Pitch deck structure: What to Include in an Investor Deck outline

A startup pitch deck outline is the standard document used by startups to present their case to investors; it’s a brief deck comprised of about 10 to 20 slides. While an effective communication tool, its use is very widespread mostly because it’s what an investor expects to see before meeting a prospect, and even an extended version of that presentation is what ends up being used most of the meeting.

With how competitive and complex the process to raise money is, it’s not an exaggeration to say that a pitch deck can make or break your company: when done correctly, pitch decks can really go the whole nine yards.

START YOUR PITCH DECK

The Investor deck should achieve three things:

1- It needs to tell your company story.

2- It needs to convince the investor that they can make money with this.

3- It needs to do that in under 4 minutes.

What makes a pitch deck successful?

We work with founders to help them pitch their company stories, so we get to see hundreds of decks and talk to dozens of companies every month.

The most common problem we see is founders getting caught up in the slides, the details, and the 'rules' when they focus on the story. You'll find dozens of articles on keeping your deck to 10 slides or how you must have a board of advisors slide, but we base our thesis on some more tangible examples.

Companies like Airbnb, Intercom, and Buffer have released the pitch decks that they used to raise their first rounds of funding, and if you look at their structure, you can essentially find the same set of slides.

Angel Investors and Venture Capitalist have also learned to expect a 'standard' pitch deck as the first filter when evaluating a company to invest in. Venture firms like Sequoia have also released pitch deck templates of their own, and well, you ought to listen to them as well.

Let's pause for a second. If you are new into the world of pitch decks, we recommend you to go and read what is a pitch deck first.

The Ideal Pitch Deck Structure

What should be in a pitch deck?

First things first, this is the standard pitch deck outline:

• Problem
• Solution
• Business Model
• Competition
• Founding Team
• Marketing Plan
• Fundraising

We’ve actually gone through the trouble of looking at the most popular pitch deck references, and concluded that those elements are the absolutely most essential slides your document must have.

Here’s a comparison table:

While different authors and accelerators disagree on certain points, the pitch deck structure remains rather unchanged. It follows a recognizable presentation storytelling resource we call the three-act structure (More on that here). In the first act, it’s critical to engage your audience, capture their attention and establish the status quo. In the second act, your story should be developed to build excitement about the business opportunity, by providing numbers that are as irresistible as they are irrefutable. The third act is where the rubber meets the road and you deal the killer blow, making your point about why investing in your company is a fantastic opportunity.

Remember, investors aren’t there to like you or fall in love with your team. They are there to make money, and the more you can convince them that their investment will be returned tenfold, the better.

Here's an overview of the three-act structure:

First section: status quo

The first two slides should provide the company name, founder team members, hero images and an elevator pitch. Let your audience know why the founding team members are the rock stars of the company. Text should be five to seven descriptive words of the product or service. You may want to select hero images that showcase a person actively using your product or service.

The problem should be summarized in a one to four fashioned bullet points that are easy to understand. The solution should be presented in a layout that shows three key benefits of your product or service. The business model is a key slide in your sales presentation. Lay it out carefully, clearly and with as few words as possible.

Second section: how we are disrupting the market

Name your competition and outline why you can beat them. Point out their weaknesses and talk about why your company has the advantage. Creating a founding team slide lets the investors know your company has the skills to reach milestones.

Third section: we rock and you should invest in us

The marketing plan slide is another key element. Your potential investors will want to know: “How are you going to get those millions of dollars in revenue?” Be sure to lay out short- and long-term customer acquisition strategies that answer that question. Focus on the metrics of unit economics of how much it costs to acquire a customer and the LTV (Lifetime Value of Customer). These metrics are the heartbeat of any company.

A full breakdown on these sections, and the contents of these slides can be found on our Complete Guide to a Pitch Deck.

- Recommended: Pitch Deck Design Service 😉

What do you write on an Investor Deck?

Pitch Deck + story

Remember, a pitch deck is a summary of a company story. We are using slides to give arguments on why this company is incredible.

We can talk a lot about slides, slide order, and story (and we will), but in the end, this is what your pitch deck needs to answer. These are the questions your pitch deck needs to answer.

• What opportunity have you discovered in the market?
• What have you built to tackle it? How does it work, and who is it for?
• How much are you growing, and will you continue to grow?
• And why are you and your team the team to change that status quo?
  

That's it!

It's easier said than done, though. We see founders getting lost on the technicalities: the market size, the business model, and the financial projections when what you are doing should focus on answering that set of questions (in under four minutes).

So let's combine the 3-Act structure with these questions.

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1- First, the Setup. This is the Intro, the Cover, and the Status Quo question. What's happening? Your solution slide becomes the plot point. We change the direction of the story.

