How to Make Engineering Interns Effective for Your Startup

Here is Elevate’s Guide to Investor Pitch Deck for your reference.

A pitch deck by definition is a brief presentation, often created using PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi, used to provide your audience with a quick overview of your business plan. When emailing your pitch deck to potential investors make sure you save it as a PDF. This will ensure the investors are seeing exactly what is intended and that there are no formatting issues.

There is NO perfect investment presentation.

NO magic bullet that will get an investor to throw money your way.

NO hidden words or special sauce that always works.

BUT, there is a pretty common list of questions that your presentation needs to answer or address.

Here are 10 key items you should cover in every pitch (and what investors really want to know).

1. Elevator Pitch: Can you communicate what you do and your value proposition concisely?
2. Team: Does this team have the right people at this stage to build a company to a meaningful exit and make a return to the fund?
3. The Problem: Is this a real problem customers will pay to solve or simply an annoyance?
4. Your Solution: Does your solution really make customers happy?
5. Market Size: Is this big enough an idea to build a big business?
6. Competition: Do you really understand why folks buy from you?
7. Business Model:  How are you going to make money?
8. Marketing & Sales: Can this team actually get customers and consistently so?
9. Proprietary Solution/Technology: How do you create a long-term competitive moat?
10. Money/ Milestones: Is the round sized correctly to the next round’s milestones?

Is this a high-growth, venture-backable or capital-efficient organic growth opportunity?

Clearly, there are more questions investors will want you to provide answers to when looking at your presentation, but this gives you an idea or what to expect. VCs see countless pitch decks a year so creating something that stands out and explains the business quickly and efficiently is key.

Elevate has developed the Guide to Investor Pitch template that captures the 10 items discussed above. If you have any questions after you’ve reviewed them, feel free to Contact Us.

*Note that the deck mentioned above and provided template is ideal for sending to potential investors and/or used during in-person meetings with investors where you are hoping to move through their investment process (move into due diligence). The information in the deck gives an investor more detail, which is the point.

There are several different kinds of pitch decks, all of which are used for different purposes. For example, if you are entering a pitch competition or participating in an accelerator program you may be asked to provide a 3-min, 5-min, or 10-min pitch. Those decks are generally shorter and do not cover all 10 topics discussed above. Pay attention to the requirements of the pitch for each program. What they expect will be provided to you when you apply or are accepted to participate. If you don’t know the requirements, don’t hesitate to ask for them.