Guide to Demo Day Pitches

I've seen 100s of demo day pitches, and here are three more slide tips that most do not follow but should:

1) Do not include the same words on every slide as a footer, like your twitter handle, website or company name. It's very distracting. You should mention your company name a few times through the presentation, and you can finish with a slide that has your company name and website as a refresher.

2) Transitions should not be abrupt. You should use a fade or other similar transition between every slide. Watch any Apple presentation and you'll see they always have a fade.

3) Do not use animations. They generally look bad. Exception: If you're a pro presenter, there are some animations and transitions that can look good if done right.

These tips come from my experience giving 100s of presentations and keynotes to sometimes very large audiences. They also can be found in the book Presentation Patterns and on their website. [0]

Edit: Thought of one more. Don't use a pointer. If you find a slide where you need to point at something, change your slide to highlight that thing, or add another slide, so you don't need the pointer.

[0] http://presentationpatterns.com

There's a lot of terrific advice in this article. One of the things it mentions is among the most common, most easily addressed issues that I've seen in demo day pitches:

> Investors are simply trying to manage the flow of information and, more than anything else, figure out who they can ignore and who they’d like to meet. Therefore, your goal should be to intrigue your listeners enough that they will want to meet you and learn more.

The goal of a demo day pitch is not to tell the audience everything they need to know in order to make an investment decision, it's to pique people's interest enough for them to try to connect with you after the pitch. To use a movie analogy, a 3-minute demo day pitch should be more like a movie trailer than like a 15-minute clip that you sped up by 5x by talking faster. Movie trailers don't summarize the whole plot; they feature a few highlights that make you want to see the full movie.

An additional piece of advice, especially for pitching at more mature demo days (like YC's): as the participants get better and better at following an effective pitch template ("here's what we do, here's why it's a big problem, and here's a hockey stick chart..."), it becomes critical to really distinguish yourself in some way. 50% monthly growth is amazing, but it's easy for investors to lose track of that when 30 of the other 100 companies in the batch also advertise 50% monthly growth. Ideally, there's something in your pitch that is not present in anyone else's pitch. There's no formula for what that might be, but it could be very strong founders, particularly good traction, amazing customer engagement/happiness, a very memorable and deep insight about a market that the audience can empathize with, and so on.

My best pitch was one slide, three KPIs

1. Cost of Customer Acquisition 2. Lifetime Value 3. Growth Projection

Two facts, one guess. Had existing customers/revenue which made facts easy to get. Projection was a slight acceleration of previous 12mo growth.

Didn't close any paper (and wasn't looking) just needed a good impression to this investor group and continued engagement - worked a treat!

I always love that picture. Jessica and Paul look like summer camp counselors with their misfit campers.

Is it Aaron Swartz in the picture? Felt a little bad.