2- Now, Rising Action. This is your Product section: we are meeting the hero. Once we get into the market, how the market is reacting, and how big the market is, the stakes are high.

3- Then, the Crisis. Your competitors and how you plan to beat them. The climax of the story. Your team, your competitive advantages, or your ingenious rollout plan are going to be the Resolution to this conflict that you unearthed.

4- That's when you get to ask for money.

Story Context (and time on slides)

The term pitch deck is broad. I've seen it used to refer to a sales deck. You could even use it to refer to a movie pitch.

Still, there are quite a few ways investor decks can be classified. Mainly the Demo Day deck, the Email Deck, and the Meeting Deck.

Demo Day Pitch

The conditions for a Demo Day pitch are pretty peculiar:

• You have the founder presenting: so the slides don't need to be self-explanatory. They are rather a support and illustration for what the person is saying.
• You have a time limit: usually 3 or 5 minutes- so maybe here, that rule on the number of slides isn't complete crap.
• You are presenting in front of a large audience, which means that you should refrain from sharing confidential information. There are some regulations in the US around what you can tell non-accredited investors, which you are likely to have in the audience. =
  

Email Deck

Most deals happen because you get intros to investors (unlike cold emails, which is an approach many founders choose to take before exhausting their network).

When you get an intro to an investor, they will either ask you to send a pitch deck or ask them if they can take a look. This is the deck that gets you a meeting and probably the one that needs the most amount of work.

(The Email deck is also used in other contexts: for example, when applying to an accelerator or submitting your deck to a competition).

With that context, we can infer some characteristics about the email deck,

• It needs to be self-explanatory because the investor will consume it on their own, without your voice or narration.  
• It will also be the first impression an investor will get about your company, so it needs to look stellar.
• It's only being sent to handpicked investors, so you can reveal more of your secret sauce in it.
• It's designed to get you a meeting: so you don't have to tell everything about the company, just enough to create attention, curiosity, and get called to the next stage of the process.
  

Here's an extra insight: tools like Slidebean and Docsend allow you to track the activity on your slides. So we know, we know in which slides investors spend the most amount of time, and it turns out VCs spend an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds on them.

You can't assume that you'll change people's behaviors, so if your deck can't be consumed in 3-4 minutes, chances are investors will skip through some of the content or just give up after a certain amount of slides. That's why we always encourage decks that can be wholly consumed in 4 minutes.

The meeting Deck

If the email deck gets you a meeting, you'll need a meeting deck.

To me, this is an evolution of the email deck. It's essentially the same thing, with a little extra detail.

A usual first investor meeting goes like this:

• Five minutes to settle in and small talk.
• Fifteen minutes for you to go through your slides and your company story.
• Thirty minutes for discussion, questions, follow-ups,...
  

So as you can see, you are turning a 4-minute self-read into a 15 minute narrated deck.

It may be unrealistic to build and maintain three decks, especially with the insane schedules we often have to deal with.

That's why most companies resort to making something close to an Email Deck and using small variations of that for everything. It's a fair approach, and I know I've done it.

Still, I think you must understand the difference between these, to avoid common mistakes like,

• Taking the same email deck to a meeting: you are expected to bring more.
• Using a demo-day (non-self-explanatory) deck to send via email.
• Sending a meeting deck over email, which may be overkill.
  

Great! Now that we understand the use cases, let's look into the structure of a pitch deck.

The pitch deck outline

Based on everything we’ve covered, a fantastic pitch deck outline could look like this.

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Let’s go over each slide.

Intro Section

Cover Slide

The cover slide should have a 5-7 word description of what you do: simple, self-explanatory, so short that you read without even trying. This tagline is not a marketing tagline: it's a very brief description of what your company does.

Traction Teaser (Optional)

If you want to hook your audience early on, you can include a short Traction slide that validates your company and gets people excited about what's to come.

Remember, they are coming in without knowing the context of your business: they aren't really sure what you do or how you make money (yet), so the information you put in here needs to be universally understood without context.

Executive Summary (Not Recommended)

I never recommend adding one, but some decks include an Executive Summary right after the Cover, which feels a lot like a spoiler to the rest story.

Beyond that, it forces you to cram all the slides into a single one, which sort of defeats the purpose of the rest of the deck.

Status Quo Section

Problem/Business Opportunity

Most great companies solve global problems:

• Uber solved taxis.
• Slack solved excess emails and meetings.
• Dropbox solved file syncing across devices.
  

There's a bit of an aha moment if you get this slide right if you can point out a problem that people experience regularly; that's standing right in front of them, that's so obvious, and yet they haven't seen it.

This slide can also make your whole pitch fall apart when you come up with questionable statements that the investor can't get behind. If they 'disagree' with you about this premise, then you might lose them here.

