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The pitch deck has to be more upfront here, including information about you, the passion that brings you here and how are you planning to scale up in the next couple of years.
Unicorn companies hold significance in the startup ecosystem, and for legitimate reasons. To be classified as a unicorn startup, a company must have an investor valuation of $1 billion or more, and there are only 554 unicorns in the world as of 2021.
If there’s one thing these iconic large valuations can teach you as an early-stage entrepreneur wanting to take the next step, it is that investors are betting big stakes in new firms. They aren’t scared to take chances and try new things. Investors are now willing to consider innovative ideas and entrepreneurs who have the potential to bring about paradigm changes.
However, there’s a catch; most businesses are so focused on obtaining targeted business figures during the early stages of fundraising that they overlook or are unfamiliar with what investors are looking for, resulting in missed opportunities. Most of the entrepreneurs miss out on presenting their business impactfully in front of investors henceforth, losing funding opportunities.
There are a lot of companies helping startups to connect with investors by assisting them in making impactful Pitch Decks. Pitch Decks can help you explain what your business holds and how you can make a change in the current scenarios. It contains details about your problem, solution, business model, market size, financial projections, and future goals.
A Pitch Deck is the first tool that entrepreneurs use to communicate with potential investors. A pitch deck’s goal is to entice possible investors to participate. A compilation of facts and figures will have less of an impact than a story.
The course of pitching starts from seed and pre-seed round itself, with the help of pitch decks companies try to get more attention towards their business model, current traction, product, scalability of the idea, and on their team from the investors in these rounds. If we understand about pitch decks at the seed level, it’s about compiling your startup’s story in front of the investors, before the final product is out.
The pitch deck has to be more upfront here, including information about you, the passion that brings you here and how are you planning to scale up in the next couple of years. The pitch deck should commute a mixture of verbal and non-verbal information to the investors and help them build a personal connection to decide their interests. This approach is essential in the early rounds since there is less traction for you to present as of now.
The major difference between the pitch decks of later and seed rounds is traction after having a live product. After analyzing about 200 startups at their seed round, data collected by Docsend and Harvard business school tells that investors spend most of their time in ‘financial projections’ then on understanding the ‘team’ and later comes ‘problems’, ‘competition’, ‘market’ etc. The slides in this round should be more KPI-focused and business-centric.
It is also essential to understand the investors will take a hard look at what you drop from your pitch decks, so it’s a key exercise to keep things as simple as you can. Also other than focusing on numbers and graphs, Entrepreneurs need to focus on what value they are bringing in each of their customers’ daily lives. Investors look for this trait to determine how sustainable their investments can be, fetching them long-term profits. Startups may want to cram as much information as possible onto their initial pitch deck but less, is often more. More enticing than a text-based interface, simple, clearly defined ideas described in dot points and graphical information might lead to follow-up conversations.
Slides of the Pitch Deck discuss target market, sales strategies, differentiation, and the milestones as well, if everything is in place you will be able to pitch the investors and convince them for a follow-up meeting. From our experience of serving 500+ clients, before obtaining funding, businesses often pitch several possible investors.
Therefore it is essential to take consideration of the following points before making a pitch deck- an impactful storyline that is easy to understand and conveys everything precisely about your business, it should contain all the necessary slides, reliable market size and research, and last but not least professional design.
Remember to compile your pitch deck with up-to-date data along with recent developments that include critical metrics and recent achievements, before each presentation. Make sure you tick all the above-mentioned checkboxes before presenting your business in front of the investors as founders that do so have higher chances of convincing investors for a follow-up meeting, ultimately leading to funding.
Source: Business World