Impress Investors with Your Pitch Deck: A Step by Step System
In this 40‑minute Founder Institute webinar, host Daniel introduces Sam Eisenberg, co‑founder of Design for Decks, who shares a systematic approach to creating winning pitch decks. Sam begins with sobering statistics about investor attention (average VC sees 3,000 decks a year, spends ~2 min 42 sec per deck) and stresses the need for a clear story that captures problem, timing, and team. He outlines a step‑by‑step workflow: (1) Plan – choose a proven storytelling structure, decide whether the deck is a live presentation or a send‑along, and pick a collaborative platform (PowerPoint, Figma, Beautiful.ai, Pitch.com, Canva). (2) Answer the “big three” questions on every slide – why the problem is worth solving (quantify pain), why now (market or tech shift), and why you/your team are uniquely positioned. (3) Create an outline that maps these answers to the standard slide order, keeping one idea per slide and constantly asking if each slide is necessary. (4) Iterate aggressively – aim for a polished version before the first investor meeting, use feedback loops (colleagues, founders, AI tools) and practice with recording tools. (5) Design – once content is ~90 % final, apply visual hierarchy: clear headlines, minimal text, consistent colors/fonts, purposeful graphics, and simple tables instead of complex quadrants. (6) Competition slides should use straightforward tables or check‑marks rather than subjective quadrants. (7) Appendix – a well‑organized appendix acts as an objection‑handling repository, shows depth, and lets founders keep the main deck concise. Sam also answers live audience questions covering team‑slide importance, common deck mistakes (unclear first slide, over‑filled slides), inclusion of financial KPIs, structuring the ask slide, presenting complex products, and whether to reference past failures. The session ends with networking instructions and a promise to share resources via email.
Chapters
Hello, hello everyone. My name is Daniel. I'm a part of the FI marketing team. I hope you're having a super awesome Wednesday and we're back again with a really, really interesting and a fun event. And I'm personally super excited about this because we do a lot of work when it comes to creating a pitch deck and it's always great to have an expert come in and kind of give you their perspective as well. Before I kind of introduce who our expert is, let me know in the chat where you're coming in from, right? I can already see Kenya, awesome, awesome. Toronto, uh, who do we have here? Okay, UK, Chicago, awesome. Ottawa, Montreal, a lot of people from Canada today, which is perfectly fine, right? Uh, San Diego, Estonia, uh, Awesome, Romania. Awesome, awesome. So yeah, a pretty international audience. That's one of the really great things about F5. We get people from all over the world, and it also shows you how interested people are in entrepreneurship and startups in general, right? So our speaker for today is Sam. He is the co-founder of Design for Decks. He has helped startups and organizations raise over a whopping $2 billion by helping them design and and create and curate their decks, right? Before I bring Sam on stage, I wanna run a quick poll with you, right? So I wanna know, and you can respond to this question right on your screen, right? What's your biggest challenge when it comes to building a deck, right? Is it getting started? What to include and what to cut out? Is it the design or order of the slides? Awesome. So, okay. So we have, okay, so what to cut out and what to include, right? That's pretty common. I think we hear that often from founders within Founder Institute as well. It can get a little tough to decide what are, you know, the more important things, right? Awesome. So I'll just keep this poll running. I'm gonna hide this from the stage and I'm gonna bring Sam on. Hi, Sam.
Hey, Daniel, thanks for having me on. How you doing?
I'm doing great. What about you?
I'm doing great. I'm really excited for the session.
Awesome. Super excited to have you. So folks, before I kind of move back and let Sam take over, Just two things that you need to know. Sam's gonna run his presentation for about 30, 35 minutes. After that, we'll have a Q&A. If you have a question, you'll see a Q&A button on the right side, right? Click the button and pop your questions in, and I'll get to them once we start the Q&A, and we can bring your question up on stage and Sam can answer it. And once we're done with all of that, we have a networking portion as well. So please do stick around. Sam will hopefully be there too. I'll be there. All your questions. We're all ears. Sam, I will mute myself, let you take over.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Daniel. And thank you to all our members for joining us today. I'm really excited to see we have an audience from all over the world. Some of you I see woke up in the middle of the night to join the session, so I'm deeply honored. Some of us stopped in the middle of our workdays. I know that's not easy as well. And what I'm going to try to do over the session is make sure that you're taking a break from your day to join the session will have been well worth it. Okay, I'm going to be moving quite fast during my presentation. I have many, many hours of content on pitch decks and I'm trying to really keep it to a key set of items that we can cover in 40 minutes. It's mostly geared for people who are building their first pitch decks who haven't done raises before, but even if you have, there should be some helpful tidbits in there as well. Beyond that, if after the session you have more questions, we will have a Q&A session. If we don't address everything, feel free to reach out to me directly and I'll make sure that all of our questions are answered. And with that, let's get rolling. All right. Okay, if you could let me know in the chat box that you could see my screen, that would be fantastic. All right, perfect, thank you. So today's session is called Step-by-Step to a Winning Pitch Deck. I don't think I need to elaborate too much. My goal here is very simple. We can discuss mistakes that people make. We can discuss, we can tear down pitch decks, we can do all of that. But what we're going to really be doing here is walk through a very simple process for building a pitch deck that is going to get investor attention, but really is geared for getting any sort of audience attention. It's storytelling, selling, and many other things that we need to be doing as founders, as business owners, and the like. Okay. So first off, I'm Sam. My name is Sam Eisenberg. Excuse me. I'm originally from New York. As an adult, I moved to Israel. I spent 10 years in the tech ecosystem in Israel, and for the past 2 years I've been based out of Hungary. Okay, I'm a founder, I'm a growth marketer, and I also own a pitch deck firm. So the truth is from the various ventures I'm involved in, what I enjoy the very much, the very most is pitch decks. We help both founders and investors, mostly in the US, raise capital. And to date, our decks have raised over $2 million. I've been blessed to have been invited to speak on a lot of stages throughout the world. Most recently, we've spoken in Slovenia, Podem Conference Untold Stories. Obviously, I'm excited to be here with Founders Institute. And I mentor in some communities, obviously in Founder Institute cohorts, but other places as well. And what I really make, is really critical for me to understand is that the advice that we give on pitch decks is the best advice we can give because there's a lot of subjectivity to it. It's not a perfect science. And when I'm giving advice to founders, I wanna make sure I'm giving them