Subscribe now

Business not as usual

Twenty years ago, the entrepreneurial ecosystem made a wise decision: to never again prepare a Business Plan in Word for investment purposes. Those dense pages explaining startups are a thing of the past, to the point that many of you may not even know what I'm talking about.

Since then, the scene has evolved, and slide decks in landscape mode became the new way of showcasing your ideas to the world. When we talk about decks, we must understand that it's not just a single multi-purpose document, but rather a format for sharing information in a synthesized manner where visuals are paramount.

With this in mind, depending on the stage of the company, as well as the point in the fundraising process, we can find different types of decks. In the upcoming newsletters, we will clarify the information to include depending on your startup's maturity. Focusing on the three types of decks associated with different moments in fundraising, we have:

1. Teaser: it's the trailer. Just like for a movie, in this deck, we must tell the trailer of our project. It's sent to initiate conversation with new investors.

2. Pitch Deck: it's the movie. More extensive than the teaser, yet the least verbose of all. It's the presentation that accompanies us at the meeting, never should it overshadow it. It's not necessary to share it with investors.

3. Investor Deck: it's the extended version of the movie with director's commentary. The most extensive and verbose, nothing should be left unsaid, and it includes as many annexes as necessary to expand information. It's recommended to send it after the first meeting where you present the pitch deck.

Think outside the slide

It's clear that building all three decks helps a lot if we want to secure funding and maintain an organized process. But to have them, we need to build them, and the first decision we face is: which tool to use. Focusing on presentation software, we have a wide range of options to choose from:

• PowerPoint: for me, the champion of champions, it’s a comprehensive tool with all the functionalities to keep your creativity unlimited. If you're not an expert, the learning curve can be somewhat slow.

• Google Slides: a clear copycat attempt at PowerPoint, with limitations in functionalities. But it's wonderful to work simultaneously with your team.

• Canva: the favorite of the new generations. Although it has even fewer functionalities than Google Slides, its templates and easy access to graphic resources make it an ideal candidate for those in a hurry.

• Slidebean: they started as a consulting firm for decks and transferred their knowledge to their own tool that automates the design process. Very useful for making a good deck without having to worry about margins or layouts.

• Tome: an AI-native presentation tool that comes to make the building process as efficient as possible. An option for early adopters that doesn't disappoint..

In my experience, the ideal workflow is to build an "ugly deck" in Google Slides, or another collaborative tool, so that the entire team can easily contribute. And as that raw version progresses, the person on the team with the most design skills, along with the one who will present the deck (usually the CEO), builds the final deck in their favorite tool.

P.S. I haven't included Prezi because I believe it doesn't offer any advantage when it comes to building decks (PowerPoint with its "zoom" functionality already allows you to create exactly the same effects).

Data-ta-dah

In line with the comments in the previous section, I have doubts about the preferred software for building decks by entrepreneurs. After much research, I haven't been able to extract more than some outdated statistics.

On the one hand, back in 2010, Microsoft estimated that more than 30 million presentations were created worldwide every day, which translates to about 400 presentations per second. And according to Visme, nearly 90% are done in PowerPoint.

Regarding startups, Decktopus showed in 2022 that 12% of the presentations created are investment decks. To update and expand on this data, I propose to use the power of the reader-entrepreneur community. Tell me down here what software you usually use to build your decks:

Slide or Hide

To kick off this section, I bring you an example to show you what you can expect. It's the AirBnB deck when they raised €600k in 2009. To be fair, back then the tools were more limited and certain formats weren't even available.

The idea is to choose one of the slides that makes sense to reconstruct and show you the before and after. This time, I've chosen the solution slide where the value proposition was explained.

Although it's a "for fun" presentation I made years ago, I share the complete redesigned deck here. And if that's not enough, I give you more specific feedback in tweet format (tweetback):

If you want your startup's deck to be the next one I analyze in the next newsletter, send it to nacho@slidehackers.com. Let me know which slide you think needs more work and clarify if you want me to share the complete deck (quite a few investors are reading around here).