Creating perfect pitch decks for funding from investors

1. Let's Get Started: No matter what type of presentation or pitch deck you're creating, you always need a question or a problem, and an answer or a solution. When it comes to making a winning pitch, it has to answer the question in a very easy to understand way. Which is both the difficulty and the fun in creating a pitch deck, hoping that you have lived with the question you're trying to answer and your ideated solution for a while now and are ready to present it to the world. Let's dive into the creation of the pitch deck. 2. Practical Knowledge is essential: I browsed for a while on the Internet to find only some superficial information about how to create pitch decks. They are bullet points that give an outline but it is not explained to make the process easy enough to follow along. I also asked Gemini and this is the information that I got. Again, they are bullet points with some links provided where there are examples of other decks. Of course, you can learn by reading and looking through those examples, but nothing works like you practically creating a pitch deck. So I will provide you with examples from my experiences. A little bit of my opinion and knowledge from many years of creating pitch decks and presentation slides, to go from an idea to passing funding rounds. 3. The Class Project: To make this, not just a theory session. I'm going to pick a product that is not in the market yet, from Kickstarter and create every slide for the product. As your class project, you can either create your own pitch deck, for your idea as we work through or pick a product, any product that you like to create a pitch deck. you can do that from Kickstarter as well. Post your project and I will be more than happy to provide you with my thoughts and feedback. Remember, no matter what you learn here, your authentic expression is what truly sets your work apart and wins you the applause. so don't forget to include your unique flavor into the presentation. So, let's get started. 4. Presentation Tools: Since you don't want to be stuck on technical issues when creating your Pitch Deck, you need a slides creation tool that is both easy to use and has all the features you need so that you can peacefully focus on the content. There are options like Google Slides, Prezi, Adobe Express, the Evergreen Power Point, and many other. But I am going to be using my favorite Canva to create this deck. In Canva, you can specifically choose a presentation project. And there are many pre made templates that you can get started with. There are specifically business pitch deck templates as well. Along with my favorite tab, the elements where you can unleash your creativity and make your pitch deck truly unique. But I'm not going to make this deck very artistic or design oriented. After all, it is about the content in the deck. I'll pick a template, any template and start working on it, and we'll go from there. 5. The Introduction Slide: In the introduction slide, you have to include four to six elements which are the name of your project or product, the one sentence tag line. A quick description of what can be expected or what the project or product is about. Your name, your designation or the team's name. An image or two. And an optional logo for your project or product. If you have created it. For the name, I wanted the big bold writing to be easily read and understood. So, from my project I thought Customizable Notebooks was the perfect title. For the tag line I've got four options that I like from the project page on Kickstarter. I think I'm going to rephrase and use these for the tag line and for the product description I saw that this template already had an O as part of its design, and the brand logo is OT, for Organized Thoughts. I created a T that looked similar to the O and designed the logo into the background. Now I need an image, a tag line, and a description. As the next natural step, I included the image of the product and included the description as features of the product. It saved space while also communicating the product effectively. From there, it was simple rearranging of the elements until it felt complete so that it reads OT, one of a kind, customizable notebooks. Choose the thread, color, front cover, and the inside pages. For the writers, designers, creators, planners, artists and paper addicts. 6. The Pain Points Slide: To come up with anything innovative, you need the quality of being critical of the existing and current. You need to be able to see and understand that the ways of doing things right now is not optimal and there should be a better way to do things. These things that you believe are not optimal are the pain points. And that is the point where your innovation journey begins. If you're designing a solution for a system or a product that you experience or use every day, you should know it completely and you can list out the pain points. But if it is something you're not familiar with, you need to research. Even if you do know the system and the pain points, you still need to research to see how common the problem is. With my customizable notebooks product what do you think the pain points are? Pause and think about what it is that you would like better in notebooks, and let's see if I got at least one of them. Now, the pain points are: each of the activities, journaling, sketching, and planning requires a different paper and page set up to accomplish the tasks. You can bullet journal in a notebook with dotted pages, but you cannot use paint on that same journal. You have to open up your art diary. You can write up everything on your mind in your diary with ruled pages. But you can't plan in it because you do not have enough space. You like the cover design on a journal, but that only comes on an unruled notebook. One or the other, there are limitations with the possibilities of writing tools