advice that really serves them. So to that end, we get feedback from the investors we work with. We get feedback from the founders who are actively raising from investors to get to understand the feedback they're getting in the mentoring and different companies that I'm, you know, accompanying as they do their raises from there as well. And we've also run surveys to really try to quantify as much as we can. So there is a great deal of subjectivity here, but most of the advice here has been proven quite effective over and over again with the companies we work with and many others. Before diving into the content, I need to share the sobering reality. It's something that we're probably familiar with, but nonetheless, I do need to quantify it. The average, institutional investor, VC, and the like will get 3,000 pitches a year. Well, 500 of them they'll give a little bit more attention, and ultimately they'll only invest in up to 2 of them, okay? So well under 1%. With top-tier accelerators, the number isn't that different. YC, they just released, they've had over 44,000 applicants this year, and they're going to be selecting less than 1% of them, okay? So around 400. And one more sobering statistic. This is from DocSend. They've tracked that the average pre-seed investor spends a total of 2 minutes and 42 seconds on a pitch deck. And basically what all these different stats tell me is that investing your heart and soul into building your startup, investing your heart and soul into putting together an amazing team, into building the best possible product you can, into doing everything that you need to be doing right, it really is not enough. Ultimately, founders need to be able to sell their story. They need to be able to sell it first and foremost to investors so they can raise capital, but obviously to clients, to partners, to employees. You know, when you're bringing a startup employees on and you're trying to get them into the startup culture and trying to get them deeply invested in your company, this is all part of the storytelling. So every story is told slightly differently, but understanding how to tell the story to investors who are the least engaged, who are getting pitched the most often, and who have the most to lose by investing in your company is the best place for us to start. So today I'm going to share simple steps to build powerful presentations so that we can pitch, raise, and sell successfully. Okay, you're with me? Perfect, thank you. Step 1, before we begin anything that we need to do, we need to plan. And I see this mistake over and over and I've seen it recently many more times. People are going into these various AI pitch deck builders or into ChatGPT, build me a pitch deck for company X, Y, and Z. This is possibly the absolute worst thing you can do. If you wanna end up in the pile of the 2,999 that get discarded, it's a guaranteed way to do so. Before we do any sort of building, any sort of content, we need to be planning. And what this means is we need to understand what it is we're building. The first thing is the storytelling structure. There are different ways of telling a story, but for the most part in Hollywood and in various other formats, all the best storytellers they follow, right? You have an intro, conflict, you build up, a climax, come down to the resolution. And with pitch decks, our company philosophy is the same. We're going to build up, we're going to tell a story. The highlight's always going to be the product demo, what we're presenting, the execution, how we're going to, you know, the go-to-market, and then the ask and the use of funds, okay? And we don't have to get too creative with the order of our slides and what to include because all the top investors in the world tell us what to include. And this is what they're telling, this is what they need to hear. They know what are the key slides What are the slides I want to be seeing in the deck? What are the order of the slides that I want to be seeing? They all follow a similar storytelling structure. They all have various different inclusions, but first and foremost, you want to be, you don't wanna be starting from scratch. You wanna be taking an order that works, a storytelling format that works and using that one. And all the more so when you're pitching a specific investor or applying to an accelerator or whatever it is, check if they have a format they use and use their format. They have a way they like hearing a story. They have that familiarity, give them the way they wanna hear it, okay? The next thing is going through the deck format, and this is really critical. I've been seeing this at tons of live events where you'll have founders get up for pitch competitions and they put on these presentations that have 4,000 words of text on a slide and it looks like you're reading the Bible. They have, you know, 6 different messages across their slide and it's just no way to follow it. There are 2 different types of decks and you need to build them separately. If you're sending a deck as a send-along deck for someone to read, it needs to be designed for reading. It has to have the details. There's no one to fill in the blanks for them. They have to be able to understand the whole story. Inversely, when you're presenting live, let's say like I'm doing now, or when you're going to do in front of a group of investors, in front of an audience at a pitch competition, you need to, you want to be the focus of attention. You wanna keep your audience focused on you. You are telling the story. You are the person they're interested in. And the slides work as a visual aid. They help. You can use it for graphs. You can use it for basic text to keep them following along. You can use different design communication techniques to help them remember, to help something stick in their head, but ultimately you don't want your audience sitting there squinting and reading all your slides while you're up on stage presenting. Okay? And the last piece is build platform. When you're picking a platform to build in, the standard is Microsoft PowerPoint. Personally, I'm not a fan. I'm going to be looking for something that's collaborative, something that I can use offline so that I can use it whether I'm on a train or power goes out so that I can present it wherever I am, something that updates in real time so that when I send it to an investor, I send it to someone to check if I've made updates, they can always look at the updates and see the most recent version, something that gives me design flexibility so I can get a high-quality output. And I would say now I also say AI-assisted. When you can use AI to help that process, that's always better as well. I've explored at this point dozens of platforms. I can't get deep into it, but on a very high level, if you have a designer in-house, or if you're comfortable with it, Figma is definitely a top option. And if you don't, I recommend looking at these three, although there are plenty of other good ones too. Beautiful.ai, what's really neat about it is it has auto layouts. You can give it one slide and have it laid out different ways so you can see what looks best and what's most effective. Pitch.com, really easy to use, really intuitive, great templates. I'm not a template person, but it's better to have something that looks nice and professional rather than looks like garbage. And if using a template is what requires you to do so, then that's what we should do. Or Canva, a lot of design flexibility, free, very familiar, easy to find designers for, great option as well. Okay, so step 1, before we begin anything, what is the storytelling structure we're going to be using? I don't need to reinvent it, I don't need to create something from