Part 7 Pitch Deck | Pitching Workshop

All right, cool. Actually, before I go on, I assume that Favor guys do, but does everyone else have pitch decks that they've worked on? Or like that they have on their computer right now? How close is it to what we just went over? I saw like a, ugh.

Yeah, missing a few of the elements, but most of the major ones are there.

Jonathan? 90% similar, but it's a battle of preferences.

Like I don't have charts because I don't want to have charts.

And actually, on the point of decks, so you can have multiple decks. I know you guys usually mention it. Did you go over— I didn't hear it, I don't think. No, no, we didn't mention it.

But you guys probably know, always have different decks. So you have a deck that you can send out to an investor. You're cold calling, pretty much. You have a deck for somebody that you met, an investor you met. You're sending them more information. You have a deck that when you sit down with them, it's more visual. And it's more about you and what you're saying. I usually like that best, because they pay attention to you rather than the The text on the screen. So just have different decks, different variations. Have your 30-minute pitch deck, a 30-minute pitch, 10-minute pitch, 1-minute pitch, a 30-second elevator pitch. So have different variations and try to condense all that information down to 1 minute, 2 minutes, because you will be in these situations when you go out there either acquiring customers or new investors.

And the good thing about having the structure is that you can kind of improvise around it. So I always talk about it as like learning a new instrument. You know, when you learn one—

want to learn guitar or something, you learn a song.

Once you get that structure down, you can start to improvise, add a little few notes here and there. You talked about, you know, going to the next language.

Yeah.

But once you have that structure and you practice and practice, it makes it easier to improvise.

We definitely have different tracks. If you can't talk to them and you're doing it, like, it has more words.

Exactly.

If you're in person, then obviously you can say a lot more, and that's always better.

What do you find, I mean obviously there's a range, but like on average with an investor one-on-one, how much time do you typically have and how does that look as a pitch?

I mean, yeah, like no meeting is, I mean if you actually get in person, I mean no one ever schedules less than a 30-minute meeting I feel like, but you're either gonna get 30 minutes or an hour probably. It depends on what stage you're at with them. Generally the structure goes, if it's a VC firm, you'll probably get the first meeting with an associate or a principal. If you guys don't know the structure of VCs, I definitely encourage you, there's really good books out there you can read. Venture Deals is a good one.

That's what we always recommend.

Yeah, read Venture Deals and you can fully understand how VC funds work. It's really— there's associates, principals, and partners. Usually you get an associate meeting or a principal meeting at best for the first meeting. That might be an hour just because those guys, they have more time. But it might not even be in the office. It might just be over coffee or something. So it might be kind of— like I said, make sure it feels organic. It might be kind of awkward to try to pull off a pitch. You might just be casually talking to them. And it might just be better to build a relationship and be friends with that person. The final meeting, usually we'll do one more maybe with a partner. The final meeting would be the partner meeting, maybe all the partners are in a single meeting with you. That's almost always an hour, and those decks are usually bigger. Oftentimes when I start a meeting, I don't even pull up a deck. I'll just start talking and then see if they're like, oh, do you have a deck? Then I'll pull it up.

I normally think that there's 2 types of decks as well. So like there's one deck—

that's what they're just talking about, you're in the back.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you, if you want to finish your thought, I just—

there's one that's more content heavy that would be for a partner meeting, then you have one that you use that's like 12 slides that you use to get a meeting from someone at the VC fund.

And then there's text group, then there's text that you send out. Yeah, yeah, like I usually— we send it out with There's tools that you can use.

What's the one that we've been sending? DocSend?

DocSend is amazing.

You should use DocSend because you can see when they open up the deck and then how much time they're spending on it and where in the deck they're looking.

That's very cool.

DocSend's super badass. I mean, literally this morning I got an email like, this person looked at the deck and they looked at it this time and they spent, you know, 15 seconds on this slide, 15 seconds or 12 seconds on that slide. So then you start to actually figure out what part of the deck is the most interesting to them. So before you even go to have a meeting, you already know what they're most interested in depending on how long they spent on the slides.

That's really cool.

