Create your own fundraising Pitch Deck

Create your own fundraising Pitch Deck


Written by Uday Agarwal June 14, 2020

A pitch deck is a presentation in which every detail about your startup is summarized into 14-15 slides, which is then mailed or presented in front of investors to raise funding.


To better understand the inner part of these headlines, I am going to analyze one of the best pitches in the world which raised about $600K. Let’s have a deep dive into Airbnb Pitch.

Short Intro about your startup

This slide contains a short intro about your startups like your startup logo, its name and a short description about what you do. Try to keep the short description as short as possible, maybe up upto 7 words.

Analyzing Airbnb Slide 1:

  1. The Airbeds and Breakfast is representing the logo as well as the name of the startup.
  2. Book rooms with locals, rather than hotels this describes in a short and simple way what they do. Their focus is to book rooms with the local residents rather than hotels.

Problem

This is the prime slide, if presented in a right way, you can grab the attention of investors.

There is a big misconception that every startup starts with an Idea. If it is true, then this slide wouldn’t be there in the pitch decks. So, Every startup starts with a Idea problem.

Analyzing Airbnb Slide 2:

  1. Highlighting keywords like Price, Hotels, and Not easy way exits will help investors to analyze the problems quickly.
  2. Problems that they are trying to solve are defined in a short and simple wayl, (No jargon).
  3. I think they haven’t ranked the problem or have ranked it according to their needs because my ranking would be Not an easy way, Price and Hotels.

We are living in a world where it is very difficult to figure out a problem and if someone day we find it out then there is already a startup built from that problem. We here at Voxup also provide you with people 's problems that are unsolved and are looking for a solution. Check out problems on our platform here.

Solution

A solution for the problem. Here comes the Idea that you have built for the problem. It’s always better to test your solution before presenting in front of investors. There might be many reasons that your customers don't like your solution.

Let’s have an example when the Airbnb idea was born in 2008 and after some months they went live to take bookings many people thought it was a scam. People dropped reviews on their website like who will give their home to strangers, the homeowner might kill you, or the stranger might be a terrorist but, as some people booked and stayed. The reviews changed from negative to positive.

This slide will contain the solution for the problem the you have written in previous slide:

  1. You should tell how you are going to present your solution in front of your customers like will it be a website, an app or a hardware or something else?
  2. What does it do?
  3. How does it help?

Analyzing Airbnb Slide 3:

  1. A highlighted web platform tells that it will be a website.
  2. One line explanation of their website(Users Renting to host travellers).

Market Validation

It tells investors, people who are in need of what you are building. It might be some website similar to yours may be your direct or indirect competitors, or may be your beta users if they are good in numbers.

This slide will tells what are the potential numbers of people that you think will use your website:

  1. Numbers are always better to use if they are good.
  2. This represents how much your business will be worth in future or how much your customer base will grow in future.
  3. Use of a Bar chart or Pie chart will also be better as they are easy to read and understand.

Analyzing Airbnb Slide 4:

  1. 630,000 users on couchsurfing shows that their product has ability gain this much of numbers in future.
  2. 17,000 listings in SF and NYC represents that these number of users are present near to them.

Market Size

Market Size represents how big the market is. There are three points in which this can be defined:

  1. TAM(Total Available Market)
  2. SAM(Service Available Market)
  3. SOM(Service Obtainable Market)

To understand the above terms in a more better way. Let's have an example, assume you are starting a food chain.

  • Your TAM would be the worldwide fast food restaurant market. Potentially, if you were present in every country and had no competition you would generate TAM as revenues.
  • You are starting your restaurant chain in two cities where the demand for fast food can be estimated based on: the population, their food habits, and the revenues generated by fast food restaurants in other cities having similar demographics.That is your Serviceable Available Market: the demand for you type of products within your reach.
  • Most likely you will attract fast food aficionados living or working close to your restaurants and a fraction of the people located further away that are willing to give your chain a try for the sake of fast food diversity. This is your SOM.

Analyzing Airbnb Slide 5:

  1. Here TAM is the no. of trips booked worldwide.
  2. Here SAM is the service they are providing, Budget(Save Money) and Online Trips(Web Platform).
  3. SOM will be Total no. of trips that that are booked in SF and New York

Product

  • Screenshots/video of your product.
  • Reviews will be very much helpful

Business Model

This is the favourite slide of the investor, how does your product make money. Finally, if an investor is investing money in your startups because he wants money out of it.

This slide will help investors to evaluate how much money you will be able to generate in the coming future.

  • Mention the areas where you will be making money.
  • If you are making money from Ads, don’t be shy to write it.
  • Use graphs(to help them understand in a better way.)

Analyzing Airbnb Slide 7:

This will depend from company to company so no comments, but in a startup you have to try different business models to figure out which one is right for you.

Market Adoption

It tells how are you going to advertise your product to acquire customers. Anything from events to partnership with other companies

Competitive Analysis

Presenting the competitors in a quadrant graph is always a good idea. This way you not only show them your competitors but help them compare features of your business with them easily.

Many investors believe that having a competitor is good as everything is already tested and defined like the business model, how to acquire new customers.

Analyzing Airbnb Slide 9:

Just have a look at the airbnb slide 9. It will take only a couple to seconds that to analyze that:

  1. Airbnb: is both affordable and accepts online transaction(1st quadrant)
  2. Vrbo: is expensive and provides only offline transaction
  3. Hotels.com: accepts online transactions but is very expensive.

Competitors Advantages

Every startup has something unique from their competitors and this will help them to gain customers. So, In this slide you have put out the points that How is your product better than your competitors? What you are providing that they are not?

Show all the qualities that will make your startup standout from your competitors.

Current Revenue

Airbnb doesn’t have this slide but it’s always better to show your current traction and your current revenue.

Most investors out there only invest when they see your current revenue. It helps them to know how many people are willing to pay for your product.

How much are you trying to raise?

I think airbnb had this slide, but it wasn’t added in slideshare. You may have heard that you should not raise more money than you want. You will end up losing most of your money in trash.

Having an Idea of how much you are trying to raise and then showing it how much you are going to spend in which services. This helps investors to understand that the founder knows what he is doing and what he has to do once he raises the money.

Pro Tips:

  • Investor time is very valuable. So, most of the pitch decks they see come to them through a warm introduction or by a shared connection. So, It’s better to have a warm introduction from one of their portfolio companies.
  • On Average, an investor spends about 4 min on each deck he read. So, try to keep it short and simple.
  • Before mailing, your deck to investors try to show them to your friends and mentors and change the content according to the feedback they give.
  • If you have future ideas to implement in your startup, adding them will be great.
  • Designing is a great way to make some read your pitch deck excitingly. I personally had used Slidebean and Canva to design my own pitch deck.