scratch, I can take one of the top structures from Founders Institute, from Y Combinator, from 500, whatever you'd like. Next is I'm going to be determining, am I building a pitch deck, a presentation deck, or a send-along deck? Ultimately, you'll usually be building both, but you need to start with one and you shouldn't be using one for both. And then what build platform? Your deck is going to go through hundreds of iterations, whether you use it for different cases, different investors based on feedback. Using the right platform will allow you to get the best possible output with the least possible investment. It's very important to pick that from the outset so you start on the right foot and save yourself a lot of time and heartache and headache as you go through the process. Okay. Second step, the big three. Your deck is a story, and yes, your story has to include a lot of things, but for most investors, they need your deck to answer three questions, and then you'll have the follow-up meetings and many other places to answer the dozens of others that follow it. The first question, which is so critical, is why is this a problem worth solving? You may have heard the term solution in search of a problem or a SISP. That's a big concern of investors is that if someone's just creating a solution and it's not actually a problem, we don't want to solve it. So before I begin anything, I need to be explaining to my investors, why is this a problem that is worth solving? Why is this a valuable problem to solve? So I need to portray a huge problem, okay? And I want the problem to be very painful. We have a tendency though, when we wanna make something painful, is we start describing it. And I see this in probably 8 or 9 out of 10 pitch decks that I see. It is very cumbersome. It's very, very difficult. It takes a long time. This is a huge problem. We use all sorts of descriptors, all sorts of ways that we're telling someone that it's a big problem, but they don't actually feel or understand it because they don't have that industry knowledge like you do, and they don't necessarily want it. They want you to feed it to them on a silver platter. So what I want to do when, when pursuing a problem, I want to quantify it. I want to make it specific. I want to give it to them a medium they can understand. If it's a SaaS, How many dollars is it going to save the company versus their other subscriptions, whatever it's saving them? How many manpower, how many staff is it going to save them? How many hours of work is it going to save a marketing employee or an individual, whoever your market is? If you're a med tech company, how many lives is it going to save or how many lives is the problem currently costing us? Ultimately, I can't just say something is big. I can't say it's painful. I don't wanna use big scientific terms. I just want to make it crystal clear. This is a big problem. It's affecting a lot of people and it's costing a lot of money, hours, lives, whatever it is. When you can use specific data, that's better. Specific data feels more real and it shows you've done your research, okay? The second big question we need to answer is why now? And this one is a really, really tough one, but ultimately investors are looking at the market and they have limited capital they can spend. So we need to create a certain, we need to create a certain sense of what is the reason that they should be investing right now in this company? Why is this the right time for the solution? Why is it the right time for the investment? Why is it the right time for your team? And there are a lot of different ways to answer the why now. It could be that you have some sort of inside knowledge. Obviously that doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Tech advancement, something's recently changed that has now allowed this to come to market, right? That's the big why now in nearly every AI deck we're seeing. Market conditions, are we heading into a recession? Right now is a great time to tackle this market or is this going to be very relevant to a large audience? And ultimately, if you can't find a great why now, it's going to be there's an existing market, we'll show you competitors, and we're doing this much better. So that's kind of like a backdoor way of answering the why now, but ultimately you need to be able to answer this question. And why you? This one's really, really critical. Sometimes it'll be easy, right? If someone has prior exits, if they have a team that comes from all the Fortune 500 companies, if they have a solution that with tons of traction, that's the really easy way. But unfortunately for most of us, that's not the reality. So we're going to be using a combination of the three and pretty much highlighting the one that we wanna highlight the most. A unique solution, right? What's unique about the solution compared to the other ones that exist compared to our competitors or their competitors, categories of competitors. A winning team. Why is our team uniquely suited to solve this problem? So if you can't show exits and prior wins, you can show that they've worked together and built things together. You can show relevant degrees, relevant industry experience, position-relevant experience. If I have a CTO, I wanna show that they've had a lot of technical experience and so on and so forth. I wanna show that the team is well suited to do what they need to do best, and we're much better than the competition. So that's the one I keep highlighting is that when there already is a market and we're trying to tackle this market, what we're trying to show is what we're doing is much better than competition. And we'll discuss a little bit later how we can help differentiate that and make that really clear. So ultimately the 3 questions I need to be able to answer before I start building my pitch deck is what, what is this huge problem? Why is now the right time to solve this problem and to invest in this company? And why is our team the best team to solve this problem? Or why is our company or solution the best solution to solve this problem? When you can answer those 3 questions really well and really clearly and really simply, then you're ready to start thinking about building your deck, okay? And now we're going to put pen to paper. We understand who we are, we understand what we do, we understand why now, why it's a huge problem, and now we wanna start writing. The first thing we need to do is create an outline. An outline, what you're trying to do with the outline is you're going to take one of the formats, the storytelling structures that I recommended, and I can give you links to them, we compile them all as well, and then we're going to say, these are the 3 questions and I need to now distribute them across these slides. So I want to understand how are these 3 questions going to be highlighted throughout my deck, these 3 answers, and obviously putting more of a focus on your strongest one. So you just simply, you follow the story structure, you include the key slides and everything else is to complement those 3 slides show why it's a huge problem, why now is the right time, and why we are uniquely suited to solve this problem. Okay, and what's critical, and I'll reiterate, is one idea per slide. We can only follow so much information, and that's even with our full attention. If someone's now— if an investor's sitting at the dentist's office waiting to be called in, scrolling through their phone, uh, spending a total of 2 minutes on your deck, the more you put there, they're not going to grasp it. Try to make it really simple for them to understand It's true in a live audience as well, checking their phones, checking messages. You won't have their full attention. One