PITCH DECK TOOLBOX: 10 slides that are essential for landing investments, pulled from Airbnb, Postma
- Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule for presentations specifies that your deck should have no more than ten slides, run for 20 minutes, and have a minimum text size of 30 points.
- "The purpose of a pitch is to stimulate interest," he writes. "Your objective is to generate enough interest to get a second meeting."
- With Kawasaki's rule in mind, Business Insider reviewed the dozens of successful startup pitches we have published previously to highlight real-world examples of the essential info every entrepreneur needs in a pitch deck.
- Continue reading to see how startups like Uber and Airbnb first got investors interested in their ideas.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Title and contact info
Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann used this pithy and clever slide to introduce his concept for the low-cost courier service that transformed into one of the top four food delivery services in the US and agreed to be purchased by Uber for $2.65 billion in July.
His title slide works like a business card, and piques interest in the problem his startup is looking to solve without a lot of distractions.
Market opportunity
Pradeep Sindhu's 2015 deck for his infrastructure startup Fungible caught the eyes of some of Silicon Valley's biggest investors – and the cocktail-napkin aesthetic certainly gives a sense of being in on the start of a big idea.
"The fact that my slides are hand drawn became a theme," Sindhu told Business Insider. "It's not that I wanted to stand out, but it's just how I like to work. I don't like PowerPoint because it constraints you. Being able to draw by hand allows me to be much more expressive."
Value proposition
Data analytics is an especially competitive industry, so Thinknum's Chief Growth Officer Marta Lopata led the creation of a comic book called "Quest for Alpha" to stand out with investors.
"When you are working at a startup, you are constantly trying to find the straight line in the chaos, and the artistic process is very similar," Lopata said. "They're both about how you get to that clear vision when you have all these crazy things happening around you."
Even so, the book gives an enticing peek at the company, and has helped it land some $12.6 million in total venture capital, according to Pitchbook data.
Why is your idea special?
Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley's described his startup as "part friend-finder, part social city-guide, part social-game."
"Decks don't have to be super formal," Crowley told Business Insider in 2009. "It's okay to stray from the 'business school 10-slide pitch deck template."
The deck shows how Foursquare was thinking about mobile before apps were really a thing, and demonstrates how their platform is positioned to benefit a range of stakeholders.
Business model
Airbnb started off as an air mattress rental company, and grew to a valuation of $31 billion last year. (That figure has slid significantly from the high, in part due to the coronavirus pandemic).
This slide makes it very clear how Airbnb made money, which showed investors how founders Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia were thinking about revenues from day one, unlike many audience-oriented startups.
Customer acquisition strategy
Signpost founder and CEO Stuart Wall got the idea for his startup after having a bad experience trying to market his sister's pottery business on Google.
This slide clearly lays out how the company builds its client base of small and mid-sized businesses, from data acquisition to sales distribution.
Competition
Fivetran is a data-analytics startup that centralizes companies' data in a single dashboard, and investors are going all in on the hot space.
In such a competitive industry, it's especially important that founders distinguish themselves from the competition in order to land with investing heavyweights – Andreessen Horowitz in this case.
Leadership team
When Andrew Parker was building the pitch deck for his elder care startup Papa, he wanted to highlight the C-suite's industry experience. For example, he could tell investors how Papa's executive vice president of client success Leslie Courtney applies her experience from BlueCross BlueShield.
Papa, which has raised a total of $31 million, pairs older adults with caregivers who can provide technology lessons, companionship, or transportation. The Miami-based business is one of many aiming to find solutions for Baby Boomers, who are the second-largest living adult generation, according to the population estimates by the Census Bureau.
Projections
Before Uber got so big that its name became a verb, co-founder Garrett Camp outlined the dream of a "next generation car service" in a brief presentation on his computer.
The three potential outcomes Camp outlined seem quaint after the Uber's dominant decade, with 2019 revenues of more than $4 billion. The company has yet to post a profitable year however, and the days of top-line growth at any cost may be coming to an end.
Timeline
Austin-based digital marketing startup OutboundEngine provides tools and services for small and medium-sized businesses, and used this deck to land $14 million in new funding. This slide shows where the business is in its larger journey, with a clear summary of where it came from and a preview of what's to come.
"We're not in the business of constantly adding shiny blinky things because they're cool and everybody else is selling them," said CEO Marc Pickren. "We're in the business of doing the things that work and doing them consistently and reliably every single month."
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonyzscClZJ6wkaK9rbHSZqafZaSdsm59j2aqpaGUmsBusc2tqZ6oopq7psHRrGSnnZWZerG105yfZpyVmLhufo9rZ2Zv