3 Ways to Know Your Pitch Deck Sucks (+How to Fix It)

Your pitch deck’s job isn’t to tell your company’s life story.

Or to explain the universe of possibilities you’re going to unlock in 10 or 15 years.

It has one job to do:

Give a 30,000-foot view of where your company is at right now, so you can GET THE MEETING.

That’s it.

Unfortunately, most founders just don’t get this:

“Fail early and often” doesn’t apply to pitching.

You only get one shot to make a great first impression with an investor, and a poor pitch is going to stop you from getting that meeting in the first place.

I’ve reviewed 1,000s of pitch decks, and built hundreds that raised $5B+ from some of the biggest investors on the planet: Tiger, a16z, SoftBank, Khosla, Insight, GV, General Catalyst, General Atlantic, DFJ, you name it…

And here are the top 3 things even experienced founders (including those with wildly successful exits) screw up in their pitch deck:

• Information overload
• No core story
• Plain-vanilla instead of polarizing

Here's how to know if you’re making these mistakes - and how to fix them, step by step:

Step 1: Check for info overload

I don’t care who you are - you do NOT get a pass that allows you to have a 30-page pitch deck.*

You’re also not allowed to put more than 500 words in your deck.

If you’re beyond these rules of thumb, then print out your deck and start throwing away pages (into the Addendum at best).

This is NOT an info deck. It’s a pitch and it needs to be short and punchy.

Step 2: Make sure you’re actually telling a story

If I flip through your deck, does your story come through the monitor and slap me in the face?

…or does it just suck?

How to know: Go page-by-page and write down your slide headings as a series of bullets.

If they’re just kinda general, then you need to do some surgery.

If you don’t know exactly what should go there, try this: Take the coolest thing you wrote in small text on that page, and try making it the heading.

Example Bland Title: Customers & Marketing

Example Much Better Title: Existing Community of 10,000 Superfans

Step 3: Drop vanilla. Mint Chocolate Chip + Unicorn Cotton Candy is 100x better

Here’s a secret: no one’s going to write a check because your business seems “kinda OK-ish”

But you also don’t need 200 people to fill up a cap table; sometimes you only need ONE investor to believe in your vision.

How to know if you’re being too Plain Jane:

Find the one big, bold statement that will definitely p*ss some people off.

…if you can’t, then it’s time to polarize.

Define the enemy, and go on the line by calling out what’s wrong, then poke them in the eye.

My example: Fatcat Wall Street investment bankers got rich by convincing founders they can’t live without them. I give the power back to founders so they can raise more money & grow their businesses faster - without getting screwed and paying millions in fees. Banksters hate me for it - and I’m fine with that.

Summary

*There is only one founder EVER who I recommended run their round with a 57-page pitch deck. It was for an EXTREMELY specific reason. You are not them.

Go audit your deck.

Give it a once-over and watch how much more powerful your story becomes.

Next week we’ll talk about taking back the power in your investor meetings - see you then.