1. Learn from other pitch decks
Do you review other pitch decks? You MUST! To come up with innovative ideas and more relevant information for your presentation, other pitch decks will be of great value. Investing time on them will help you learn their upside and flaws. Read carefully, analyze, and evaluate to store the attractive parts or strong points and discard the ordinary information.
Browse through our library of pitch decks to get some ideas.
2. Analyze the competition
Don’t try to convince investors that your solution has no competition at all. Whether it is direct or indirect, every business, startup, product, or solution will have competition. Therefore, trying to convince them that there is no competition will make you look unrealistic and naive. A simple Google search enables investors to locate credible competitors for your solution. Investors will appreciate if you educate yourself with the competitive landscape and come up with a realistic explanation of how your designed product, advanced technology, and smart marketing will help you outweigh the competition.
3. Show realistic financial forecasts
Investors target to invest in companies that have the potential to grow significantly and turn out to be exciting businesses in the future. They discard pitch decks that make unrealistic projections. If you show an unattainable financial forecast of making $500 million in revenue in a span of 3 years, the investors will lose their interest very shortly. And how will you justify making a 10x growth in revenue with only a 2x growth in operating and marketing costs? Isn’t that just unrealistic?
4. Develop a coherent marketing strategy
Customers will not buy your services automatically. You must have a proper marketing and promotion plan in place to reach the mainstream audience. You can include details about:
- Targeted outlets
- Cost-effective plan to reach prospective customers
- Social media marketing plans such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
- Your thoughts on content marketing and sponsored posts on sites like BusinessInsider.com, Forbes.com, and AllBusiness.com?
- Cost-effective search engine marketing plan
- Additional steps to raise the sales and revenue
5. Estimate customer acquisition costs and long-term value of the customer
Investors will expect you to have a clear understanding of the customer or user-acquisition issues. You can prepare the answers to these queries:
- Customer acquisition cost
- Customer lifetime value
- Channels for acquiring that user or customer
- Typical sales cycle between initial customer contact and closing of a sale.
The inability to provide clear answers to these questions demonstrates your poor understanding, business plan, and approach.
6. Be clear on how the investors’ capital will be used and the company’s burn rate
Before making investments on your start-up, investors will definitely want to have an explanation of how you will utilize their capital. Educating them proactively about your company’s anticipated burn rate will help them learn when the next round of financing will be necessary. This explanation will enlighten them on your fund-raising plans and other estimated costs.
7. Be realistic about the company’s valuation forecast
Showing a $100 million valuation through your pitch deck for your three-week-old business that has no reasonable traction will only make investors losing their interest in your pitch deck and startup. Instead, not discussing the valuation of your startup in the first meeting will be more ideal and advised.
