Looking to Existing Pitches

Daniel supplied us with some good existing investor pitches to have a look at.

This will give us an idea of what to include, and how to lay out our presentation slides.

After I looked at these, I also went onto Piktochart and had a look at their article showcasing 30 Start-up slide decks.

I found this article to be very useful as there was a broad range of all different pitches – that were all styled quite differently. This gave me lots of ideas for how I will lay out my own slide deck, and I’m excited to start planning.

Pitches from Learning Materials

The first pitch I looked at from the learning materials section of BlackBoard was the Youtube pitch:

Thoughts:

I liked how this pitch was simple yet effective. However, I will say that I thought there was maybe too much text on each slide. Like Daniel mentioned, this will distract the audience as they will try and read the text rather than listening to everything that you have to say outside of what’s on the slides. I understand though, that with a concept like Youtube, it may be hard to make visual aids without making some sort of mock-up to describe what you’re talking about – and that likely won’t happen until after the money is invested.

I then looked at AirBnB:

Thoughts:

The AirBnB pitch was also really interesting to look at. The thing I think they did better than Youtube was that they didn’t overload the slides with text and information.

Their colour scheme was basic, but fit the brand well. They mentioned the problem, their solution, market opportunities and also competitors. They didn’t speak much about the users though, which would be an issue for me if I did the same in my pitch.

The final of the three that I looked at from the learning materials tab was the notch pitch:

The first thing that stood out to me about the notch pitch was the amount of research they did. Especially the amount of user research they did and included. My aim will be to include as much user research as I can into my pitch, along with some user personas.

Just like the Youtube pitch though, notch had a few slides that were filled with text and information. They could have included just a few facts or statistics to act as a visual aid, or even visual cue for their own speech as they went along.

All in all, I found that doing this bit of extra research by looking at other pitches has really helped me decide on how I want my slides to look, and what to (or not to) do with them.