Almost 5 years ago we released a resource for founders looking for guidance on their seed stage pitch decks. Today, it’s been viewed over 300,000 times on Slideshare, and is still one of the resources we hear positive feedback about from the greater founder community. Our goal as a firm is to always strive to provide updated and top notch resources for founders.

Our original pitch deck template featured 2 versions, “The Show”, which was a more theatrical storytelling version of a pitch, and the “Kitchen Sink Explainer”, which was an explanation of the meat and bones of the appendix. But a lot can change over the course of 5 years, and we’ve seen some trends become industry standard that we don’t particularly love.

Because of this, we wanted to have an honest conversation around the structure of the fundraising deck. We believe that fundraising is about searching for believers not convincing the skeptics, and the best way to succeed in that search is to tell a story rather than a just-the-facts presentation; the goal is to win potential investors over with their hearts as well as their heads.

A deck should be short and sweet, and very flexible for different sorts of audiences or settings. In general, we love to see decks that can be delivered with 10 slides or less but have an in depth appendix that can be referenced if needed.

Rob wrote a post late last year on “Rethinking The Fundraising Deck’, in which he covered the slides he thinks are most important in a pitch and the story you should be telling. We’ve taken this approach and reevaluated our pitch deck template to match this outline.

As some of you may remember, last September we did “Fundraising Month”, where we posted a blog a day on some topic related to fundraising. This year, we are rereleasing a new and improved version of our seed stage pitch deck template.

Throughout the month of September, we will be posting one slide at a time paired with an in depth blog post for each slide. Over the course of September, you can expect posts on the following slides:

  • Team
  • What do you do?
  • Is it working?
  • Why does it matter? (Market)
  • Can you be best in the world? (Product, growth, and financial metrics)
  • Where are you going?
  • What do you want?
  • Appendix

At the end of the month, the updated version of the pitch deck will be released in its entirety and will be available for download.

Subscribe to our email list to get the posts delivered straight to your inbox, and have the final version waiting for you at the end of the month.