What we learned from designing 200 pitch decks | Hacker News Reader

What we learned from designing 200 pitch decks

sketchdeck.com

121 pointstechnotony29 comments

Somebody should run a recursive deep ANN on pitch decks to optimize for money raised, and see what it comes up with as the optimal pitch deck.

See this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9687696

Arguably one might need to capture a bit more data describing the context and outcome associated with each recorded "deployment" of each deck.

With only a couple of hundred samples, and a highly complex process with many poorly understood interacting factors, and loads of missing information, throwing neural networks at it sounds like a fun exercise in overfitting!

Could probably get further by getting hold of a few experts who have strong prior beliefs about what factors may be relevant, and then carefully running some statistical analysis / additional experiments!

"statistics" and domain expertise - not trendily branded, probably still a great idea when you merely have a few hundred samples in a crazily ill-defined high dimensional space.

Has anyone here used this service? It looks pretty interesting. I've tried to get an outside service to improve my pitch decks several times but the results were never as good as calling a buddy who worked at McKinsey.

That is a pretty high bar - I may have a misunderstanding of what McKinsey does, but I thought that they specialized in powerpoint presentations.

They do and are pretty good at it (competition here but respect where it is due.) I bet they do not like it though, and only see it as a necessary part of their job, not the core of their offering.

I am sure. I can bet it will cost a lot more than $1100 to get them to make a pitch deck for you :)

We've used SketchDeck several times. Once for a powerpoint deck, but other times for other public facing documents / one pagers.

Their founder, Chris, is actually a former McKinsey guy. The thought was exactly that - to align 'McKinsey pitch deck thinking' with professional design.

I've used their service and was pretty happy with it. A large share of YC companies use them too.

People spend $1100 getting their decks designed!?

If you're trying to raise a few million dollars and you're not a PowerPoint jockey it feels like money well spent to me.

Our pitch deck was just black text on a white background but would have loved to have thrown some design time at it.

> If you're trying to raise a few million dollars and you're not a PowerPoint jockey it feels like money well spent to me.

The problem is that pitch decks are (or should be) continuously updated, so it's not exactly a one-time cost. (That, or you have to learn enough PowerPoint skills to update it yourself).

While the stories of "here's how I raised my series A in 7 days!" make good stories, the reality is that most fundraising cycles are not like this. They're longer than people expect, and they're an iterative process.

Definitely going to be iterative. Hopefully you get the basic elements covered and can move things around from there.

That's barely two days worth of effort for a regular employee. $1100 to get a deck designed doesn't seem outrageous, considering what's riding on it.

I just did the same calculation. Put another way: if you're currently at a job and looking to leave for your own startup, then stay at that job another three days. With the after-tax money you earn, pay a professional to do a massively better job than you're likely able to do. Totally worth it.

Only those that got funded :)

Given how much is riding on this you want as much external feedback on your deck as possible.

My wife's gig involves EVP to C-Suite presentations where getting the internal client's project/launch/ask/initiative approved depends heavily on connecting with the thinking and narrative style of the particular high level executive(s). Often that connection is visual. I can confirm that $1100 for an outside service that even partially executes on a similar type of presentation is an exceptional bargain.

My takeaways:

What matters more than anything else is honing down the story to its barest, honest minimum. Then it can fit in a slide deck quite easily.

Until you understand why your take on the world matters to the rest of the world, you cannot make a deck no matter how good your design skills are.

Fortunately that came through nice and strong in this article.

Oh, and use blue ...

This article really doesn't say anything about which decks were successful. They simply state here's what they / their customers did most often.

I would suggest making decks is like making plans - the benefit comes from the process. Forcing yourself to work out what the hell actually makes you different is the key.

And as Insay that I realise I have not done it - for myself. And it's an interesting question - why fund / invest in me - it's something I feel we should all do.

Got something to mull over night ...

From personal experience: a poorly designed slide deck with great growth numbers beats a well-designed slide deck with bad numbers or no numbers.

The numbers you need, in descending order of preference:

1) profit

2) revenue

3) DAU / MAU (or paying customers)

4) traffic (or some metric for "interested future customers")

Obviously, the less strong/preferable your numbers, the better your intangibles need to be. If you're walking into the room with a mediocre traffic growth graph, your story had better be earth-shattering, or otherwise tickle an investor's private parts in some specific way.

Once you get to series A, your job is to show that those numbers are not only sustainable (via business metrics), but also that you're ready to make them go up faster by taking a big pile of money. This is much (probably 10x) harder. That's why the series A decks have more metrics and slides.

I like products like this because they distill the concept of "investor storytime" to its essence. Raising a funding round (in my cynical view) is the ultimate in high-touch enterprise sales. You have a small number of potential customers, but you only need to land one. It's worth spending an enormous amount of time and effort closing the sale.

Indeed. Sometimes a startup's first main customer is the lead investor, and all the early results, market analysis etc is for that. You can approach it like enterprise sales. The product is the exit. Most of the time this is a great approach when you are planning to exit soon ("flip" the company) as opposed to building the next Facebook. The latter is done out of love and not necessarily profit, which makes it more likely to be self-funded until it gets big.

For 'Series A pitch decks are longer than seed decks' graphic, the 18 slide deck should really be more aligned with the 5th slide, to get a truer sense of proportion.

How about no decks at all? Why not just bootstrap your way to your first 1~10 million dollars and then be in a much more dominant position when it comes to trading cash for equity?

You could literally be able to walk from any VC. You could ask for absolutely every set of conditions that puts you in favor. You could have complete control.

To me I think that is an invaluable asset to have, being the one with control not your investors whim. They should consider it an honor to be able to invest in you. You will be able to ask for far more. You run the business for your vision not theirs. You ultimately have more control over your destiny than being focused on burning cash fast to keep your investors happy and then looking for more of them before you run out.

As someone who bootstrapped themselves to this point (it did take me 15 years and quite a few detours) I do agree that not having outside investors is very nice. Having said this it is not an easy or quick way to build a business.

Why not just bootstrap your way to your first 1~10 million dollars and then be in a much more dominant position when it comes to trading cash for equity?

...because that's actually rather difficult.

It's often not an option in a high growth land grab market.

Not an option? Just ask WhatsApp ;<)

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