So tools like DocSend is a really good tool.

That's awesome.

Once we started using that, it was amazing. And what's cool about that is you can make it so that if you're worried about your competitors getting a hold on it, you can make it so that people have to enter their email in before they can see it. And you can make it so it's not downloadable. Technically they can like still screenshot it, but they have to feel pretty skeezy to be like screenshotting all that. So like it's at least like, uh, it makes them feel bad if they're like, you know, sharing it with, you know, people they shouldn't share it with.

It's actually like a real thing that your, you know, competitors or whatever can get a hold of your deck. Like I remember a long time ago we were not using Proxend, we had used something called HubSpot Sidekick. Oh, you had to use like a bot? It's like a sales tool that you use to see when someone has opened up your email.

Yep.

And it tells you like where they open it up. And I remember we had made a deck and sent it with that tool, and we're like, holy shit, this email has been opened up like 150 times.

It literally got forwarded everywhere.

It was crazy.

Like there's people opening it up all over the world. Yeah, so well, you still want to use that tool.

So yeah, Sidekick from HubSpot. Yeah, plugs right in.

It's called Signals now. Yeah, it's Signals is how you make sure you know everyone who opens the email. And then DocSend is once they actually open— it's actually a link inside the email. They click on that, and that's how you track how long they're spending on each slide. So those 2 tools combined, you'll know who opens your emails, if they're forwarding those emails, who's actually looking at the deck, how long they spent on every single slide. Both of those tools are huge.

DocSend?

Yeah, Doc.

Doc. D-O-C-S-E-N. It's really, really good.

Is it free?

It's called HubSpot Sync Signals. It's like—

they're all free.

What?

Instead of DocSend.

What is it?

SlidePipe.

SlidePipe. It's like DocSend, just stronger. You can do a lot more.

Yeah, there's probably a bunch of competitors. I tried to work with them.

Heavier.

Heavier, yeah.

But it depends. DocSet for this type of activity is very, very—

it's maximally cool for this.

But if you want to do also more advanced stuff, like if you want to have video pop up at some point, or you want to have a testimonial, or if you want to have sharing capabilities, or you want to use it for sales, but you want to get heavier intelligence, Yeah.

And do you have any, from your side of things, on the more VC side, on meetings? Because I know that's the original question. How much time do you usually spend with people when you're looking at them?

Well, the first 7 seconds is the real time.

The first 7 seconds? There you go. You get 7 seconds.

The meeting could be very— for us, usually it starts with a phone call. Because a lot of the companies we talk to are not— Based— work from Israel. They're not based in Israel, so we usually do it at a conference, something like that. But yeah, 30 minutes to an hour, that's pretty much it.

And are you getting emails on these people that you're calling, or where are you sourcing them from?

We get cold emails. We have online presence where people can actually contact us.

We have partners.

But the best deals obviously are referred.

Yeah.

Send targeting?

We do 100.

I think they— even in Israel, there's over 6,000 startups, only in Israel. They're active. So I think some of the best companies that I found the last few months, we target them as well.

Awesome. So now that we've gone over slide decks, my portion of this is a little shorter and illustrates the fact that with all these tools out there, almost anyone can craft a killer pitch deck. And how I see that you can stand out is through what they talked about with being yourself, your confidence, your voice, and standing up Against the crowd. So I'm gonna go over your stage presence. I come from a background in theater. As a kid, I did theater classes for like 8, 9 years. So I am very familiar with projecting my voice, filling a room, having a stage presence, walking across and doing all this stuff. You won't necessarily be on a stage, but it's more of the presence of you in the room and not, not like being up on the stage. So if you're at a pitch competition, I mean, it doesn't help to be Have some stage presence. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is your posture. And we're actually going to stand up and do some posture enhancement exercises. And these, you don't have to do these every day. It's more of doing, I guess, exercising and being confident in yourself. I am a big proponent of going to the gym and exercising, but also if you could just do yoga once a week, like on Sundays. Just to relax and kind of stretch out, it's also a great idea. So the first thing is shoulder rolls. So if everyone can stand up and join me, we're going to do some posture stuff.