The 2 reasons investors invest
Every belief someone holds comes with assumptions or supporting evidence.
To believe something new, your assumptions typically need to change. And that happens when you’re presented with enough evidence to change them.
When an investor is sent a deck, they assume the company won’t be worth their time.
So the deck’s job is to get them all the way from that assumption to believing the company is worth a call.
Which can’t happen all at once - there has to be a logical and stepwise progression towards that belief.
But in pitch decks, most founders often like to tell investors what to believe without first telling them why to believe it.
Some examples:
Showing your price before clearly explaining why your product is worth it for customers
Showing financial projections before showing any evidence that customers want your product
Showing financial projections before showing what it takes to get a new customer
Showing your GTM strategy before laying out what’s worked so far
Showing your market size before explaining who your product is actually for
etc.
Founders do things like this because they don’t realize their own assumptions. They have trouble effectively changing other people’s beliefs because their beliefs don’t need to change.
How to fix this in your deck
First as a tactical tip: lead with the value your product creates. If I don’t believe your product is actually a good deal for your customers, every single thing in your deck and story completely falls apart. More on this here.
Once you tighten that up as well as you can, the only place to go is honest scrutiny.
Go through your deck with a mission of tearing it apart. Write down all of the hard questions an investor might ask based on the story you present.
You’ll likely find that certain jumps between topics completely skipped a step, or are out of order.
And while you’re at it, ask someone you trust to do the same thing. If you make it clear you’re open to honest feedback, people are happy to share what raises suspicion or doubt for them.
Once you’ve uncovered that, you can go in and bulletproof your deck by patching up those holes.
This is top of mind as I’ve been doing a bunch of free pitch deck reviews for founders. If you or someone you know could benefit from that type of review, here’s the link.
Best,
Nathan