Where do great pitch decks come from?

I recently created my Pitch deck for my company. When learning about it, I found this site really helpful:

https://piktochart.com/blog/startup-pitch-decks-what-you-can-learn/

I am lucky that one of my mentors is on faculty at a business school, so he had one of his MBA consultant teams help with my market research, and then they put together the initial drafts of the deck. In the end, I put the final touches on it for presentation.

As the company is still pre-revenue, and I am a solopreneur with a functional app in the App Store, but pre-revenue, mine has 16 slides. It's about 30 min long and has many diagrams.

I am now looking to get in front of VC's.

I found the process of creating a deck excruciatingly difficult. I have created TWENTY versions of it over the last one and a half years. I heard that the investors want as little as six slides, which means I would not be able to explain what my app does and how it does it. My latest version has eighteen slides and that includes three pictures.

I did have a seven-slide deck. It sounded crazy:

"Hello, I am a Martian, and I want is to make you a billion bucks. Please invest $200K into my tumba-yumba that makes magnificent ChipotStarbaburgers. They are the wendiest of them all, with bananamustardamon. Not surprisingly, I enjoy monopolistic advantage, as nobody is that mad (my graduate degree is from Yale and my advisor works for NASA)"

I figured that after these seven slides the investors would be so confused they would have to take a week off to recover. So. I. Took. Eighteen. Slides. To. Tell. My. Story.

I am happy with eighteen slides because it is also a test of a venture capitalist I want to work with. My app is magnificent; it could help millions of people to dramatically improve their lives. It took me 30 years to develop the technology for it, and it is not like I am going to have a second life... Thus, if the investors are so set in their ways they do not fall off the chair by slide number four, they can invest in yet another food delivery service.

So my advice is this: if you are a creator of the New World, respectfully offer your own reasonable rules, and just tell your story. If you are a food delivery service #Zillion, use ten slides, lots of bright pictures, and have it all very professionally done, by a specialized company.

> Were/ are you the founder of the company?

Yes

> If so, did you create the pitch deck yourself?

Yes

> Did you delegate the deck creation to another team member?

No, never.

> Did you and your team reach out to an outside consultant for assistance?

Yes, several times. Oh, what a waste that was. Each consultant invariably said about the last guy's work: "This is bad, we have to redo this from scratch". But the result was always the same.

> Did your deck follow the 10/20/30 rule or did you do something different?

Not really. Most investors had their own predetermined constraints on the number of slides and on the time (one or two even required a certain font size).

Anyway, I'm convinced that for best results one should use more pictures than words. One of the best presentations I've seen was almost entirely made of cleverly chosen stock images, not text. One of the advantages is that you can pack a lot more slides into the presentation, because human brain can decipher images much faster than text, so you can dedicate as little as 5 seconds to each slide, and it works great (if you do it right).

Hi Jason,

Thats a wonderful questions you have put in. Me and fellow co-founders learned things in a hard way after numerous presentation. The among traits among seed funders are that they are looking,

- What is the problem you are trying to solve?

- Is it worth solving?

- Is there a long term benefits for the funder?

- How good is your team?

In the ends its all about story telling. I have used the concept of Monroe's Motivational Sequence it might help you too. Good Luck.