This document provides lessons and recommendations for creating an effective pitch deck for seed funding. It recommends including key slides that tell the story of the startup, such as describing the problem being solved, product, market opportunity, competition, team, and traction. The pitch deck should clearly communicate the startup's vision through a compelling narrative rather than a disconnected set of slides. Details like fonts, images, and branding should be consistent to avoid distraction. The goal is to concisely yet memorably convey the startup story to investors.

1. Pitch Decks
Lessons We Learned
From Designing

2. Include The Right Type Of Content
Different pitch decks serve different purposes, depending on your
investment goal and where you are in your business journey. While a
classical pitch deck structure like the one presented by Sequoia in their
article on “Writing a Business Plan”, each investment stage requires a
different structure.

3. If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these key
slides :
Vision
You have to be sure that your vision is specific to
your niche and not too generic or broad, and that it’s
a vision you’re striving to achieve (meaning you
haven’t achieved it yet).
Include The Right Type Of Content

4. Describe the pain of the customer (or the customer’s
customer), as well as the negative consequences and
emotions it triggers. If you can outline how the
customer addresses the issue today and what are
some limitations of those current alternatives, that’s
even better.
The problem
If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content

5. Describe how your solution works, its features, the
architecture, any proprietary code developed, or any
intellectual properties.
The Product
If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content

6. Include market size estimates and declare your
beachhead market. It would be great if you could also
describe your ideal customer and show why this is a
good time to act (explain why your solution was not
possible a couple of years ago and why it cannot wait
anymore, to create a sense of urgency).
Market Opportunity
If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content

7. Don’t stop at naming your competition, but describe
how you intend to position yourself in relation to your
competitors - what are your key differentiators and
what makes your solution superior to all the other
ones.
Competition
If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content

8. Team
If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content
Especially in an early-stage startup, investors are
betting more on the team than on the product,
because you may pivot your product in the future but
you still have the same people running the company.
One common mistake we see here is that founders
usually just put a picture of each team member, list
their name and position and that’s it. Unless you are
very well known, that doesn’t say anything to
investors.

9. Traction
If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content
It’s important to show numbers if you launched your
product in any kind of way, especially in a series A deck.
It’s not just about financials, this includes any other
relevant metrics or forms of content: number of
customers, client pipeline, a study case, client logos,
testimonials, pilot projects, etc.

10. If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content
Business Model
How are you going to make money? You can
include key revenue streams, revenue models, and
type of service/product packages you offer,
lifetime value of clients.

11. If you’re creating an early-stage pitch deck to
get seed funding, make sure to include these
key slides :
Include The Right Type Of Content
Fundraising Goal
Include the fundraising amount you're looking
for, use of proceeds and milestones/goals for the
next 18 months.

12. Tell A Story
Your whole deck should be built on an overarching story instead of
looking like a group of disconnected slides put together with what
investors want to see/hear. Having a compelling story can really help
you stand out from other startups. Consider the fact that investors
see so many decks, that they often lose interest or patience, which is
why a good story will make you memorable.

13. Every slide is a part of your story that you want to get across. If you took all your slides and just read the
headings, you should be reading the story of your startup. If you took out just one slide or changed the
order of slides, then your story should not make as much sense.
Tell A Story

14. We talked about different techniques to tell stories in your presentation in the Power of Storytelling. The best
one is to make it personal. When describing your problem, start by talking about a personal experience, a
frustration you’ve experienced, something that kept you up at night and how you came to the realization that
you weren’t the only one with this problem. An effective persuasion technique is to tell the story in such a way
that investors can relate to the problem you are describing (they might have faced the same issue).
For example, in this deck describing a solution for
fender benders and hit & runs, the founder started by
talking about a personal experience that people can
relate to it (it’s very frustrating to go to your parked
car and see that it was damaged by another driver)
before showing that it’s a larger problem.
Tell A Story

15. Don’t Include Too Much Content
Pitch decks are somewhat limitative. While they are a marketing
document, in essence, they are not a 400-pages industry report. Most
founders tend to stuff their deck with every fact and figure they have
read over the previous 12 months.

16. This is the first interaction with investors. You don’t
want to scare them, tire them or bombard them with
so much information that they are not able to describe
what your startup does or who you are. The urge to
share every piece of information with investors is in
every founder, the key is controlling it. This is where
we come in; through our experience, we help guide
founders to create the right structure for their story
and communicate it clearly and effectively.
The clearer you are in communicating startup’s vision
and your business plans, the easier it will be for
investors and VCs to focus their attention on your
needs for a short amount of time.
Keep your slides clean and concise and treat them
like billboards.
Don’t Include Too Much Content

17. The Importance Of Details
Think of how many decks have been presented to these investors. They
already know what to expect, how they want to see it and they can
identify a misplaced idea, number or phrase almost instantly.

18. The Importance Of Details
Overselling your headlines
Language-wise, make sure to avoid the following:
Using obvious phrases and industry clichés
(if they see ‘disruptive’ one more time…)
Overly complicated phrases
(the need to include more content can
be reflected here)
Technical jargon that investors may not
be familiar with
Use your own language to tell your story.

19. Take your time designing the first two slides.
Investors spend the most time on these. The title slide/presentation slide will be a key slide to make a first
impression. We recommend that you focus on making the cover slide more visually appealing than the rest.
The Importance Of Details
As for the second slide, the Problem slide, it’s
usually where the presentation lingers most
and where investors get the best sense of
your business

20. Keep your design consistent throughout the deck
Don’t alternate more than two or three fonts, don’t switch color pallets mid-deck, don’t combine illustrations
and photos, don’t abuse overlays.
The Importance Of Details
Stay away from red/green, brown/green, blue/black, blue/purple combinations. Instead, aim for a high contrast
between background and text. Also, don’t use bright background colors that will strain your audience's eyes.
These details can be very distracting for investors, robbing you of their attention.

21. Another key aspect is having a consistent design
in terms of branding.
Use the same colors, logo, fonts, type of imagery you
normally use in your branding (on your website,
collateral etc.). Pick a color scheme based on your
logo.
The Importance Of Details

22. Use high-quality visuals that fit the context.
Use images that are relatable to your business and your target
market, taking into consideration diversity as well (if you’re
addressing the Hispanic market, images should have models from
that demographic, not Caucasian).
The Importance Of Details
Don’t use cheesy stock photos like the
one below..
If you're in need of quality graphics to build your
presentation, we've made a list of visual resources website you
can check out.

23. Most founders make the same mistakes. Common, easily-addressable
mistakes, that are impossible to catch if you don’t have an objective
second pair of eyes helping you to improve your pitch deck.
Hopefully, these lessons will prove useful the next time you're working
on a pitch deck and if you have any questions, we're happy to help.