For example, I've come across a fair share of social media startups that begin their problem slide by saying, 'current social media is boring.' That's an opinion, not a fact. You don't want to get into an argument at this point.

Some companies aren't necessarily solving a problem but instead tackling a business opportunity that has arisen. Examples here are mobile games, which certainly don't solve a problem; they are just jumping on a business opportunity they discovered.

Solution Slide

Think of the solution slide as a mirror to the problem slide. Remember: this is the plot point. This is when you break the status quo.

Great solution slides are also concise. They don't involve technology or features; it's not time to talk about the product yet. We are presenting our thesis: what if instead of doing things like this… we do things with this new approach.

Product Section

There's some elasticity here, depending on how complex your product is or how much time you need to reserve for the next sections.

Product Slide

You can approach the product slide as a (short!) video demo, a how-does-it-work diagram, or even a series of product screenshots. These slides will probably not be too different from your marketing landing pages; you can probably get some inspiration there.

Feature/Benefits Slide

I like to keep this to 5 or 6 benefits tops and notice how I use the word benefit instead of 'feature.' A feature would be: Slidebean is fully responsive. A benefit would be, edit your presentations anywhere, even on your phone, while on the go.

By removing the jargon and adding a real-life use scenario, the statement becomes more impactful.

Audience/Use Cases

You'll see that this slide is not included on any of the decks we analyzed, but I think it's a critical slide, especially if you are a Seed or Series A company.

The idea of this slide is to prove that you understand who the product is for: so many companies don't know the answer to this question, and that is a common deal-breaker.

Infrastructure/Underlying Magic (optional)

For products with a strong technological component, or when the tech infrastructure is one of their core differentiators, it's also relevant to include an 'Underlying Magic' slide.

Market Validation/Why Now (optional)

A 'Market Validation' slide is included to support products where adoption could be a challenge. For example, on their 2009 pitch deck, Airbnb had a market validation slide to support their thesis that people would be willing to stay at stranger's couches.

This is our redesign of that slide.

Business Model

This is one of the easiest slides to solve and one of the slides that many entrepreneurs get wrong. This slide is not about projections. It's not about how much money you could make if you get 1 million customers. It's just about how you make money.

Is it a subscription? You don't need to lay out every single plan and its ins and outs. In my experience, that should be changing regularly as you experiment with different combinations: just tell us a $XX subscription, with or without trial. Done.

Is it a product or a service? Tell us what the price is, or maybe the average order size, and give us an idea of the margin. Is this a 30% or a 60% margin product?  

Is it a marketplace? What % do you charge per transaction? 10%. Done.  

Milestones & Roadmap

I think this slide functions as an excellent bridge between the product, what it is, how much it costs… and what's coming in the next section, which is the numbers and the traction.

To me, an ideal Roadmap slide goes over some of the major highlights in your product evolution and your company history, and then it talks about what you intend the product to become, again, over the next few months.

We are not making financial projections yet- this is the product section, so we are talking about product vision, not numbers. Don't get revenue projections mixed in here.

Market Section

Traction

This is a slide about numbers. Think of a number as a photo and a chart as a story, a film. Saying that you've made $1M in total revenue sounds cool, but what we want to know is your journey getting there.

How much of that revenue came in the last month? How much was that month compared to the previous one and the one before that? What breakthroughs did you make that completely changed the inclination of that chart?

There's no faking a Traction slide, it is what it is, and that's why it's so important.

Go-to-Market

How will this money that you are about to raise accelerate your growth? We can answer this question by covering these parts,

• What have you done to get here?
• What are you doing that shows promise?
• What are you going to do next?
  

Remember, rounds of capital usually fund 18-24 months' worth of operations, so we are looking for a growth plan: a marketing plan of how you will get the company to the next fundable milestone.

The most common mistake I see on Go-To-Market slides is lack of focus. I can't count the number of go-to-market slides that say 'we will do social media, SEO, and influencer marketing.

That's what everybody is doing. It doesn't make you unique. It makes you generic. A great Go-To-Market slide talks about two, maybe three concrete channels that you are using to grow your customer base and that you will continue to use.

Market Size (TAM slides)

In the previous slide, we already talked about how big this company is getting over the next year. Now it's time to answer, how big does the company get, total!

The concept of that is TAM or Total Addressable Market, but it's a bit foreign to many of us. What does TAM mean?

Using a SaaS (Software as a Service) example, your market is not THE SaaS Market. That's a $200B+ market these days, but it doesn't matter to you how big the SaaS market is. Saying that you'll own 1% of the market is just an oversimplification.

Your TAM is also NOT the size of the problem. For healthcare startups, for example, it's not the amount of money wasted on X or Y process that you are solving. You are not earning that money, and your company is not worth that. You're solving the problem and charging a fee for it.

