Blog

What is the primary goal of a pitch deck in the startup world?: I’ve often asked this question. Sometimes the pitchdeck feels like a fancy marketing pitch and you have to impress these investors to win them over. As shallow as it feels, I think a pitchdeck is one of the most important things in the early stages of a startup.

What is the primary goal of a pitch deck in the startup world?

We tried to explore this for the requirements of a startup pitchdeck . Although there’s no single way to do this, the pitchdeck must convey a few elements that talk about the ability of your business idea. From my perspective, the answer to the question – What is the primary goal of a pitch deck in the startup world? is to show awareness about your vision, plan and clarity of thinking.

Ultimately a pitchdeck conveys the same information as a business plan. Fundamentally, they both help you think about the strategy and vision of your business. The other purposes of a pitchdeck are:

Define market opportunity

Show the audience that you’ve done your research. A fundamental requirement of a startup is the ability to scale. An investor will want to know the scalability of your startup idea. In essence, higher scalability is more attractive to an investor.

Express understanding of the problem

Demonstrates clearly the ability to understand the problem in depth. The main point in a pitch deck is to identify that you clearly understand the problem. Not only this, but you must also be able to show that this problem is found across many users so that the solution can be scaled

Define your USP

This answers the question of how you’re special and how you will win. Ultimately, the investors will sense check your plan and ability based on how uniquely capable you are to provide a great return on investment. A good USP helps create a market differentiation and showcase your strengths.

Test and validate market appetite

A good pitch deck can help you identify the response level of the market, its readiness. You can use this pitch deck to ask people what they think about the solution, gather feedback and identify if there’s a problem space you might be missing. You can also use this to sense check your pricing and business model

Return on Investment, scalability

I will leave you with this last point – the main purpose of a pitchdeck is often to raise funds from an investor. This should include how you’ll use these funds to grow, scale and provide a great return on investment.

References:

How to build a seed round pitchdeck – https://www.ycombinator.com/library/2u-how-to-build-your-seed-round-pitch-deck

Pitch deck examples: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pitch-deck-examples-from-successful-startups-2018-jose-caya-cayasso/