A great pitch deck does more than just explain your venture idea. It helps your audience understand the problem you are solving, why your solution matters and why you are the best person or team to make it happen. Your pitch deck should make your venture both easy to understand and difficult to forget. Often, getting that balance comes from iteration and repetition.
At the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute, founders have the opportunity to develop and practice their pitch decks and live pitches through different programs, mentorship, workshops and events.
From student founders, faculty and community entrepreneurs sharing their ventures with their communities, one key principle for a strong pitch deck remains the same. These slides are not a place to put everything you know about your venture. You must select the right information to help the audience understand your venture and its story.
Here are some quick tips to help make your pitch deck stronger.
1. Start with a story
Before you start creating your deck, think about the story you want to tell your audience.
A good pitch is not simply a collection of facts about your venture. Your pitch should take the audience from a problem or opportunity to a solution, and then ultimately show them why your venture matters.
Start by answering a few basic questions:
- What problem are you solving?
- Who experiences this problem?
- What is your solution and why does it matter?
- What do you want your audience to do next?
The beginning of your pitch should quickly give people a reason to care. You can do this by sharing a surprising statistic, describing a customer experience, or telling a short personal story about the frustrating problem your venture will solve.
Give your audience an opportunity to empathize or relate, and then build from there.
A typical pitch deck structure moves through the problem, solution, target customer, market opportunity, business model, competition, traction, team and ask. While the exact order of these slides might change depending on your venture and your audience, every slide should contribute to the same story overall.
2. Keep your pitch deck simple
One of the biggest mistakes a founder can make is trying to fit too much information onto each slide. Your audience should be listening to you speak instead of reading paragraphs behind you.
Instead of overloading your slides with text, look for opportunities to replace unnecessary text with images, graphics, charts or other visuals that help communicate the idea more quickly.
As you create your deck, ask yourself: What does my audience actually need to see on this slide?
For example, instead of writing a paragraph explaining how your product works, how can you explain it in three bullet points? Instead of listing months of sales numbers one by one, could a chart show this more effectively?
This same principle applies to your entire deck. You may want to list dozens of details about different aspects of your venture, but not all of them belong in the main pitch deck. You can always add information and supporting details in appendix slides that you can reference during Q&A.
The goal of your pitch deck is to provide clarity, not overwhelm your audience with information.
3. Show evidence, not just potential
It is exciting to share your idea, but your audience also wants to know what you have learned since having the idea. This is where traction and validation become important.
Traction looks different depending on the stage your venture is in. For one venture, it could mean bringing in revenue and having paying customers. For another, it could mean having successful customer discovery, a prototype or early users.
The important thing is to include evidence that you are learning from the people you hope to serve. For example, compare these two statements:
“College students can’t find affordable meals near campus.”
“We spoke with 60 college students living on campus and found that for 82% of them, affordability, not variety of options, was the main consideration when deciding where to eat.”
The first statement is a vague assumption. The second statement uses real customer research to provide evidence.
If your venture is early-stage, do not feel pressured to manufacture impressive numbers. Focus instead on accurately demonstrating what you have tested and what you learned from those insights.
Show that your venture is being shaped by evidence, not assumptions.
4. Know your audience
Understanding who you are pitching to leads to a strong pitch. Competition judges, investors, potential customers/users or potential partners may all be interested in different aspects of your venture.
Before you build your deck, think about who your audience is, what they need to understand about your venture and what you want them to learn from your pitch.
A competition judge may want to hear more detail about your go-to-market strategy and traction, while a potential customer may want to hear more about your competitive advantage and why they should choose you over competitors.
You do not need to create a separate new pitch deck for every audience you may pitch to. Instead, consider adjusting the information you emphasize, the amount of detail you provide, and moving around the order of the slides (you can always pull from your appendix slides).
Knowing your audience can help you focus your pitch on what is most important to the people in the room and help them understand why your venture matters.
5. End with a clear ask
Do not assume that your audience knows what you want them to do. They should not have to guess what you want from them.
If you are seeking funding, give a specific dollar amount. Explain how this amount will benefit your venture, what you will do with it and how it will help move the venture forward.
Give evidence behind the number you ask for. Your audience wants to know how you came up with this very specific amount of money, and how it benefits your venture.
Remember that money is not the only possible ask. You might be looking for pilot customers, mentorship, industry connections, potential partners or just for feedback. Ask for the help you are seeking.
Your audience does not know how to help you until you ask them clearly.
Instead of ending your pitch with just, “Thank you for your time, and thank you for listening,” end with a clear statement of what comes next. What milestone is next for your venture? What resource would help you reach it? Why should they help now?
A good pitch leaves your audience knowing where your venture is going and how they can become part of that journey.
Pitch deck example: Learning from a winning Venture Devils Demo Day venture
Take a look at a real example of a venture that won funding during a previous Venture Devils Demo Day, SoMIT Lab, led by founder Jean Amukwatse: Edson E+I Example: SoMIT Lab Pitch Deck
SoMIT Lab’s pitch deck is a real-case example of how these tips and tricks come together in a successful pitch deck. The venture focuses on providing real-time soil intelligence for smallholder farmers in Uganda.
The deck establishes the problem quickly, using a few key statistics to show the challenges farmers face without accurate soil data before moving directly into its solution. From there, visuals help explain how the technology works, while later slides cover the competitive advantage, market opportunity, business model and go-to-market strategy.
The deck is not text-heavy. Instead it relies on key information and effective visuals to share its story. It ends with a specific ask: $30,000 for pilot testing, MVP development and go-to-market preparation.
A pitch deck does not need to contain every bit of information about your venture. It needs to guide your audience through the most important information with a clear story, purposeful visuals and evidence to understand why your venture matters.
Your pitch deck is never really finished
Your first pitch deck will not be your last.
As you receive questions from your audience, get feedback from judges, talk with potential customers/users, meet with mentors and practice your pitch, you will learn more about what people understand immediately and where they get confused.
Use the information that you get and iterate.
Edson E+I provides many opportunities for entrepreneurs at all stages to practice this. Venture Devils founders can access venture mentorship, pitch competition opportunities, programming like Lightning Incubator and education opportunities to further develop their venture and pitch deck. Other resources, such as Open Pitch Week and Training and Development modules, give founders additional ways to develop their venture and pitch deck, receive feedback and strengthen their pitch.
You don’t have to wait until your venture or pitch feels perfect before practicing. In fact, sharing an idea and listening carefully to the questions people ask will help you make both your pitch and your venture stronger.