Startups are exciting to investors if their TAM is, at least, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Again, it's not about inflating your numbers. It's about this self-assessment: is my company potential significant enough to get investors excited?

One of our investors did a fantastic piece explaining how to estimate this.

Why us

Competitors

You can approach this as a simple business grid chart, a table comparing features, or a simple summary of your core competitors.

Competitive Advantages/Secret Sauce

When you talk about competitors, more than comparing features, more than comparing what your pricing is, it's about showing that there's something that you understand about the market that others don't seem to get.

That's what makes great companies, unique insights that you have discovered that these established competitors haven't figured out yet.

Team slide

The founding team on a startup needs to have the skills to get the company to $1M in Revenue.

If you are building an app, getting to $1M in Revenue requires marketing, development, UX, and business/operations. If you are building a B2B SaaS platform targeting enterprise, you need engineers, business development, and sales.

I can't count the number of decks I've seen where the current team doesn't have the necessary skills to reach scale. You don't raise money to recruit people: you form a team, and then you raise money.

Advisors (not recommended)

Unless your investors know who the advisor is (i.e., either they are a celebrity or the investor is connected with them on LinkedIn), I wouldn't waste any space on them. Advisors are great, they are helpful, but chances are they'll spend one or two hours a month working with you.

This company is going to be built by its team. That's the people we care about. ‍

The Ask

Financial

The Financials slide is straightforward:

• If you've been operating, we want to see the last financial year of data; and then, for everyone,
• 3-5 years of financial projections for your company.
  

Founders typically add a simple table with their SG&A, COGS, CAPEX, and revenue- with a final profit margin and percentage number, requiring you to do some financial modeling. However, that's an article for another day.

Financial Model Service

Fundraising/Use of Funds

The fundraising slide should cover how much money you are raising and be super clear about that next fundable milestone we have talked about.

A Seed round is supposed to last until a Series A. Closing a round takes about six months, so this round should last enough for you to get to Series A status, plus an extra six months to complete that round.

You'll see a lot of decks that talk about 'this round funds 18 months of operations, and that's not necessarily a bad slide, as long as the math behind that number responds to a fundable milestone. It's not about time. It's about metrics.

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TL;DR

That’s a lot of information to process, and figuring out some of these slides will require you to sit down and iterate time and time again.

A good sanity check after you finish each iteration is to go back to those questions:

1- Is this deck telling your company story?

2- Can investors make money with this business? Can the company grow enough for that to happen?

And finally, if you are sending it over email,

3- Can the deck be consumed in under 4 minutes.

In conclusion, a strong pitch deck is an essential tool for any startup looking to secure investment. By following a clear and effective structure, you can effectively communicate your value proposition, market opportunity, and financial plan to investors. By highlighting the key elements of your business and avoiding common pitfalls, you can increase your chances of success in securing funding. Ultimately, a well-crafted pitch deck can be the difference between securing the investment you need to grow your business and missing out on valuable opportunities.

Pre-built pitch deck outlines (Templates)

Investment pitch decks

Most of the references mentioned above have made their outlines publicly available. We took the liberty of redesigning the slides that were most outdated, and making them available to you, as a free download or as a starting template on our pitch deck creator.

Download this Template

This investor deck template is ideal for initial approaches to VC's and Angel Investors. If they ask to see your pitch deck, this is what you want to send. The outline of the investor deck mainly focuses on your startup's growth metrics and traction.

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Facebook’s original pitch deck was basically a media kit containing the company’s value proposition, key metrics and Online Marketing Services. We’ve taken the liberty of using the exact same information and redesigning the original pitch deck. Check it out here!

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Sequoia is one of the most well-known venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. They specialize in incubation, seed stage, startup stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies. This Sequoia Capital Pitch Deck takes a page out of their book. This template is perfect for companies that are getting ready to develop a pitch when seeking investors.

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We've taken the liberty of re-bulding the YCombinator pitch deck template in our platform, and came up with a few style alternatives. . The deck you see here follows the structure proposed by the YCombinator team, with a much, much fresher look.

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From the first to the last slide on this investment proposal template you will wow your clients with your organization and potential. Perfect for meeting with potential investors and creating a name for your company.

Slidebean Pitch Deck Consulting Services

At Slidebean, we offer pitch deck consulting services to help you perfect your pitch and win over investors. Our team of experienced consultants will work with you to understand your business and craft a pitch that showcases your unique value proposition. We also provide feedback on your delivery, so you can be confident that you're putting your best foot forward when it comes to pitching your business. Whether you're raising funds for a new startup or looking to grow an existing business, our pitch deck consulting services can help you get the funding you need. Contact us today to learn more.

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