This week, instead of writing a massive pitch deck guide, I decided to give you 20 tips to instantly upgrade your pitch deck.
I like simple things, so it won’t take you days to implement them. Each one should take just a few minutes.
Let’s go:
1. Turn your slide titles into one-liner hooks
Your slide title is the most important real estate on your slide. Use it as such.
It should be a one-liner which delivers a message on it’s own and makes the investor want to read more.
So your titles go:
from “Problem”, to “E-commerce brands lose €320k/year to abandoned checkouts”
from “Traction”, to “Our revenue has grown 4x in the last 12 months”
from “Go-To-Market”, to “We can reach 80% of our buyers through three scalable channels”
And so on.
2. Run the headline-only test
After you’ve done the above upgrade, do the following:
Read only your slide titles top to bottom, ignoring all body content. They should form a complete, coherent story by themselves. That’s exactly what you want.
3. Add labels on each slide
Team, Problem, Solution - we already agreed that these have no place in the slide titles. Instead position them with a small font (10pt) in any of the upper corners - left or right.
Investors skim through your deck and such labels help them get around easier and faster. It’s more brain-friendly.
4. For the design use a Canva/Google Slides template
When it comes to the visual part of your pitch deck - I know it could be challenging without a designer. But do not, worry - we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Canva has a number of free design templates to use.
So does Google Slides - Create a new Google Slides document - Click “Templates” in the right tools panel - Browse through and choose your template.
5. Highlight the important numbers
Any metric worth showing and highlighting should become more visible.
Make it with a bigger font 60+pt. "$90K+" enormous, "Sales Per Month" tiny as a label beneath it.
Two quick examples for you:
6. Leave only one idea per slide
Complex slides with many ideas is the easiest way to lose investors.
So, the rule here is: If a slide needs two headlines, it should become two slides.
Don’t try to say too much all at once.
7. Remove any AI-generated photos
“AI-generated” already has a negative connotation to it. So any photos which have been generated through AI gotta go. Seeing this automatically triggers a flag in the investor’s head that many other things could also be AI-generated and sloppy.
This is valid, unless you’re using the latest and greatest AI-image models and they are indistinguishable from real ones.
