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Pitch deck advice by Atrium.co

Link: The Founder’s Guide to Raising a Series A Venture Financing by Justin Kan, CEO of Atrium LTS

Start with a compelling narrative

I firmly believe that investors invest in (and employees join, and journalists write about) compelling stories. Your pitch deck is really just a vehicle for telling the story you want to tell.

Getting the right narrative is the most important part of the pitch process So make sure you spend a lot of time perfecting.

Use this narrative arc

Step 1. The world is a certain way

  • Outline your background and the current state of the market
  • How you were introduced to the problem, and why you are an expert
  • The order of magnitude of the problem today (it should be big!)

Step 2. Something changes

  • Your solution to the problem
  • Why now is the ideal time for it

Step 3. The world is now different

  • How your solution is changing the world
  • Product traction (especially metrics / milestone focused traction)
  • The future opportunity (or why your traction will continue and make you big!)

How do you know your narrative is good?

  • If you have a powerful narrative you should be able to have a conversation with someone who is a novice at your industry and guide them through it, and at the end they should think your company is amazing and probably going to be very successful.

  • To refine my narrative I often do exactly this (it doesn’t have to be with potential investors) and use it to iterate the story I am telling (adding or removing specific facts, changing ordering, etc).

Narrative tactics

  • Your narrative must be concise and accessible.
  • Leave out anything that doesn’t powerfully support one of your points.
  • Many (or most) of the investors you talk to will be less knowledgeable about your industry than you are, so you will have to explain things simply.
  • You can often do this by walking them through real world examples of the what would happen without your product, and what happens with your product.
  • You should pitch the biggest vision that you actually believe in. VCs are trying to find multibillion dollar companies. You want to present what you are building as something that is going to be big. However, it has to be a vision you actually believe: if you pitch something that you don’t actually believe will happen just because you think it sounds big, it will be apparent and investors won’t want to back you.

Your pitch deck

  • Once you believe you have a powerful narrative, you can make a pitch deck.
  • Your pitch deck should follow the major points of your narrative as we outlined above.
  • Leave all the extraneous details (competitive analysis, deep dives into your P&L, etc) for the appendix because those details aren’t core to telling your narrative, and you will only have to refer to them if an investor is really digging in and asking in depth questions.
  • Leave out clip art, stock photos, and other random graphics.