Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Therefore I decided to share the pitch deck I used to raise the my last
at my company RegioHelden in 2014. I will explain the thinking & learn-
ings behind the slides. The pitch deck evolved over ~3 years from 2011
(%rst 1 million raised) to 2014 (last round before exit in 2015). At the
time I was in my early twenties, which I usually never told the investors ;-
)
I probably used the deck in ~50–70 meetings and ended up raising 10m
in total from 6 investors over 3 rounds. The VCs were mostly from
Germany and were a mix of institutional investors, business angels and
public institutions/banks. I used a very similar deck when I sold the com-
pany later.
Who are you going to pitch to? Photo by Christian Dubovan on Unsplash
1. be easy to understand,
3. create trust.
• As you will see, my pitch deck doesn’t look very polished design-
wise. That actually never caused a problem and nowadays as an in-
vestor I’m rather suspicious when I receive a perfectly-designed
agency-like pitch deck. I ask myself: Does the founder have the right
priorities?
• I think a good pitch deck (just like a good MVP) is the result of lots
of feedback and iteration. I created a new powerpoint deck for
every appointment and changed the order & messages of the slides
a lot in the beginning.
8. Team
Disclaimer:
Language — the slides of the deck are in German, but I think the speci:c con-
tent is not as important as the structure and the general learnings and the
narrative.
Numbers — I kept all the numbers in the slides. However, since the deck is
around 4 years old and we evolved the business model the numbers/KPIs are
outdated.
So here we go…
It’s best to use hard metrics like revenues if possible. If revenues are not
growing in this way I would use some other, easy-to-understand metric
that shows monthly progress.
Slide 13: Role models
The next question people would usually have was: “How big can this
business get?”. Of course it was hard to say, but the US market gave us
some perspective. At the point where I pitched our main competitor/role
model ReachLocal was doing 500m in revenues in the US. That created
trust and showed investors a massive opportunity.
Slide 14: Market dynamics
This slide showed the general macro-market dynamic. In our case it
explained that there was a big disproportion in online usage vs. online
spendings for SMB marketing dollars. Of course everybody easily under-
stood, that the dollars would move from oqine (YellowPages, newspa-
pers etc.) to online (Google etc.) in the next couple of years.
a) we exactly know the breakdown of our CAC and CLV. This creates
trust.
c) there is still room for improvement (lower CAC through scale and in-
crease CLV through upsells and/or erciency gains). This is a good dis-
cussion to have with investors because they usually develop some ideas
of their own to improve the business (and therefore psychologically
switch to my side).
If I could only pick 2 slides to use for my next pitch I would use
“Traction” and “Unit Economics”. It’s really strange to see that in many
decks I receive the unit economics are just missing. Very bad sign in my
opinion. Do your homework!
By the way: See how the right box has higher contrast and is bigger than the
left one? I think it’s usually much easier to understand the message if the
slide visually supports the content.
Interestingly the company that I actually sold to is not even on the list and
we ended up buying one of the US competitors (ReachLocal) later. This
shows that the future is never predictable but it still makes lots of sense
to think about the options and one’s own positioning.
Slide 20: The team
Some founders put this slide upfront but I liked it better at the end. A
vulnerability I always had was being a solo-founder and your (between
22–25 years old when I raised). I usually didn’t tell that to the investors ;-
) Still, I tried to ooset it by showing our board members/advisors and
COO to create trust. In earlier versions of the slide I also had pro%les of
some of the key employees there.
Look at all the ties on the slide. It showed that were really serious ;)
Slide 21: Cap table
This was rather a backup slide if an investor wanted to see the cap table.
It usually did not come up as a question but was still good to have. The
general messages was that I as a founder owned enough shares to be
incentivised enough.
. . .
Backup slides
What I generally did in longer pitch sessions or second meetings was to
put more information in the backup to answer speci%c questions. In due
diligences I sometimes had decks with >150 additional slides on
things like:
• Vision/mission slides
• Goals / OKRs
• Product margins
• Competitive environment
• IT/feature roadmaps
• Process documentations
Yeah… this is a lot of work. Get over it and start building your perfect
pitch deck! :-)
. . .
. . .
• 30 Legendary Startup Pitch Decks And What You Can Learn From
Them
• 35 Best Pitch Decks From 2017 That Investors Are Talking About
• Bekannte Pitch Decks, die sich jeder einmal ansehen sollte (German
website but mostly english decks).