A pitch deck is a sales tool that does more than raise money: it clarifies your strategy, aligns your team, and sharpens your messaging. Study decks from Peloton, TransferWise, and Dropbox to see how founders think like salespeople when pitching investors.
But just like a sales pitch deck, an investor pitch deck is often used to help communicate and sell. In this case, you're not selling your product, but you're actually selling your business or the opportunity around your business. But there's a lot of value in having an investor pitch deck beyond that, right? It can also serve as a strategic tool to help you refine your business. It can provide communication clarity, can help with business planning and strategy. You know, with networking partnerships, feedback and validation, fundraising prep, marketing, branding, internal alignment, right? There's a lot of reasons where there's— this is valuable. A pitch deck layout often includes these slides. Okay? Now again, I'm bringing this up in context of pitching because guess what? You've gotta pitch this in a similar way. You've gotta identify the framework of the, the investor. Or employee or whoever you're trying to use to, to sell this vision to. But this exercise is really valuable. And this is, this is kind of how like a traditional layout might include. And I'm gonna give you, if you wanna come back and look at this later, again, I'm not gonna go through all of this and I never planned to go through all of this, by the way. It's not like I'm rushing through the last 5 minutes, but what I wanna do is just, hey, if you're gonna go create these slides, here's some ideas on how you might do that. And then I'm gonna give you 30 great— there's pitch examples that you might wanna look at, right? So Peloton, TransferWise, Dropbox, you know, we can look at some of their pitch decks and learn from them. I do wanna do one exercise here just to wrap things up though. Well, you know, I don't know if we're gonna have time to do this. I would invite you to come back if you wanna look at investor pitch decks, look at this last section a little bit more. Detail and really kind of think about this thing. When was the last time you updated an investor pitch deck? Do you even have an investor pitch deck? Now, some of you might not be in the position where you're like creating these, but guess what? In marketing and in sales, the pitch deck is a really important process. And this is really important for earlier startups, this part about the pitch deck, right? The same principles that we talked about in selling somebody your product or service, they apply to selling investors as well, right? But think about this for a minute. How can a pitch deck help you better articulate your sales and marketing message? Do you know who your competitors are? What milestones are you hitting? What are your revenue projects? What are your financial models, right? Again, my intention here is not to go and create an investor deck with you, but to rather help you think about scripting and sales pitching in the context of an investor, right? So make sure you learn those same kind of things.