idea per slide can help them absorb it, okay? And with each slide, you're going to be asking yourself two questions. This is a self-assessment, self-critical. We need to look at every slide and ask two questions. Is it necessary? Does this slide, does it need to be in our deck? And that means either the investor expects to see it or how does it contribute to our story? I only want slides in my deck that are A, absolutely necessary because it's a key slide that investors expect to see. It could be an investor I see it in all the storytelling structures, or it could be that even though it's not a key item, it helps really strengthen our story and brings a lot to the story of why they should invite us back for a second meeting. Those are the two items I wanna be, the two questions I wanna be asking in every slide. If something doesn't fit strictly into those, I don't want it in my deck, okay? So we create a clear outline, follow the story structure, follow the story, fill in the details, ask ourselves critically, and try to keep it as neat as we can. And now comes the fun part. We got to our V1, we built our first deck, and now we're gonna go through 40 iterations until we bring it to investors. So usually in the startup world, we're always talking about how shipping things as fast as we can, done is better than perfect. I know all these things. With your pitch deck, it's just not true. You get one chance to make an impression with an investor and you wanna make sure you get that right. Before you come into your meetings, make sure you're not delivering iteration 1 of your deck. Make sure you're delivering an iteration that you can be very proud of. It'll give you more confidence to present it and your investor will have a much clearer idea of what you're presenting and you'll greatly increase your odds of ending up in the 1% and not the 99%. Okay, the big differentiator between the 1% and 99% is not luck, it's not connections. I mean, that sometimes does help as well. It's more a matter of how well do I understand investors and how well can I get them to invite me back for follow-up meetings. The second you can get that, you greatly increase your odds of being invested in. Every word has a purpose. Or every word has purpose. If we're going to include something in our slide, each slide that we present, I want it to be crystal clear, I want it to be concise. I want all the focus to be on making sure my story is clear and that the main ideas will stick in our head, okay? As Henry Ford said, "If it doesn't add value, it's waste." This is especially true with pitch decks where you only are going to leave so much of an impact. You're only able to make so much of an impression and you wanna make sure that your words and data and stats and team members and anything that you're sharing are there purely because they add value and help say, this is a company worth investing in, this is a founder worth investing in, this is a company we wanna be a part of, this is a solution, a problem we wanna tackle together with this company. Obviously it needs to be clean, it needs to be clear, it needs to be persuasive. That is the focus of what we're doing with a pitch. But the best way to get there is to have your audience pitch you. And I'll tell you right now, The first thing we do when we build something, a pitch deck or whatever it is, is we show it to our colleagues, we show it to our friends, we show it to our family. The biggest issue with that is twofold. First of all, they're likely to give you softball feedback and we don't want that. Second of all, just like you, they suffer from the curse of knowledge. They understand a lot about your company that your investor and your audience may not. So what I say is you flip the script. It's still better not to have a family member, but even if it is, we say, "Take my deck and pitch to me." And I say, "Okay, great. I'm listening to you. I'm sitting and listening." On each slide, after they pitch me, I'm gonna say, "What did you understand in this slide? Can you summarize what you understood from this slide?" And then I'm going to ask, "What is the main takeaway? What is the highlight? What do you think the main point I'm trying to get across on this slide, did that come across?" If they can explain it and they get the main takeaway right, then you're doing a pretty good job. If they didn't, it means that you're, Deck has room to be a lot more clear and a lot more concise, and we wanna focus on that as well. And I know people love using AI. I've been testing, as I said, all the deck builders. None of them are quite where I can recommend them. But if you, beyond getting feedback from your friends, from your family, from people, and especially here we have the opportunity to network in Founders Institute. So you can get feedback from other founders who don't know your company well. You can also ask GPT, and I don't wanna get into the prompt and the prompt engineering, but you know, something along the lines of, here's what I included on my slide, here's what I'm trying to get across. Is there anything that's not clear? And you can use that to help iterate on your deck. I wouldn't rely solely on GPT or on chatbots to help me with it, but it is another way to get another sense of feedback and to make sure that my content is dumbed down enough and clear enough and simple enough for an audience who may not be familiar with my company and who's going to give me exactly 2 minutes of attention. Okay? And obviously before we go into our, our, pitch or into our presentation, we need to practice, practice, practice. And there are a lot of different tools for this. You can record yourself using a Loom, Poise, Rhetoric. There's a few different programs. I'm happy to recommend others as well, where you can, some of them give you feedback on your pace. You can use it to share a presentation with your audience and they can leave feedback right inside your presentation asynchronously. So that way you're not always having to live pitch people. You can have feedback from busy people as well. They can tell you exactly where something went wrong. Whatever it is, you want to practice your pitch, record yourself, see that your pace is good, see that you're not using too many filler words, which to me isn't actually critical, but for some people they believe it is. Make sure that you're covering everything in the allotted amount of time. If an investor tells you you have 5 minutes or 3 minutes and your presentation's taking 10, you obviously need to be doing something different, and so on and so forth. And beyond that, all the programs you can use, anyone who has PowerPoint, right inside of they have something called Rehearse with Coach. I don't use PowerPoint to build my decks, but I will put a deck into PowerPoint. I'll, you know, I'll take a PDF, export it to PDF, put it in PowerPoint, rehearse it, and it can show me how long I spent on each, how long I spent getting across the deck, how many words per minute, my pitch, and so on and so forth. And it's really great, a great way to improve on what you're working on. I wouldn't aim for perfect. No one wants to see a robot. Not everyone's a perfect speaker. Most founders are not, but you do wanna be moving in a direction where you're giving off a sense of confidence, where your pitch is clear, where your tone is clear, where you're not getting stuck too many times and practice is the best way to get there. So we need to be cutting aggressively, refining our deck, getting feedback and moving forward. Okay, now that we have a deck in place, only at this point do we start on design. And this is really critical. I see people all the time, just like they start from the outline, they start from