What’s a pitch deck?
Pitch decks are brief presentations (and a vital fundraising tool) that give investors an overview of your business. It usually focuses on showcasing the product/ project, explains the planned monetisation strategy, outlines high-level financial projections, identifies funding needs, and introduces the members of the team.
There are many examples of what different authors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and evangelists believe are necessary elements for successful pitching presentations.
To create a well-crafted pitch presentation outline it’s normal to include the followings items:
● Problem
● Solution
● Product
● Market Size
● Business Model
● Underlying Magic
● Competition
● Your Advantages
● Marketing Plan
● Team
● Milestones
But not all ventures agree with what might be considered the essential pitch deck inclusions! As you can see from the following image, not all of them place the same importance on the most important slides a pitch deck presentation should include.
Let’s see some real and effective examples of startups’ Pitch Decks – and how these legendary companies got the attention of their investors:
Year: 2004
Amount: $500,000
Investor: Peter Thiel
Est. value: $831.8 billion (Mar 2021)
Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook, is a notable entrepreneur and venture capitalist. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created a dorm room project named “Facebook.” He had just begun developing it into something that would last for years to come.
As a result, he received $500k from the billionaire who invested early in what we now know as the social media juggernaut.
Year: 2006
Amount: $1.6 billion
Investor: Google
Est. value: $170 billion (Dec 2020)
YouTube, online video service and one of the most popular websites on the internet, was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion, and like Facebook, this company doesn’t require any introduction. This is not the original pitch deck, by the way – this is YouTube’s pitch deck to Sequoia Capital (one of the most established VC investors who’s often regarded as one of the industry’s best), which was released through a legal proceeding. It shows that knowing what your product can do and having momentum isn’t enough unless your business plan is solid!
Year: 2009
Amount: $600,000
Investor: Sequoia Capital’s
Est. value: $75 billion (Dec 2020)
Airbnb is a platform that allows people to list, find and rent lodging. This company has been one of the greatest startup success stories in recent years due to its innovative approach towards short-term rentals as well as changing the way we live our lives by reinventing what hospitality means.
Year: 2008
Amount: $3.5 M
Investor: Hearst Ventures & SoftBank
Est. value: $1.7 billion (Dec 2020)
BuzzFeed is a leading website with over 120 million monthly visitors and has been referenced by CNN, Forbes Magazine, The Economist among many others.
And as of today, BuzzFeed has managed to raise $240 million in investments from the likes of NBCUniversal Media LLC; Hearst Ventures; RRE Ventures – With a combination of human editors, links and click data, the company is also the founder of Tasty, the world’s largest social food network.
Year: 2015
Amount: $1 M
Investor: Kima Ventures, Gigi Levy Weiss, DRW Venture Capital, Wellborn Ventures
Est. value: $5 M (Mar 2021)
MapMe is a site that allows users to create maps of anywhere they want with no coding required.
The deck helped them raise $1 million in seed funding, and investors were impressed with their social proof and their go-to-market strategy, which allowed them to go viral on social media.
Year: 2011
Amount: $500.000
Investor: Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot), Hiten Shah, and others.
Est. value: $5 M (Dec 2018)
Buffer is a social media scheduling platform that helps you schedule content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. The almighty startup pitch deck that helped Buffer to raise half a million dollars gained popularity by becoming one of the first pitch decks openly shared online.
Buffer began its development in October 2010 in Birmingham, UK by co-founder Joel Gascoigne, who established the idea of the social media application while he was in the United Kingdom.
Once he developed the idea, he created a landing page to see if enough people were interested in the product to make it a profitable venture.
After reaching a critical mass of registrations, Gascoigne built and designed the first version of the application software over a span of 7 weeks!
Year: 2015
Amount: $1.1 M
Investor: Accel, General Catalyst Partners, 9+, Ridge Ventures
Est. value: $6.4 billion (Dec 2020)
Discord was publicly released in May 2015 under the domain name discordapp.com. According to Citron, they made no specific moves to target any specific audience, but some gaming-related subreddits quickly began to switch their IRC links with Discord links. Discord became widely used by sports and LAN tournament gamers.
In March 2021, Discord announced it had hired its first finance chief, former head of finance for Pinterest Tomasz Marcinkowski. An inside source called this one of the first steps for the company towards a potential initial public offering, though co-founder and CEO Jason Citron stated earlier he wasn’t thinking about taking the company public. Discord doubled its monthly user base to about 140 million in 2020.
The same month, Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal reported that several companies were looking to purchase Discord, with Microsoft named as the likely lead buyer at a value estimated at $10 billion. However, they ended talks with Microsoft, opting to stay independent.
Instead, Discord launched another round of investment in April 2021 and among those investing in the company was Sony Interactive Entertainment, who intended to integrate a portion of Discord’s services into the PlayStation Network by 2022.
Year: 2014
Amount: $50 M
Est. value: $5 billion (Dec 2020)
Dating app Tinder is not your traditional startup. To demonstrate its simple but brilliant idea, the company used a single guy “Matt” as an example. In 10 slides they show how he goes from confusion and love rejection to acceptance when meeting people on this site.
Created in an IAC accelerator program, Tinder was originally known as Match Box.
I hope that I’ve inspired you to take your ideas and turn them into something the whole world can enjoy. Remember, if you need more insights on how to make a perfect pitch deck, I’ve got you covered with this “Do’s and Don’ts” Pitch Deck article. Enjoy!