available out there. Now examine your product or system and list out ways that you believe it could be better. Go to Google and look for customer reviews to get an idea of what others feel about the products currently available in the market. No pain point, no innovation needed, and no pitch deck needed. Take your time. But an important note, everything needs change and upgrade. So, whatever you're looking at definitely calls for innovation. Just don't give up. 7. The Problem Slide: Before we jump into learning about what goes into the problem slide of the pitch deck. A quick look through of what I have so far in my pitch deck. For the pain point slide, I have added some images as a visual guide along with summarizing the pain points from my research into three small statements. Completing the pain point slide is very important as it is the starting point to creating your problem slide. Because the problem slide is basically collecting every information you have researched to provide an over encompassing reason as to why the pain points are experienced and need to be solved. If you are struggling to find the reasons as to why the pain points are experienced, you just have to research more until you have convincing, persuading evidence or points, because finding an innovative solution is dependent upon finding a worthy problem. In my pain point slide, I have mentioned there are limitations with the possibilities of writing tools available out there. Moving directly to the problem slide, which basically answers that the limitations are 'because of' the mass manufacturing of specialty notebooks seeming to dominate the market, where customers are left with the only option of buying at least three to four different journals when they just need one journal according to their custom specifications. Find the gap in the industry where your product can fit in, curate your evidence as pain points, and provide the justification as the problem. The 'because of' to your pain points. That is what the problem slide is all about. Your problem will not resonate with every audience. So, don't aim for a full house of people who agree with the problem. But there should be at least a few users or audience who believe it's worthwhile and convincing. To make it easily understandable you can have just one statement and some bullet points highlighting certain parts of the text for impact and some or many images. This is one of the slides that needs to be impressive and make a bold statement. Do what you think best portrays your problem. 8. The Solution: The solution slide is your moment of bringing in your innovation. The hero that everyone has been waiting for in your presentation. You have to present it like your solution is here to save the world. Or at least a few people in the world who have been having a very hard time with the huge problems they have been experiencing. The solution slide typically includes a solution statement or a sentence, business or product name. The one line tag line of a business or product. Numerical data that supports your solution and shows that it is effective and some features and benefits of the solution that the users in your audience would really value. The numerical data is the most important part of the solution slide, as it could clearly communicate to your users and investors that there will be a significant improvement upon implementing your solution. Do not miss that part. The solution slide is the easiest slide in the pitch deck because that is what you have been thinking about and researching all the time before you even set out to create the pitch deck. But it is also the slide where you have to pause and think and keep iterating until you believe your solution has answered all parts of the problem that you have stated. Create a flow chart and see if your solution is an answer to the main problem that you have stated. And answers all other questions that you can think of. You already know it. You just have to go back to researching more If you believe your solution can be better. If it is a perfect work of art, then just get putting it together. I will share my solution slide in the next chapter, and hopefully it's an answer to the problem that I have been trying to solve. 9. The Prototype: Your audience, the users and investors for your product or business would always want to visually see what you have thought of as a solution. No matter how perfectly you explain in words, they always love to see the hero in some form of a demo. If it is a digital solution, you should definitely think about creating at least a wire frame model of your web app, website or mobile app. If you have a little bit more time, then create a no to low code prototype that includes some UI and UX as well. If you want to impress and show off your development skills or have a developer in your team, then you should create a full working prototype of your solution. The same applies to physical products as well. Either a non working model of what the product would look like, a working model, or the first version of the fully built product. Some popular tools that you can use to create wire frames, UI or UX prototypes and websites include Figma, Webflow, Adobe XD, Shopify Wix, and many more. I will now show you what I created for my solution slide, as well as the demo and prototypes that I created for my product. My solution slide has the product offering in big bold writing. Along with the product name Trik. I have three bullet points on how this product is directly the answer to the problems. I have a numerical fact that there are 1 billion trees worth of paper thrown away each year in the US alone. And that is why instead of mass manufacturing, we need to custom make these products. I have also listed the important customizable features of the notebook that organized thoughts offers, which makes the difference with the whole made to order concept in the eyes of the customers. For the prototype slide, instead of showing every notebook design, I wanted to create some animated graphics of how the cover designs would look like on the notebooks, as well as the possibility of having any types of pages within the notebook. For the next prototype slide, I have an image of a completed custom journal along with a video showing the packaging and touch and feel of the product. I have also included the link to the website in the slide if anyone wants to check it out. But at the point of having the campaign active, I only had a landing page with links pointing to the campaign itself. I believe the creative parts of the Pitch Deck end here. And what we're about to start on next would be the logistical and financial aspects of the product. So let's move on to the target market slide. 