design. Our design has a very specific purpose. Yes, it needs to be aesthetically pleasing. We want our deck to look nice, but we also need it to communicate effectively. Our design is not just a way to make something look good, not just a way to make something look professional, not just a way to make something look on brand. Those are all fantastic. It's a way to make sure that the messages that we're communicating are coming across in a clear manner. And there's no way to do that until you know what your message is. So once you have your story in place, once you have your content in place, only once it's at, I would say like 90% ready, you know, iteration 30, 40, whatever that number is, only at that point would I really start touching the design elements, whether that's you yourself doing it, whether it's using a template or whether it's using a designer, no matter what it is, design happens after the content. On each slide, you should be asking yourself and communicating to your designer, don't just hand it to someone on Fiverr or Upwork, you need to be telling them what it is. What am I communicating on the slide? What is the message that I'm trying to get across? And what should stick? What is the trend or the highlight, the main item that I want to really make an impact? And I can use very, very simple design communication tools in order to do that. And I'll show you some examples. I took really, really simple decks that don't do anything crazy just to show you what effective design means. The first thing is going to be how I'm going to prioritize and include the items on my slide. So I've seen many decks where it says problem in these huge, huge, you know, 120, you know, size 120 fonts. We don't want that. We want it to be very simple. The problem or solution, we can include that on our slide somewhere in the corner. It's a reference. So when an investor looks, they know where we are in the story. That's great. It's good to include it. You don't have to, but it's a good thing to do. The next thing is our headline. Our headline, you need to have a headline. Don't just have a body. The headline is telling us the story. The headline is the item we want to stick in their head. The headlines of them saying, this is the main idea of the slide. Student loans are the second largest source of debt in the United States. Very clear, I understand exactly what it is. I understand that it's a very, very big problem. And then they use the body of the slide to agitate and demonstrate the problem. How many people this affects, how big the debt is, how much it's growing. So they're showing trends, they're showing a large problem, and they're showing a problem that affects many people, okay? Very simple design, nothing crazy. This is from a deck that we designed also, extremely, extremely simple design. US drug costs have risen dramatically over the past two decades and it's getting worse. We could have used italics, we could have used callouts, we could have used a lot of different design elements. I'm not a designer myself, but our team obviously is, and it's getting worse. We use a different color that highlights a trend that makes an impact. We used a different color to color contrast from the companies we're trying to show the problem in the US. So we're using these as a comparison, but we want the focus to be on how big the problem is for the US. We used a really prominent, simple label, annual retail prescription drug spending per person. We didn't stick it all the way here at the bottom. We didn't leave it for them to guess what it is. Help the investors understand what it is you're trying to say. Simple, clear heading. And then for the scale, we could have used 100, 500, a million, I don't, whatever it is. We used a very simple scale. So that when investors see the slide right away, they can understand US person, average person is spending about $1,000. It's very clear, very simple. They see that it's much, much bigger. It's a much bigger expense compared to other Western countries, and they also see that it's getting worse. So we're giving them all the important things in a very easy to digest manner. So now when it comes to competition slides, this is a very clear example of where aesthetically pleasing versus effectively communicates comes into play. Many, many decks you will see will use the quadrants, right? Quadrants, they look sophisticated, they look good. We'll have all the companies, we'll compare simple versus cheap, fast versus slow, accessible versus non-accessible, geographic versus global versus local, whatever it is. And then always we're going to have our company somewhere in the top right quadrant, right? Upper right quadrant. This is standard We'll see this in a lot of decks, including winning decks. The problem is with the quadrants is first of all, we're limiting ourselves to comparing in only two different ways. We can only compare in this case, simple and complex or expensive and cheap. Second of all, it lends a great deal of subjectivity. Whenever you're looking at these quadrants, you're always thinking, hey, why is this company here? I think this company's less complex. Oh, this company's not really so expensive. It's only expensive for enterprise. There's a lot of questions that come into play. And then the third thing is, is it takes time to digest what is it actually trying to tell us. We recommend a really, really simple table, okay? We're comparing all different companies. I had a, until yesterday I had a Twitter logo, I had to update it for the new X logo. We have 4 to 6 features, benefits, differentiators. Then we have our competitors. It doesn't only have to be competitors, it can be also categories of competitors. It could say, if we're comparing ourselves to social media companies and to communication apps, whatever it is, we can have those as categories. And then for us, check, check, check, check, check. We use a color contrast to make it stick out, to put focus for the competition. We put in whatever's relevant and then we use the white space instead of putting Xs, we use white space. That way I can look at the slide and I can immediately say, wow, company X is much better than the competition. For A, B, and C reason. I don't need to guess it. I don't need to, I don't need to say, you know, oversimplify it. I can right away look and immediately understand why we're much better, okay? And just to give you an example from an old deck, this is Airbnb's deck, which actually worked at Race quite successfully. I look at this deck and I find it quite funny. The two things they compare themselves on are affordable versus expensive and online versus offline. If I were to compare Airbnb, I probably would also compare it on the availability in places that other places don't, right? Some places that don't have hotels, the ability to have places in nature, the ability to have connection with a local host. They put Couchsurfing in affordable. At the time Couchsurfing was free. I don't know how it even belongs on the scale. When I look at it, it just seems oversimplistic, hard to understand, and very, very difficult for me to explain why they chose these as the only two ways to compare themselves. And then this is from another deck. JRNY, okay, this is the simple table approach. Here's all the things that we do differently. They used the background to call out what they do. Check, check, check, check, check. They had Xs here, I whited them out just for this example. And then one other really neat thing they did here is for their competitors, they use these little callouts to create FOMO. They're showing, hey, we're not just raising the space, our competitors have already raised a lot of money or huge evaluations. This is a very