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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. It also serves 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.
A demo day presentation, for example, should be very visual and contain very little text. It’s going to be seen from afar and you’re going to do all the talking. On the other hand, a pitch presentation that you’re planning to email should be completely self-explanatory. It’s going to be seen on a laptop monitor, so small font is not so bad.
In these cases it’s also very useful to track your investor’s activity on the presentation, to figure out if they actually read the 100% of the slides; this can be critical when determining the frequency for follow up emails. In our case, it was key to raising our most recent round of funding. A number of pitch deck platforms offer this as a feature.
Related Article: 35 best pitch deck templates
A number of authors, venture capitalists, startup founders and evangelists have created different versions of what they consider required elements to successful pitching presentations. Most of them agree on the following investor deck outline:
If you made it here, you are probably looking for inspiration to create a pitch deck for your own startup. Yeah, you’ve come to the right place. Let me start by saying that this might not be the best approach to take when pitching investors: “Each investor deck should be tailored to the company’s strengths." Let's begin by covering some basics:
The story you tell about your idea, team and concept validation (yes, metrics!!) is what will ultimately determine if your deck is appealing or not. Still, getting some inspiration from previously successful startups is definitely a good place to start.
We have a video about how to create a pitch deck for investors.
Bonus: Investor Deck Template by 500 Startups
The Airbnb Pitch Deck is one of the most searched references on the internet, probably because it’s a company so familiar to us all. As you will see, this is a classic 10 Slide Investor Deck template, most startups are using these days.
We’ve also taken the liberty of redesigning the original slides using Slidebean's Pitch Deck Templates, and wrote a full article about the process and a teardown of the original content. You can find that here:
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This is the Original Airbnb Pitch Deck slide layout:
The killer slide in this presentation is their business model slide because it lays out their revenue model in the simplest possible way. They make a 10% commission on each transaction, period.
Also, notice how simple the problem slide has been laid out on the presentation: 3 simple bullets are enough to portray the problem.
Even though we redesigned the original elevator pitch, the simplicity and the small amount of elements in each slide was inherent from the original deck. As we’ve mentioned before, less is more when talking about presentations.
For the ninth anniversary of the founding of Uber, it's co-founder Garret Camp shared the first slides they created in late 2008. At the beginning, Uber was originally called UberCab, and it has evolved from a simple idea into a major platform that has improved the car service industry.
Here you have Uber's 25 slide deck! There's a lot to be learned from their first ever pitch:
It’s rather hard to imagine a world without Facebook today. But back in 2004, 21 year old Eduardo Saverin was just another entrepreneur trying to convince people to put money into a growing company called thefacebook.com, co-founded by him and his friend Mark Zuckerberg.
The story about how they founded one of the most successful companies in history was dramatically portrayed in the 2010 movie: The Social Network. Mark Zuckerberg himself has admitted that the movie, as many other biopics, is inaccurate in many aspects. But he also acknowledges that the movie gets a lot of details right.
One of them is that Eduardo did in fact go to New York in 2004 at the time when thefacebook.com was launched, to try and sell Facebook’s initial idea of ads to potential clients.
Facebook’s original pitch deck was basically a media kit containing the company’s value proposition, key metrics and Online Marketing Services.
At that time the company wasn’t making any money from The Facebook, so their presentation wasn’t based on revenue traction (actually they were still figuring out their business model overall). Instead, they bet on solid numbers such as their user engagement, customer base and growth metrics.
Here's the Facebook Pitch deck outline:
The biggest difference you’ll find from this presentation to an investor deck used today is that there’s no Problem Slide. Facebook was pretty much creating the necessity for college students to interact in the digital world. A created necessity that turned so real and massive soon enough it was obvious it would need to transcend colleges and universities in the US.
Our slide deck at the 500 Startups demo day was the culmination of a 2 startup accelerator process, hours of rehearsal and dozens of adjustments thanks to the feedback from our mentors. Pitching on a Demo Day event is very different from pitching to an investor on a one-on-one meeting. I've blogged about it before:
Related Read: A complete guide to creating a pitch deck presentation
Furthermore, if we advertise Slidebean as a presentation builder, our presentations need to ROCK, which does put a lot of pressure for any demo day or on stage pitches we need to do.
Here's the latest version of our deck:
Slidebean Pitch Deck slide layout:
Notice the BIG difference in the number of slides. Remember this is a demo day deck, so it is expected that somebody will be standing in front of the presentation.
Most slide deck format have very little text and only one or two large images, so you can sweep over the presentation much faster. If you look at the video, you'll notice that each slide stays on the screen just a few seconds.
Since Sequoia Capital has quite the reputation for investments, it makes sense to take a page out of their book. This slide deck outline is perfect for companies that are getting ready to develop a pitch when seeking investors. Similar to a business plan, a pitch helps to answer potential questions that an investor will have before putting up their money in your business. This presentation slide deck has slides that build upon each other to create your overall pitch.
Each slide of the pitch deck will help you walk your potential investors through the investment opportunity you’re offering them. The slides included in the Sequoia Capital Pitch Deck Template each have a specific purpose that leads them down the path of discovery into your pitch
Related read: What is a pitch deck presentation
Peloton broke the fitness industry with their stationary bike system which connects users and trainers via the internet.
