good example of this is the Early Adopters slide, where we used a two-column layout as a macro grid, but then divided each of those columns into a 4 by 4 grid on the left, and a two-row column on the right. The same goes for the Background Check slide, where the photo and text worked better with an asymmetrical column distribution.

Once we have all of these changes in place, the result looks super sharp.

We want to thank Lincoln and all the guys at idWall for letting us review and re-edit their slides. You guys are killing it, and we wish you all the best. Obrigado!