hot space. You want to invest here. So it's a way of creating FOMO, it's a way of showing they understand the competition. It's this little neat little trick that people do that can really help get more attention on your competition slide. So with our design, we can go into this from morning to night, but very simply, clean, don't overdesign your decks. It's not about having the most complex thing. Simple, we should be able to understand everything in it. Consistent, use the same colors, use the same fonts and supportive. Maybe the most important one is your design should be supporting your story. It should be helping tell your story helping bring out your main points and not there just for the sake of being there. All the time I'll see slides, I saw a cybersecurity company recently and they had a picture of a man on a computer on their slide. And I said, why is this picture here? They said, oh, we had a place for a picture in the template. I said, but it doesn't add anything. All it is is a man with a picture. It has nothing to do with your product, nothing to do with your solution. It doesn't belong there. If a design element is there, it should be there for a good reason. And last, this is maybe not the most critical thing, but it's a really, really good way to stand out and it's a really, really good way to help build your deck. An appendix. One of, in my opinion, the most underrated trick in building pitch decks is adding a really strong, effective appendix. An appendix serves 3 purposes, okay? It has 3 different uses. It's not there just because some decks have it or because I had too much in my deck. First of all, it's a way of showing you're smart subtly. A lot of what you're trying to do when you're speaking to investors is signals you're trying to send. You could obviously talk about how smart you are, how great you are, which is good. You'll be doing a little bit of that in your team slide. But when you can show an investor that you're well-researched, that you understand the objections that are coming in, that you understand the problems, you're showing them I have a lot of information. I know that I need to give you just the core deck 'cause that's what you want, but if you wanna delve deeper, I have a lot more in my appendix. Second of all, it serves as an objection repository. Maybe you know what objections you'll anticipate, market size, competitor, is the timing right, is your team right, you're a solopreneur, or maybe you're getting feedback from investors and from audiences, whatever it is, for each objection that you have, yes, you should be able to answer it well yourself, but having a slide to support that shows I anticipated what this objection was going to be and I know well how to address it. So you have a slide in your appendix that addresses each objection. And lastly, this is a psychological one, you feel less bad about cutting. Ultimately, it feels very painful when you have this company that you've invested your blood, sweat, and tears into, and now you need to condense it to 10 slides. For now, put it into your appendix. Not everything should stay in your appendix, but at least now you have a place for it temporarily. You're not stalling on, do I really need this slide, do I not? I have a place for it. I can reinclude it. I can incorporate parts of it. I could— I can add it to my longer, my longer presentations later on, but for now at least I have a place to put it. And then when I'm building my appendix, right, I have kids at home, and when you go into their toy cabinet, if you look on the left, you say, wow, that's a big mess. If you look on the right, you say, there's a lot of stuff there, but I can readily pick and choose and pull what I need to pull out. And that's what we're trying to do with our appendix as well. This is something that I would say maybe 1 in 100 decks do, and it's a huge game changer. Organize your appendix. This is, I pulled this from a deck that we built. I anonymized it. I got rid of their logo. I updated some of the content on it. But ultimately what we want to be doing is giving investors, when they open up our appendix, they have a table of contents. They right away see this slide is to get deeper into a technical issue that we didn't wanna discuss in the main deck because it's too technical, but if you're interested, we have it. This is if you wanna understand who we are a little bit deeper about us. This is a little bit more about our competition. This is more about our trajectory. You can use your appendix to include all sorts of valuable information, and then you can have a table of contents right at the beginning of your appendix so that you or an investor, if it's a standalone deck, can very quickly navigate and understand why a slide was included in the, in the appendix. This is a really, really neat tactic and I highly recommend it for just about every company. Company. Okay, so our appendix should be organized, it should be extensive, and it should be contributive. Once again, it should be helping tell our story and helping supplement and complement parts that we couldn't include in our main deck or that may be only relevant to certain investors. And that's it. To quickly summarize, pregame, plan before we're doing, think about the storytelling structure using the platform you're building in, and if you're building a live presentation deck or a standalone deck, The big 3, we need to be able to answer our 3 questions. Why is this a problem worth solving? Make it painful, quantify it, make it something that investors can understand so they wanna get on your team to solve it. Help them understand why you're the right team, the right solution to solve it, and also why now? Why is now the best time to solve it? Either a qualitative edge that we have, or if not, we can at least, we can show them why we're that much better than competition. Pen to paper, once we can answer the core questions, we can start building out our deck, building an outline, making sure to highlight our strengths as much as possible. You know, our weaknesses, they exist, they have to exist, but we can make sure they're not played up too much. And then as we're going, review, refine, get feedback from your audience, have your audience pitch you, get feedback from chatbots as well, that's fine too. And make sure to keep refining your deck until a point where your story is so crystal clear and so concise and so simple that a 5-year-old can understand it. Effective design. Once our content is in place, use design to help bring out our story. Use the fonts. When something needs to be big, make it big. If a design element doesn't belong, don't include it. Add labels to your charts and graphs. That's really critical. A lot of people don't do that. Design is just about making your story easier to understand and more sticky. And then add a killer appendix. We add an appendix, we can tell more, we can share more, we can invite a longer conversation, we can show that we're smart subtly, etc. And so on and so forth. That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining the presentation. I know we have questions. I'll go to addressing them in one minute. And if anyone does want, if you are building a pitch deck, you're by all means invited to reach out to me. I'm happy to share resources with you very gladly. We build a lot, we curate a lot. And if someone does want, we offer various services. Our easiest one is our pitch deck review service. I'll keep up the QR code and I included a code for 20% off just for Founders Institute members. You're more than invited to use it. And if it isn't for you, you're earlier in the process, feel free to reach out to me, like I said, and I'll be more than happy to help. Thank you.
