In the end Six months, I wrote 25 Pitch Deck Teardowns — a popular series of articles in which I review pitch decks in detail, celebrate wins, and gently (and sometimes-not-so) suggest improvements. We’ve seen ships with 74 sliding decks (yes, really), riddled with typos and awful design (but still working surprisingly well), and where the founders didn’t seem to fully understand what their market was. are in.
For every deck I reviewed in my TechCrunch series, I saw dozens of other decks as well. Don’t tell my bosses, but I have a side hustle as a pitching coach, so I see a lot of decks. I’m friends with a lot of cool VCs and accelerators that I look up to. I have a folder with hundreds and hundreds of pitch stacks in progress, from $10,000 angel rounds to multi-billion dollar deals. Sometimes people would send me screenshots of slides (I like to think of those as “unsolicited deck pictures”).
Either way, I’ve been around for so long that I’ve lost count, but I’ve probably seen a few thousand pitch floors in the last few years. Suffice to say I have. Comments About them.
In this article, I want to break down the top 11 (yes, it should have been 11) of the most common mistakes I see in pitch decks, along with several examples of how these mistakes show up.
Oh, and if you want to submit your own deck for pitch deck demolition, you’re in luck: here are the instructions.
Let’s be curious.
Not knowing your audience
Pitch is a story, and stories have an audience. You don’t put a kid in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger cutting his way through various episodes of Kidnapping and The Guardian. Likewise, the story you use to sell to your customers is not the same story you want to get across to your potential investor audience.
You need to understand how VC works; This is non-negotiable. If you don’t, you have no way of knowing how to tell your story, and you don’t really understand what they’re buying. Find that solution for yourself!
Examples of ships that get this right:
Examples of ships that do this wrong:
Not fully understanding your market size
It’s painful to read a pitch deck and realize that the founders have no idea how to target their own market. First of all, your company needs to make sure of two things.
- Can you build a venture-scale business in this market?
- Is this the right team to build that business?
The way to answer the first question is to make sense of the market you’re operating in and how you see the size and scope of that market. If you can’t do that, guess what – you’re proving you’re not a good founder, and you might not be the right team to build the business.
Yes, calculating TAM, SAM, and SOM for your market can be difficult, and sometimes involves guesswork and guesswork, but that’s okay—it’s not about how accurate your numbers are, it’s about how you see and think. are you in. If the numbers are “wrong,” however, you can defend why you thought about them this way, which will tell your investors a lot about the quality of your startup.
