Welcome to the Business Pipeline!
My Pitch: Business Cards / Pitch Deck
The first steps for your startup are clear: You have an idea, you are founding your company, you are building your product and you need a pitch deck. Why? As long as you want to raise capital or convince business partners to work with you, a pitch deck is essential. It gives an investor insight into your business. So most startups are doing it the same way – even huge companies like Facebook or Google started with a pitch deck.
Your pitch deck is your business card
By definition, a pitch deck is a short presentation of your business plan. All key elements of your business should be included in it: These range from the purpose of your company to the business model and your team. However, the pitch deck serves an even more important purpose: From an investor’s perspective, it is your business card. It is the key to being invited by a potential investor to pitch your presentation.
Sometimes startups don’t want to send pitch decks to investors or business angels and would rather talk on the phone about their business case instead. This is understandable, as hardly any founder wants to share confidential information about his “baby” with someone he hasn’t met in person yet. But that’s not how things work.
Invest in your pitch deck!
Most Business Angels or Venture Capitals don’t like time-consuming chit-chat on the phone. They need something to help them judge quickly, whether your startup fits their investment focus or not. Thus investors prefer to read through pitch decks to decide within minutes if your business case is interesting.
The first impression counts: Relevant information has to be well structured and a professional layout helps to stand out from the crowd (Links to an external site.). Investor Christoph Janz, MP at Point Nine Capita, says: “I know that most other VCs feel the same about this, so if you want to raise money, spending time on producing a great pitch deck is time well spent.”
Benefits for the startup
The reality, however, is pretty tough – a lot of startups are muddling through their content in the last seconds. Slides contain too much information or important KPIs are missing. Finding out which information is important needs intensive work and is a time-consuming operation for the investor or business angel. This often results in a pitch deck most likely ending up in the dust bin.
What a pity! However, this can be avoided with a professional pitch deck: Investing time into a great pitch desk forces the founder to systematically think through his business model. Loopholes and sources of defects can be eliminated and the package can be optimized before bringing the business model to the market.
The preparation section provides you with the elements needed to complete the requirements.
The following steps must be completed to receive the associated points for each step.
Any item marked with a * must be completed to receive a score above 0.