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Sam. Folks, I loved it. You're already using the emojis, but let Sam know what you feel, right? Sam, I think you can see the emojis blow, right? You're getting a ton of love from the good people we have here with us. Awesome. One of the things that I really love that you talked about was kind of talking about the problem, right? And we run this event where we, you know, we get attendees to do an elevator pitch. And one of the issues that we see is people, they kind of really kind of hurry when it comes to talking about the problem, right? So what we always advise is the listener should always understand like the gravity of the problem, right? And that's kind of what really pulls them in. Awesome.
Yeah, awesome. Okay, should I start going through the questions, Daniel? Do you want to read them to me? Do you want me to read them?
What I'll do here is, so we have a ton of questions, uh, some of them are more so about, uh, general startup building, and maybe you can kind of address them according to the experience you've had, right? I'll bring them up on stage. So the first question we have here is from Cristal. "Within team, what should I do if I don't have a team? Should I hire one?" I just kind of wanna rephrase this a little bit, right? To you, Sam, what's kind of the importance of having a really good team slide in your pitch deck and what are some ways you can highlight like, you know, the best parts of your team?
Awesome, okay, great question. Thank you, Christelle. So first of all, when we're looking at a team slide, what we have to remember at the early stage stage, you don't have a product yet, or maybe you just have an MVP. You don't have traction yet usually. You're obviously not profitable or you wouldn't be going to investors, I hope. So there's not a lot for investors to go on. So what they're often going on is, not often, 90% of the time is they're investing in the founder. They're building a long-term relationship with you, right? The average fund is gonna be 10 years. They're gonna be hopefully bringing you other investors. If they're a strategic investor, they should be bringing you leads as well. They want to know, are you actually the team that we wanna work with? Are you actually the team that's going to, well-suited to solve this issue? What they're looking for is, like I said, you always wanna highlight wins. If you have prior exits, you or anyone on your team, highlight that. Experience at big companies, you know, the Googles and the Metas of the world, include that as well. That always looks good. If you have stage relevance experience, you've worked at prior startups, even if they're not successful ones, that's also good to show. I have a better understanding of the startup world. Because I've worked in that world, right? That's a healthy thing to show. Position-relevant experience, I have the right qualifications, the right degrees. I've worked in this position, that's good to show as well. So as much as possible, I want to highlight for investors why we are the right team to do this. Okay, that's really critical. Solo founders, it's definitely more challenging for solo founders. There's no way to deny that, but that doesn't mean you can invest in— you can't just invent the team. If you don't have the ability to hire a team right now, that's also okay. You know, you may not, it may be more challenging to raise capital, but that's where you're at. And you shouldn't invent team members either. Just adding advisors and stuff like that to your slides will usually not reflect well on you. And it doesn't really help your case. So you work with what you work with. That's the nature of pitch decks. There's plenty of solo founders who have raised capital, plenty of solo founders who have built good companies, but it definitely is a challenge you should be aware of and you shouldn't expect an objection. You should expect investors to ask you about, how you'll succeed as a solo founder.
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, okay, so Sam, before we kind of go into the next question, I wanna be a little selfish here, right? I have a question of my own. So according to you over like the hundreds of pitch decks you've helped build, what's like a mistake or two that you see that's pretty common when it comes to creating a pitch deck?
Awesome, the biggest mistake I see is losing me on the first slide. So we use formulas that I'm happy to share as well for how can I say what my company does. And I, when an investor looks at a deck and they can immediately see on the first slide, company X helps audience Y with this problem using AI, whatever it is, large language models, whatever it is you're using. When they have a frame, they have a framework and they say, I can immediately understand what it is that you do, that's extremely helpful to investors and that makes it very, that's the best way to make sure you won't end up in the discard pile before you even start. Started. So people like using fancy taglines, revolutionizing the future of computing or whatever it is they like sticking on their decks. I highly recommend going with something, definitely with investors, with other audiences as well, that immediately gives them a clear frame of what you do, who you serve, how you solve the problem.
Awesome, awesome. So yeah, we have, okay, so we have a question from Emilia and it's, would you include financial performance KPIs in growth and all these other important bits of information, which ones, which, how do you determine what's more relevant?
