By Adam Heppe, COO and Co-Founder of Uncrowd
Forest Richter, CEO and Co-Founder of Uncrowd, presents an Intro to Pitching. Forest opens the conversation with an overview of how to build an effective pitch deck and how to engage investors. An effective pitch deck is short and sweet and is mostly focused on visuals. An effective pitch deck should be around four minutes and should be less than ten slides. The topics of the slides should include: Team, Problem, Solution, Product, Market, Competition, Model, Ask, Exit, Close. Now, these are not hard rules, but more guidelines of what should be included. When using visuals in a slide deck, make sure they complement, accentuate, and visualize what you are saying. This allows investors to focus on you rather than reading the slides, which ensures that you have their full attention. To engage investors, you should also do your research, know the details behind your slide deck, and be human! When doing your research, you should make sure your business and ask is aligned with the investor's thesis and the typical types of investments they make. Make sure not to catch the investors off guard, by ensuring they know the purpose of a meeting if it's for a pitch. Sometimes, if you are not explicit, investors may think you are looking for advice. Also research the investors, as some have specific concepts or layouts they would like included in a pitch deck. Before getting in front of investors, make sure to practice, practice, practice! Ensure you are aware of the financial models and data included in your pitch and make sure you know what kind of investor you want as part of your business. Lastly, when pitching, authenticity is important. You need to be yourself. Recognizing that investors are human will help you do that.
Here are some additional resources for building a pitch deck:
Example (airbnb): https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/PitchDeckCoach/airbnb-first-pitch-deck-editable
Thank you to all of those who joined our discussion on 10/20. Our next session, will be on 10/28 at 8PM CST: A Fireside Chat with Garnet Heraman.
These two sessions are in collaboration with Nadiyah Johnson and the Milky Way Tech Hub to help founders prepare for her $15,000 pitch competition supported by The P5 Project (Jenna Atkinson) and American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact. The pitch event is on November 17th but the deadline to apply is October 30th. Register at the link below:
http://thep5project.com/pitch/
Please sign up at Uncrowd.io to make sure you are aware of all future webinars and make sure to tell your network if you found this video valuable. If you have any questions, please feel free to direct them to info@uncrowd.io.
Check out the full session below: