Every month, my team and I go through 250 to 300 investor decks. Even while a tiny number of entrepreneurs have begun to experiment with Notion memos as a replacement for pitch decks, most investors will still demand a traditional slide presentation. The slides below are ones that we see entrepreneurs struggle with on a regular basis. What are the most prevalent causes for these slides not working?
- Founders have not quite figured out how to deal with that part of their company.
- The founder has no idea what the PowerPoint implies or what the investor expects it to say.
What does it need to say, How are you going to treble your sales in a year? A successful go-to-market PowerPoint should demonstrate that the firm knows why it is growing and what it has to do to keep expanding. The go-to-market slide is the most important in most decks and at most phases of a company. Most businesses pitch investors once they have gained some traction, so it is reasonable to anticipate that the majority of the funds will be used to accelerate expansion.
In addition, depending on the stage of the business, “go-to-market” should treat as a segment rather than a single slide. As a rule, the later the firm is in its development, the longer and more thorough this part gets. The go-to-market segment of the pitch deck that raised UpKeep’s Series B round was roughly seven slides long.
If your pitch deck is well structured, the go-to-market slide, which explains how the firm plans to use its money, will most likely be the first slide investors see. We typically place go-to-market slides after the business model presentation but before the market size slide, so you can get right into expansion after the investor has a good understanding of how you earn money (and before touching on the market potential). Airbnb’s 2009 presentation deck (the one they used for YC Demo Day) contains one of my favorite go-to-market slides:
Airbnb has identified three important go-to-market methods at this point (seed stage): “Targeting festivals and events” demonstrates a thorough awareness of the audience eager to “try out” their product. “Partnerships with established booking providers,” a method of expansion that is still employed today. It is Craigslist “dual posting function.” Airbnb had created a basic bot at the time that automatically submitted all new Airbnb listings on Craigslist. All of their posts included a link to their website.
The following are some of the most typical errors I notice on go-to-market slides: Using overly generic growth tactics: Founders just develop a list of five to six growth channels they want to test without going into detail about what they’re doing there or how they vary from their competition.