10. The Target Market: A well researched problem always itself identifies the target market. The persona who you solve the problem for. The one who experiences the pain points is your target market. But often there are other segments who experience the problem as well, which can be uncovered with a bit of thought and of course, research and interviewing of potential subjects. There are three common segmentations of market that can be targeted, including one that is location based, population based and lifestyle, and socioeconomic based. For my target market slide, I have included population based and lifestyle and socio economic based. With my target markets being students, office professionals, artistic professionals, and gift shoppers. I have chosen my products target market to be these segments because they are the ones with potential to require specialty notebooks, other than using them just for note taking. Notebooks play an important part of their well being by acting for their time management processes and artistic endeavors, other than simple note taking. Identify your target market as well as the reason why they are your target market and you will have the slide done. 11. Size of the Market: The market size slide is important because it sets a realistic view as to what can be achieved by your business in terms of the share of the market available which can be obtained, and or the monetary gain from that market share. The three important segments to consider when you're creating the market size slide are the total available market, the TAM, the serviceable available market, the SAM, and the serviceable obtainable market, SOM. By the time you get down to the filtered funnel of serviceable obtainable market, you would have narrowed down who you are targeting as well as what you believe your business can achieve. And this is very important to investors or any who are talking money. If you look at my slide for the size of the market, I have decided to use the market value of the categories, including every day use paper notebooks, educational use paper notebooks, recycled and sustainable paper notebooks, wellness and mindfulness paper notebooks, as well as planners and diaries. I took the market value of each segment separately and added them together. From that point, the market with enough gap for my new product to sit itself comfortably is both the sustainable paper notebooks market and the wellness and mindfulness paper notebooks market. So that would be my serviceable available market. I estimate that my product could achieve a minimum of 10% of the market value of these segments. And that makes my business or product valued at 156 million. Now this is the number that we could work toward as we progress in our business, as it is obtainable. For your slide, the first step to figuring out the size of the market would be to take a broad look at the categories that your product is currently used by your customers. And find out the value of the market for those categories. And then begin funneling down to your serviceable, obtainable market. 12. Business Model: For the business model slide, let's start by looking at what a business model is. According to Investopedia, the term business model refers to a company's plan for making a profit. It identifies the products or services the business plans to sell. It identifies the target market and any anticipated expenses. There are many types of business models that a company can opt to, depending on the product they are selling. Some include subscription, affiliate, freemium, direct consumer, business to business, crowd sourcing, marketplace, et cetera. We will go into detail about each of these business models in a different course. For my product, I created a plan for both direct to consumer and business to business. For the D2C model, I have estimated 70,000 purchases per year with $40 profit on a $60 notebook price. Which gives me a 2.8 million revenue in the first year. I could believe that this is the way to go where there are a few things I am assuming. Firstly, if there was a lot of demand for the product, there are wages that I need to factor in, in order to manufacture the products. Plus, in reality, the marketing costs to break the barrier between a business and end customers are way large, and that has to be patched using money. So realistically with a D2C model, I will not be making any profit. Our preferred model would be the B2B model, where our transactions are with other businesses, namely retailers, and manufacturing white label products for other brands. With B2B, I estimate that 100 businesses stock our product at 1,000 journals each per year. We will have a 45% margin, giving us an approximate 2 million revenue in the first year. Again, the costs that need to be factored in in this scenario includes brand awareness, showcasing to the stockists that our product has value and that customers need it, the lead generation struggle, which means the struggle in turning a cold lead to a warm lead to a sale which might take time, and the last one being scaling due to large demand, which means we need a facility and employees, all of which might make our first year profit close to nothing. But this is still a better model because we would make profit the following year. So, B2B, it is for organised thoughts. Both these models work for a physical product, whereas a digital product would likely fall in a subscription model. The way to figure out how much money you project to make is the same as the D2C and B2B model I showed. But you have to calculate with your own numbers for your product. 