The company, founded in 2012, has now a line of gym equipment and sells monthly subscriptions to enjoy live and on-demand classes. Their mission: "Peloton uses technology and design to connect the world through fitness, empowering people to be the best version of themselves anywhere, anytime". Do you have a business idea for this industry in mind? We recreated the pitch deck that Peloton used to obtain funding. Check it out!
The slides that comprise this deck are:
This is the presentation deck Buffer used to raise $500,000 for their startup, as redesigned by Slidebean. The highlight of this deck is the traction slide, which the founders describe as the critical one for their success.
This investor deck contains the following slides:
DoorDash is one of the most well-known food delivery companies in the United States right now. Back in January 2020, they made the country's largest third-party delivery system. Yet, as a startup, they've come to that out of pure hard work and well-aligned perfectionism, it seems.
Doordash is also looking to reduce food waste through Project DASH, by the way. In Xu's own words: "At DoorDash, we have one goal: to get whatever people need in their hands as efficiently as possible."
The Doordash investor deck is an excellent example of a pitch using traction to backup your business.
Tesla is a constant surge of news. From the electric car for masses with accessible price points to the newest model being launched in 2021, Tesla Motors’ latest insights over the past few days include being ready to join the S&P 500 at S&P Dow Jones. Reserved for leaders in top industries, this is an exclusive market-cap-weighted index in the stock market. But what did a company like Tesla do when it came down to starting financials? Let’s take a look at Tesla’s pitch deck, shall we? And we’ll also share insight on our revamped Tesla deck template with you.
The average small business has 42 SaaS tools and spends ~$200K/yr. The problem is, there's no centralized overview of this stack. Founders see themselves often checking that a tool is indeed being used by all the seats they are paying for. When attempting to find a platform to organize this, we saw a lot of them were focused on businesses larger than 100 employees. These are not known brands; they are companies that operate mostly on outbound sales.
But these small businesses, like us, at Slidebean, have a problem. The average company under 100 employees has 3.6 duplicate apps, 2.6 orphaned subscriptions, and an average of 17 platforms per employee. And this is, of course, continuing to grow.
So how can we solve this for small businesses, where there's an absolute focus on optimizing expenses. With Monthly (Renamed as Recurring), we can connect to their accounting software and to their emails to collect invoices, we can measure user activity using SSO and their Gsuite logs- but most importantly, we can offer Smart recommendations. This is the investor deck:
This pitch deck contains the following slides:
Recommended video: How to pitch new ideas to investors?
Youtube’s pitch deck was used in 2005 when it had less than 10,000 users. It was actually quite straightforward. They used an elementary version of a 10 slide pitch deck to go up in front of Sequoia Capital for fundraising. Still, the company was able to raise $3.5 M in that Series A round November of that year. This cost around 30% of the stakes in the company.
An investment proposal is the driving tool during a meeting with potential investors. It’s a presentation that covers critical company information and metrics, hoping to get investors interested in funding a company, product, or project.
The Business Plan is a crucial step in starting your own business because it represents the goals you want to achieve and outlines how they will be accomplished.
The Business Plan is a formal, written statement of the goals that your new venture plans to achieve. It's also an overview of how it will do so- these might be things like marketing strategies or costs for production equipment you plan on renting out when necessary (there are many activities involved in running any type businesses). There can vary depending upon what industry one belongs too but this particular presentation template can be used as one way to create your own business plan, or if you want something more formal and detailed than what's possible with just words on paper - it might provide some helpful insight into how other people approach their planning process!
The go-to market strategy is a plan that details how an organization will place its products in the market to reach maximum penetration and profitability. It includes all functions of business, from launching new items or campaigns down through tracking results after they're released - it's very detailed. What is your go-to market strategy? This template will help you summarize it in an engaging way!
What you should include in your pitch deck is a question that entrepreneurs have been asking themselves for years. There isn't an accepted set of contents, but there's some common ground among VCs and angel investors as to what they expect see when looking at pitches (and in which order). The new template we created distilled from benchmarking dozens venture backed startups takes this into account so all candidates will be clearer on where their strengths lie!
500 Startups is a leading global venture capital seed fund and startup accelerator headquartered in Silicon Valley with over $350M AUM.
This investor deck template is ideal for initial VCs and Angel Investors. If they ask to see your pitch deck, this is what you want to send. The outline of the investor deck mainly focuses on your startup's growth metrics and traction.
Slidebean provides a premium service for startups, entrepreneurs, investors, and creatives who want to make better presentations. Our team of experts designs amazing slide decks every week. We want your audience to understand what you do and why you do it. If you want to start a new project, you can do it here: Slidebean Presentation Design Service
Besides the pitch deck examples we shared here, we have created, curated and redesigned several investor deck and set them as templates on our platform. Our presentation templates provide a fill-in-the-blank outline that can kick start your presentation workflow. Create a pitch deck that gets you funded. Browse templates from the most successful startups on the planet. Check them all here.
