As every vertical gets crowded, it’s never been harder to raise a Series A. Cutting through the noise requires telling a compelling story in your pitch deck. Below, I lay out some slide-by-slide advice on what investors look for in a deck. I’ve also put together a sample deck that you can use as a starting point.
1️⃣ An investor will spend 30 seconds reviewing your deck before deciding if they want to meet. Do not overload it with information
2️⃣ The purpose of the deck is to tell a story (and the story should build up sequentially). This is not a deep dive document on strategy, marketing positioning and competitive advantage. (You can write an additional memo containing that if you so wish)
3️⃣ Every slide should ONLY have one (simple) message. This message should be presented in the header. (A simple heuristic: imagine the investor will only read the titles of the slides. If they do that, will they be able to get the narrative?)
4️⃣ Aim for 15 slides (20 max)
5️⃣ Most investors won’t know anything about your space before meeting you. The purpose of the deck is to grab their attention, not daunt or overwhelm them with information. You can educate them during the actual presentation and also through targeted Q&A afterwards
6️⃣ The deck does not have to be professionally designed and the slides can be minimalistic. Nonetheless, it should still be neat
The narrative woven throughout the slides should focus on why you will dominate your category (e.g. traction, team, unique insight).
- If you have really strong Traction, make sure that is one of the first slides (as it then compels the reader to read the remainder)
- If you have an incredible and unexpected Insight, lead with that
- If your Team has incredible founder-market-fit or experience, make sure to bring that to the forefront
Below is a typical deck structure you can use. Note that you can consider reordering the slides to better convey your narrative. But you want to make sure that you grab the reader’s attention from the very beginning.
- Cover slide
- Overview
- Exec Summary
- Market Size
- Problem
- Solution
- Traction
- Customers
- Case Study (optional)
- Product Roadmap
- Competition
- Growth Plan
- Vision
- Team
- Fundraising Ask (optional)
See here for an example deck I put together. I’ve also screenshotted the slides below and included some commentary on what to include.
- It’s best to have a simple one line overview of what the business does (or that is intriguing)
- This slide is optional because the message may have already been covered on the cover slide. But it can still be useful to include to quickly get the reader up to speed on what’s to come
- The benchmarks to raise a Series A have gone up, so investors expect strong traction. If the business has impressive traction, it’s valuable to include it early on in the deck so as to force the investor to pay attention for the remainder
- In most categories, investors will discount a top-down market size figure and prefer something bottoms-up. (In this specific case, advertising is so clearly a large market that it would be overkill to do a bottoms-up build up)
- Series A investors are going to preemptively ignore markets that they deem to be too small. As a result, you don’t want to be pitching anything <$1-2B
- If the market is small-ish (low $Bs) but growing fast, you should include the speed of growth
- Note that you don’t need to be pitching a multi hundred $B market either (and investors will be skeptical of market size numbers that are gigantic and simply quote a market research paper’s number)
- Also note that AI unlocks a lot of labor automation opportunities, which can mean that software companies tap into labor budgets and not just software budgets. These can be orders of magnitude bigger than software budgets and can thus turn categories that investors may have felt were too small into something investable. It is on you to convey this clearly
- Clearly state the problem so that the investor can easily understand it. You do not want to increase the cognitive load required to understand what the company does as it just increases the chances the investor won’t bother to dig in
- AI-first companies can have value propositions that are 100x better than the status quo. Investors now expect huge ROI, so make sure your solution conveys this
- The best value props are Revenue Generation and Massive Cost Savings. Try to avoid pitching time savings if you can show topline or bottom line improvements
- It’s also important to try and convey that what you’ve built is hard
- Up-and-to-the-right graphs are always well received :)
- Include a few key metrics to help the investor gain a better understanding of the company’s performance. But do not overload them with information
- Logos are an easy way to provide social proof (if they are easily recognizable)
- You can include more detailed case studies either as a slide in the deck or as a standalone document
- Ideally, this slide should convey a few things:
- You are a product centric company that ships fast (since competition is rife for every idea, and point solutions are becoming quickly commoditized)
- You have an ambitious vision for the company (hence the use of System of Record above)
- You are pursuing the market opportunity in a unique way
- Nearly all application software markets are getting crowded quickly. For many investors, the key question when investing at the Series A is: “how do I justify picking this company when there are [10] others also performing well?”
- You should be helping investors understand the market segmentation and dynamics (e.g. “most players focus on enterprise, whereas we are SMB (and here is why that’s an interesting place to build)” or “we are all-in-one whereas most players are point solutions” or “we have won all head-to-head deals against X, Y, Z”)
- You can also provide a more detailed market segmentation in a written document that you can send through after meeting with an investor
- Founder ambition becomes another important way that investors justify picking a certain company in a category. As a result, this slide should focus on conveying ambitious growht targets.
- Note that investors are frequently seeing pitches of companies growing from 0 to $3/5/7M
- For reference, forecasting growth from $1 to $3M is decent, but not especially ambitious. My suggestion would be at <$2M, forecast 5x growth for that year, and then 3x growth for the year after. 2x growth is unlikely to meet the threshold
- Related to the point on ambition, you need to have a compelling Vision for the company that gets the investor excited. Note that investors are looking for fund-returning investments, not just simply good companies. You should make sure your Vision plays to this idea
- Where possible, you are trying to convey that the team is special. This may be because of pedigree, of unique founder-market-fit, of being repeat founders etc.
- Series A investors also want to see that the team is also ready for a Series A. Specifically, this means that the company has grown beyond the initial founders to include a few additional hires (typically on the engineering and sometimes on the sales front)
- Make sure to include Linkedin links on the page so an investor can quickly get a gauge of the team (rather than having to copy paste everyones names into Linkedin)
- It’s not essential to include this slide or to mention the exact dollar amount you are raising (since you may be iterating on that number based on feedback). The risk with putting a number on the slide is that certain investors preemptively self-select out of the meeting if they think the round is too small or too large for them.
- Generally speaking, for a Series A, a round of $8 - $20M is likely to be a fit for most multi-stage funds. However, $20M may be on the high end for many folks, so you may want to instead say something like $15M (which can easily get bid up to $20M if you get multiple competing term sheets)