13. Competitor Analysis: The competitor analysis slide sets a vision for your business as to what it offers differently compared to the competition or other brands in the industry. As well as it lets you know your strengths and weaknesses. Simply put, it is your market position. By starting this part of the research, you will uncover information about what your competitors are offering and how they are marketing their product, which gives you the opportunity to surpass their offering. Take a unique tangent to make customers opt to your product instead. The competitor analysis is usually summarized and visualized using a quadrant diagram. The quadrants vertical axis illustrates the ability to execute, while the horizontal axis indicates the completeness of the vision. You have to find qualities that both these axes represent for your product. And place the competitors on one of the four quadrants, depending on if they are a challenger, a niche, a visionary, or a leader. The market position that you research and choose to be your strength and differentiation should make your brand or product occupy the top right hand quadrant, the leader quadrant. In my slide, I have researched potential competitors for each quadrant. And I have found my products unique strength and differentiation to be customer inclusive and low to no paper wastage. All the other brands and categories that I have picked sit in the other quadrants, clearly showing to the audience and potential investors that the offering is unique and has the ability to surpass other brands and competitors. Your solution slide should be a good starting point for you to look at as you start building your competitor analysis slide. 14. Competitive Advantage: To establish and maintain your position within your product industry, you need to continuously identify and upgrade your competitive advantages. There are two types of competitive advantages, which include comparative advantage and differential advantage. Comparative advantage is a company's ability to produce a product more efficiently. And differential advantage is a product's uniqueness and quality in the eyes of the customer. These are factors that make your company or product, cheaper than or better than your competitors. Your competitive advantage can be any of the following, including the cost structure, branding, the quality of your product offerings, the distribution network, intellectual property, and customer service. For my products competitive advantages, I have a mix of both comparative and differential advantages, which are the facility to make to order even in bulk quantities, the sustainability market, which is at 28.6 billion, which we could use to communicate our offering because it would be the right timing to aim toward the eco conscious customers. The custom offering makes the customer feel inclusive and we will get an edge and reputation as good at customer service, which helps build our brand loyalty. Ultimately, defining the competitive advantage is important in order to stand out in front of the customers, amongst the other brands in your industry, as well as make profits. 15. Customer Validations & Testimonials: Customer validation is an essential slide to your pitch deck because it reaffirms to your investors and your customers that your product is necessary and actually solves a problem that your customers are facing. Sample a population of your potential customers and interview them, speak to them, and pitch to them. Gathering feedback and reviews. Making your product ready for the next step of funding. A demo, prototype, Any videos and photos are all made for customers to get a touch and feel of your product before they see the official product. Use the MVP You have created, the minimum viable product, or your prototype to get real opinions and feedback for your product. and if possible, customers who are interested to buy your product upon release. Consolidate this data into your slide and your customer validation slide will be ready. For my slide, I have included reviews that I got from my customers, from my marketplace platform Etsy, where I release all products before officially releasing it on my e commerce platform and or other distributors. You can take any approach to build and take your MVP to your customers to get feedback, but never skip this step. 16. Thank you QA Slide: We are finally there. This is the end of your pitch deck and our course on how to create a pitch deck with a wow factor. If you manage to come up with a great idea and have researched, created, and collected information to complete all slides of the pitch deck, then you definitely have the wow factor. It all also ultimately depends upon how you present the extra information, your ability that is expressed from your presentation, your team, your promises and many more that will determine your success with the pitch. But there is no point in waiting. You will also get feedback from potential investors or whomever you're pitching to. So think of this Pitch deck that you have created as a product to get feedback which you can continue improving. So go pitch! In the thank you slide, open the floor to questions and thank any mentors, team, or customers for their support with your project. Create extra slides for questions that you think the panel you're pitching to may ask, so that you can immediately switch to that slide to refer to and present. Good luck!