Startup Pitch
Last updated
Last updated
In a previous lesson, you have already worked out your 1-minute pitch and learned how to present your idea briefly and concisely.
In startup life, however, it is very often the case that you have the opportunity to support your pitch visually with a presentation. You can show graphics that illustrate your product or highlight the problems and make the presentation more appealing and tangible for the audience.
Unfortunately, a really appealing presentation style is rarely taught and from school and university we often only know very complex PowerPoint slides with lots of text, complicated graphics/tables and small pictures. We do things differently here. The visual presentation you have to create should only support what you are saying ("pictures say more than a thousand words") and not distract from what you are saying. If there is a lot of text on the slide, the audience has a choice: either read the text on the slide or listen to you; and you always want the audience to listen to you.
In this video, Starterkitchen co-founder Matthias has summarized our most important learnings on the topic of pitching:
Task 1: Watch the video "Startup Pitch - Introduction"
You can find a very good description of what you should pay attention to when building the foils on the YC blog: https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-design-a-better-pitch-deck/
To give you an example of such a startup presentation, here is a pitch from the demo day of the 500 Startups Accelerator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUjv1dPGylw
Task 2: Build a simple pitch deck for your short pitch (max. 3 minutes). Also refer to the guide "How to design a better pitch deck" and this slide structure:
Title slide: Name of your startup, slogan in one sentence, what you offer.
Problem slide: Simple textual or visual presentation of the problem (can also be more slides)
Solution slide: Show your product and, if applicable, further graphics on how it works and its benefits
USP: Presentation of your unique selling proposition
Business model: A simple slide on how you earn money or what your product/service costs
Call-to-action/end slide: What do you want from the audience? Add your contact details or website address to the last slide so that the audience can contact you afterwards.
This pitch deck only serves as a visual supplement to your spoken presentation and does not work without this additional information. In other words, it might make sense to have two pitch decks in the early stages of your startup: A very simple one with which you present and a pitch deck with much more text information that you can send to potential customers or interested parties as an information brochure by e-mail.