Yeah, it's a great question, Emilia. And it's really, it's a little bit case-specific. If you have traction, you definitely want to highlight that. Traction always puts you well ahead of, you know, many of the other startups that are raising. So if you have customers that are signed, even, you know, LOIs, like letters of intent or anything that indicates that people wanna work with you, if you have dollars in the bank especially, If you have customers who are using you and not churning, you always wanna highlight those. So those are the KPIs I'm always going to highlight are the ones that showing we're having success. If you're not having, if you're brand new, you know, you don't have any traction yet, in most cases projections are going to be pretty meaningless. There's no way to project your profit going out 4 years when you don't even have, you know, a dollar in the bank or a single customer. And in those cases, I would usually recommend your market slide, your, you know, your TAM, TAM, SAM, SAM, That's where you're going to be showing your market size. That's going to be useful to you. But beyond that, there's not that much you can include by way of financial metrics. There are exceptions and it really is case by case.
Yeah, so you guys heard it, right? It, it depends.
And, and the business model slide, the business model slide as well is another place where, where you can show it's a nice way you can use a customer journey. This is what they used to use, that it would cost them Y, they use us now, it costs them X, they're saving X amount. This is an example warehouse of how much it would save them. You can use examples, you can use avatars, you can use real examples if you have them, but don't get too crazy on projections and trends and 9 different ways to— for your company to earn money. Keep it simple.
Awesome. Yeah, so keep it simple. Uh, okay, so moving on to the next question. Anna asked, how do you include the ask slide? And okay, so let's kind of just answer the first one because I feel like But the rest of it, it really depends on your business, right?
That's great. So the ask, assuming you're going to investors for capital, which is most of us, the ask is always going to be, we are raising whatever that amount of money is, $50,000, $1 million, whatever that number is, in order to achieve X, Y, and Z. We always wanna tie that ask to an objective. We are raising $100,000 to complete our MVP and onboard our first 10 customers in the next 12 months. right? You can get a little more specific, a little bit less, but always has to be right away how much we're asking for and what we're going to achieve with that money. And then after that, we usually include the use of funds either on the same slide or a different slide. And that's a little bit, you know, broad, what we're going to be investing in, marketing, sales, hiring a CTO, whatever it is that we're doing with that money. We don't have to get too granular. We don't wanna get into like micro percentages. Very simple, a very simple pie chart, $100,000 here, or $20,000 here, whatever that number is and what we're going to do with it. And you can highlight objectives, you can highlight 2 or 3 objectives for each spend. That's fine as well. Things that I would not include are your company valuation. Don't include that. That's for a much later conversation. Don't say we're raising $500,000 at a $2 million valuation. Don't get too deep into the terms, how much we're raising, what we're trying to achieve with it.
Right, cool. So, right. Okay, so we have this question question from our Musa, right? How do you pitch a complex solution or product? But I kind of want to rephrase this. Let's assume that, um, it's a product that needs a demonstration, or the founder wants to include a demonstration, right? How do you, uh, add that to a pitch deck?
It's a really good question, and it really is case-specific. So the first thing is you have to understand your audience, okay? When we're pitching to investors, there's an endless supply of investors. We want to be going to the relevant investors. And when we're looking at our investors and we're getting a sense of they understand it, right? If you're in, I don't know, deep tech or cybersecurity or whatever it is that you're in that maybe 99.9% of the world won't understand, it's possible that the investor you're speaking to will understand it. So look at their background, look at who it is you're pitching, and then perhaps you can get away with something that's slightly more complex. Okay? Beyond that, you don't really have a choice. If your investor isn't going to understand it, then you're not going to be able to sell it. You have to be able to simplify it and dumb it down. You don't have to include all the details. I just did a workshop with a medtech accelerator and all of their solutions were so heavily steeped in scientific terms and names of devices and names of diseases that I said, even if they were speaking to doctors, they would probably lose them. Okay, we don't have to get into all the details. We are helping with this and this disease. We don't have to get deep into the mechanism. We'll have follow-up conversations. This is just conversation one of many.
Right, yeah, okay, that makes sense. So yeah, we have a bit of time, but we also have the networking portion. So I wanna, what I wanna do is I wanna take one last question so we have time for the networking, right? And I kind of really like this question. It's from Lou here. He says, my last company had a great product but lousy marketing. The new company builds on that. So his question is, should I mention the past?
Right? I think yes. I think absolutely. I mean, I wouldn't make it the focus of your slide, but if you are showing you have experience, listen, we built this out once, we did it, but we made X, Y, and Z mistake, and we got feedback from the market, and we got feedback from, you know, our customers, and we did interviews, and we now understand it that much better. To me, that's an advantage. It's showing we're being humble. We understand that we don't always get it right the first time. We built it the first time, it didn't work well. We understand why now. Now we're coming back and we'll do it much better job. I think absolutely.
Awesome, awesome. Folks, there you have it. We are just 10 minutes away from the hour mark. Thank you, Sam, for joining us, for taking questions. Now we'll be moving towards the networking portion, so folks, do stick around. Again, use the emojis, show Sam some love. Thank you, Sam, for taking out the time to join us today.
Thank you, thank you. I see there's— you cut out. I see there's some still some open questions. If we don't get them answered, uh, please just send me a message on LinkedIn or via email and I'll get all your questions answered within a few days. Okay, so don't despair, I'm still here to answer.
Awesome. Yeah, thank you everyone for joining us today, and we'll be sharing a link with all of Sam's information, the pitch decks, and everything else within the email that we send out in 48 hours. So you'll have everything that you need. Again, guys, thank you so much for joining us. If you want to learn more about the events we do here at Founder Institute, you can go to fi.co/events, and we'll see you in the next one. Have a great day.
Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for joining us. I'm looking forward to networking.
Awesome.
