How to build a Pitch Deck from scratch

How do you build a startup pitch deck? This question often torments startup founders and most entrepreneurs when starting up a business. But it does not have to be a fully laborious task of something you start from scratch. In fact, building a startup pitch deck can be an easy step-by-step process with the following guide.

We’ll start off by listing the most important steps to answer the question of “How do you build a startup pitch deck?” effectively and we will expand on these below:

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*Bonus Tip: Rely on presentation templates

Step 1: Create an informative cover

To fill this slide, add your name, the position you hold within the company, a business logo and a tagline. This slide should make it easy for anyone in your audience or meeting to contact you, especially as you’ll be pitching hoping to raise interest in your startup. 

If you’re emailing your pitch deck to an investor or another third party, then all the more reason to add contact information.

Step 2: Define the problem you’re addressing

You’re in business hopefully because there is a big problem you’re solving for a specific target audience. This should be what starts your pitch deck presentation. 

Create a problem slide (titled as such) that outlines that problem you’re addressing very simply and clearly. 

Step 3: Outline your perfect solution

We hope you’re using storytelling to pitch your deck. In case you aren’t, please read this article on the importance of storytelling for business presentations. It explains why resorting to this art is excruciatingly important. 

Tying your problem slide to your solution one should also be an easy link. Use your solution slide to describe your value proposition. That is to say, describe how you have come up with just the perfect solution to your previously-outlined problem. It should also be a solution that is not currently available, or one that solves something differently.

Step 4: Explain the state of the market

The market you’re inserting with your product or service offer needs to be big enough to make it worth a VC’s interest. Whether you rely on someone else’s figures or use your own startup’s data alone, describe the market size very well. 

Tell what the market is like, what the frequency of need or use from its consumers is, and how large their transactions are in this marketplace, for example. 

Feel free to report on this information through two different slides, one titled market validation and another purely related to the size of the described niche. 

Step 5: Describe your startup product

Now, to expand on the fun in your presentation, excel in describing your business offer. This slide is all about presenting your product, which is typically the most enjoyable task for any founder. 

Use a demo or just a prototype in case your full product is not done, but definitely let the audience see what you’ve created or what you’re offering. 

Step 6: Kill with your business model

This should be the juiciest of all your slides. You need to kill here in terms of a model description of how you intend to generate revenue. Cut down to 1-3 ways in which you’ll aim at plausible profitability and explain it over this slide. 

Step 7: How you’ll insert in the market

Pretty self-explanatory; let the audience know how you intend on inserting your brand or product in the market to successful results. It is appropriate to expand on your marketing strategies here, as well. 

Step 8: Talk about your competition

The best piece of advice we can give you is to never pretend that your product is so unique there are no competitors out there for it. That is rarely ever the case and it will not make you look well at all. Speak of your competitors, on the contrary. 

Be grand in outlining perfectly well who the competition is and what they do. You should’ve studied them so well your expertise in the field will shine, making investors feel safe about your considerations.  

Step 9: Present your ideal team

More than a pretty-face slide, highlight the strength of the perfect team you’ve put together to handle your business in ideal terms. Stress out how your team’s background experience is the ideal match for your business essence and needs. Make sure you pinpoint the best of every key player’s addition to your collective success. Note we said “key players,” not everyone in your payroll.

This information should make investors feel assured that, no matter what happens, they’ll have the best support from leaders in the industry. VCs need to know you’re capable of handling challenges as much as making the best of brilliant opportunities. 

Step 10: Disclose your financials

Consider the diverse pitch deck variations on which we’ve already expanded when crafting your financial slides. And think of that overall when you attempt to answer how you build a startup pitch deck. In general, you should be outlining just how you’ve come this far, and how much you need to make it further. 

The traction slide is actually one of the most important ones to investors. That’s also why we’ve written solely on it before. 

To summarize it for you, making the best of your financial slides is partly showing your growth through graphs and figures, as well as being able to define just how much funding you need to scale further into more revenue and profitability. 

Bonus Tip: Rely on templates

Let’s wrap this up with an added bonus to our 10 steps to an effective startup pitch deck. And we’ll do that just because that is always a great way to end something. 

So, remember there are dozens of diverse startup pitch templates on which you can rely to craft your deck. The ones we have improved from successful startup pitch decks are a perfect example of winning ones. 

Using templates will make it easier to focus on the precise content you should fill in per deck slide. And it will also guarantee, at least with Slidebean templates, that you count on outstanding design to your slides. Both these items should simplify the otherwise very difficult task of coming up with a great business pitch deck presentation from scratch and on your own. 

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If you decide not to use a template to create your startup pitch deck, make sure you have some sort of design service give the best quality to how your deck looks. Aside from ensuring texts, fonts, graphs and other visuals are indeed viewable, neat impressions are everything. 

We have written about the cost and characteristics of the different options to pitch deck slide design, as well. And we also offer design services ourselves in case you’re interested.