5 tips for building a pitch deck that gets you the investor meeting

Von Protonet Team. Veröffentlicht 12. Februar 2014.

First of all you should ask yourself: what do I want to achieve?

We think it is important to deliver a sense of what the company is made of. Protonet for example is a startup with a very strong vision of the future and a will to create global impact. Nothing else is more relevant for us than changing the game. Accordingly, we have to find an investor who is interested in this as well.  But don’t be mistaken: the investor has to fit the company, not the other way around.

Our company has gone through two stages of funding and right now we are raising a Series A round. Since this is not peanuts anymore, it has to be worked out. The first things we are sending out to investors are a couple of slides, and that’s it. The feedback we are getting from investors is mostly the same: “Impressive!”.  But why is that so and what determines a “great pitchdeck”?

You can check out parts of our pitchdeck here.

1 Send only high-level information

If you get an intro to an investor (you should always try this to help him understand that you are credible), you might be asked to send some numbers or figures to discuss. We don’t do that, but we still get meeting invitations from almost everyone.  The reason is simple: our pitchdeck only caters very high-level information. We don’t describe the product in detail, we don’t tell anything about our financial plans. Why? Because it will get the investor lost in bits and pieces – and when he is lost in bits and pieces, his emotions go cold. And if that happens, your chances to get a meeting will drop. So always give only the high-level information away.

2 Answer the right questions

“Why should I invest now?” If you manage to answer this question correctly, you will get the meeting. Is there a trend that will support your product? And will it manage to support you in the future? What are the forces transforming the market that you are trying to move into? For Protonet they are: (A) the growing amount of data in a connected world, which is (B) landing in data-honey-pots that are attractive to lots of people thus producing increasing amounts of data scandals lately. And (C) Moore’s law, which will make owning hardware cheaper and simpler in the future. If you can answer the “why now” question in a way the investor can only say yes, you’ll get the meeting.

3 Visualize

The first things our brain can process are pictures. That’s the reason why your instagrams on facebook get the most likes and not the links or videos or plain text. You can consume it immediately.  The attention span of an investor is very short, so chances he might like you because you thought of this are higher than if you send a 20-slide presentation with thousands of characters. Make your picture like a book for a child to understand: easy to read, easy to understand.

4 Set the Frame

Framing means putting a person into your context. When two people interact, only one of them can be dominating the conversation. There’s a whole book around this, and you have to read it (our whole company has), it’s incredible! An example: if you set a price frame your goal is to make the investment-money become a commodity.  Every investor has money, you are the only one offering an opportunity to grow this money by factor 100. You are to be won. It’s like chasing girls: if you’re the one begging for a date, she’s in control. You have to turn it around.

5 Iterate, iterate, iterate

For our pitch we have made about 50 different versions until we had the one to send out. And even then we changed it when we first collided with investor questions – of course you have to adapt here and there. It’s a huge pain going through the same thing again and again but in the end the little details that make the first impression will count. Invest the time to pitch it to others and find out how the pitch will represent to your company in the best possible way. Again: the investor has to fit your company. Otherwise you might be wasting time now and jeopardizing your success in the future.

Another great post about how to raise money comes from Paul Graham, you should read this, too!