I Reviewed 1,000+ Pitch Decks. These Are The Most Common Mistakes

Over the past six months, I've written 25 Pitch Deck Teardowns, a popular series of articles in which I take a deep dive into pitch, empty profits, and gently (and sometimes not so much) suggest improvements. We've seen decks with 74 slides (yes, really), decks full of typos and mired in terrible design (but still working surprisingly well), and decks where the founders don't seem to fully understand what they're selling. located.

For every deck I've reviewed for my TechCrunch series, I've also reviewed dozens of other decks. Don't tell my superiors, but I have a restless side as a court leader and I see a lot of decks because of it. I'm also friends with a bunch of great VCs and accelerators who often send you decks for review. I have a portfolio of hundreds and hundreds of decks, from $10,000 angel rounds to current multi-billion dollar deals. People also sometimes send me screenshots of slides (I like to think of them as "unsolicited snapshots of the deck". Hmm.)

Anyway, I lost count a long time ago, but I must have seen several thousand starter decks over the past few years. Suffice it to say that I have an opinion about them.

In this post, I want to break down 11 (yes, there should have been 11) of the most common mistakes I see in presentations, as well as a few examples of how these errors are caught.

Oh, and if you want to send your deck for scrapping, you're in luck - the instructions are here.

Let's go to.

I don't know my audience

A pitch is a story, and stories have an audience. You wouldn't put a kid in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger watching different parts of Predator. Similarly, the story you use to sell to your clients is not the story you need to tell your audience of fame-seeking investors.

You must understand how VC works; this is non-negotiable. If you don't, it means you don't know how to tell your story and you don't really understand what they are buying. Decide for yourself!

Examples of decks that work well:

Examples of incorrect decks:

I don't quite understand the size of your market

It hurts to read the presentation and realize that the founders have no idea how to expand their market. At the first stage, your company must demonstrate exactly two things:

• Is it possible to create an entrepreneurial business in this market?
• Is this the right team to build this business?

The answer to the first question is to say something smart about the market you are in and how you see the size and trajectory of that market. If you can't do that, guess what: you're proving you're a bad founder and maybe not the right team to build the business.

Yes, calculating TAM, SAM, and SOM for your market can be very complex and sometimes requires guesswork and guesswork, but that's okay: you're not judged by how accurate your numbers are, but by how you visualize and think about the market. about who you are. , you will find. If the numbers are "wrong" but you can explain why you think so, it tells your potential investors a lot about your founder status.

Examples of decks that work well:

Examples of incorrect decks:

Develop your startup: what's in the presentation