Creating Your First Pitch Deck Part 1
A Pitch Deck is a shortened version of a business plan. Creating one requires you to think through the essential parts of your startup and is put in a presentation format that is easy to understand and communicate what you are trying to build to others.
Once you have the essentials down in your pitch deck, you will work on your story. Your story is what you will say when presenting your deck- think of your story as a movie trailer with just the exciting parts to get someone interested in having a sit down meeting with you and learning a bit more about your business. We’ll go over storytelling in a separate post. For now, we will focus on your pitch deck.
Start with a word document and answer the following questions:
What problem are you solving?
What do you believe the solution to this problem is? Be specific, what are the wow factors? What is unique about this solution? Is there anything unique about it that will keep a larger company from building this idea (IP) or a network effect? How is your product defensible?
Who else would want to try this solution? Be as specific as possible. Where do they live? What are their demographics? Etc.
What are people using today to solve this problem? It could be a piece of paper and pen or a solution that doesn’t have all of the features as your product, but they are using something. There isn’t one business that doesn’t have competition, so write down everything you can think of. Do some research and make a list of all options.
How much do you believe people will pay for this product? Do some research on what people are paying now for the above solutions you listed for item 4.
How will people pay for your product or service? Will people pay a monthly subscription fee? A one time purchase? At what price?
What have you done to date to test this idea? Do you have an MVP? Some initial customers? Signed letters of intent? Quotes from customers?
How are you going to launch this product? If you have already launched this product what did you learn on the initial launch and how are you going to grow? What is your plan for gaining new customers?
Who is on your team? What makes you and them experts in this space and the people to take this solution to the world?
What are you asking for? How much are you raising and how will that money be spent? What will you accomplish with it? If you don’t know that’s ok. See this post about a business model and how much to raise.
Take your time answering these questions. Spend time doing research. Once you are ready, move on to the next phase. Your answers above will most likely be in long paragraph form. For the purpose of the pitch deck we need to fine tune them down to one sentence to two sentence answers.
Interested in an example? Check out our “First Pitch Deck Example Doc” here.
Follow along with “Creating Your First Pitch Deck, Part 2” to start narrowing down your research into digestible slides.
