06 – PITCH DECK COMPETITION SLIDE – 10 SLIDES TO VC FUNDING SUCCESS

6: Pitch Deck Competition Slide – 10 Slides to VC Funding Success

❏ Today, in Part 6 of my series on 10 Slides to VC Funding Success, I’ll speak on Slide 6: Pitch Deck Competition Slide: 10 Slides to VC Funding Success.

The competition slide is on the sixth page of every successful VC pitch deck. After discussing the trajectory slide, you should immediately describe your competition. When you look at your competition, be honest. You likely have publicly traded large competitors. Offshore competitors may exist. Also, there may be startup competitors. Your competition slide should include all of these.

What is the competition? You’ll be able to learn in this article the answer to this question and what is essential to show on your pitch deck competition slide.

My History:

One of my responsibilities as an executive coach is to assist company founders with creating their investor pitch deck. Throughout my career, I have made and reviewed many investor pitch decks. Upon reflection, some of our team’s investor pitch decks, especially early in my startup career, were “horrible.”

Sometimes, our teams were successful in raising money from investors. Many times, they were not.

I never thought that the content and presentation style of the investor pitch deck might be hurting us. Boy, was I ever wrong? Working with many investors taught me what they want in an investor pitch deck. In my last company, we raised $87 million over rounds A, B, and C.

So, in this series and an upcoming book, I look to share my hard-learned lessons from 20+ years of being an entrepreneur.

The Investor Pitch Deck Series:

In this series, you will learn the order and importance of each of the following pitch deck slides:

1. Cover Slide
2. Problem Slide
3. Market Slide
4. Solution
5. Traction
6. Competition
7. Monetization
8. Financials
9. Team
10. Ask

This 10-part series covers the ten investor pitch deck slides’ ideal content, order, and flow. You’ll have learned how to craft your story into a successful ten-page investor pitch deck that can get you funded!

When an entrepreneur assembles their investor pitch deck, they usually make a hoard of information. Sadly, they often construct a “book” that is 20, 30, or even as much as 80 pages in length! Most of us humans have a concise attention span. Even ad networks know that most ads over 30 seconds don’t work with consumers. For investors, the successful length of an investor pitch deck is about ten pages and 7 to 15 minutes in presentation length.

Pitch Deck Competition Slide – Why Important?

Last week in 5: Pitch Deck Traction Slide—10 Slides to VC Funding Success, I spoke about the Traction Slide and its importance. This week, I’m discussing the competition slide, the sixth page of every presentation, and its significance. After discussing the traction slide, you should immediately describe your competition.

Why? First, you’ve walked your audience through your customer’s behavior, solution, and market for the problem. Their brains are poised to hear who your competition is and why they won’t stop you!

If you’ve followed this series, and your investors are in your market space, they’ll be on the edge of their seats!

Pitch Deck Competition Slide – Content

Please take a look at the example image for this post. What do you see? A table of rows and columns with a title. A feature titles each row in the table. Each column is headed with a logo, beginning with your own, then competitors. This slide is where you highlight the top 5-8 features that you have that your competitors don’t. Your company column is leftmost and has all green checkmarks. Your competitors have some of your product or service features but not all of them. Where they don’t have a crucial element, show a gray dash.

This slide is where you get to “shine” on your depth of understanding of your competition. Who are your competitors? How big are they? What is their market share? Why do customers buy from them.? What are the key features of a customer perspective? Why are these features important to them? How difficult is this feature to manufacture or duplicate? Is the feature patentable? Which competitors are startups? Which are the divisions of multi-billion-dollar companies? Why won’t the competitors simply “clone” you in weeks or months? Does your solution hold the makings of a company, or is it just a product company’s makings?

Pitch Deck Competition Slide – What’s Your Story?

So, what do you think you could say while your pitch deck competition slide is visible? Pick three critical product attributes from the list that highlight the problem you described. Give each feature 15 seconds, and let us know why your customers need this feature.

So many entrepreneurs say, “We don’t have competitors.” No competition is a fatal statement when raising money from experienced investors. You’ve just told them you’re inexperienced and need to know your market. For every problem, there is a solution. Even if you invented teleportation that has competition, the car, plane, or bus—your legs—can get you from A to B, albeit less fast. Your solution likely has existing brute-force solutions, large corporate competitors, and other startups. Know who they are, their market share, and, for other startups, who is funding them and how much. You won’t talk about all these things on this slide, but you could be interrupted and asked these questions. Here’s one example.

“There are seven key features our customers are desperately seeking. Here, our solution satisfies all seven, while our closest competitors only satisfy two. One competitor is a three-year-old startup that has raised USD 12 million. The other is a division of XYZ Corporation. Unlike our competitors, we have both an online customer portal and a channel portal. The competition makes customers and channel partners call them by phone. Our customers estimate annual savings on these two features alone are over USD 100K. Our third key feature is our single-click customer registration via a free, branded iOS and Android app. At one customer, this has already increased product registrations by 2X, allowing product up-sales of over $100K.”. Wow! As an investor, I’m getting even more excited by this startup’s story. Are you?

Presentation: We Can Read or Listen – Not Both!

Most humans can either “read” or “listen” but cannot do both simultaneously. Your Pitch Deck slide presentation exists to support “the story” you will be telling your audience. Does your investor pitch deck have many words, charts with numbers, or distracting images? Then, your audience will switch their brains into “reading mode” and out of “listening mode.” As soon as that happens, you’ve lost your audience and will struggle to get them back to listening to you! To avoid this, use primarily images and as few words as possible, usually in bullet form. So absolutely, positively, NO SENTENCES!

Conclusion

So, I suspect many of you were surprised by the importance of the pitch deck competition slide. If you’re starting to create your first investor presentation, congratulations! You will start on the right foot if you follow my recommendations above. Go back, look at your competition slide, and apply what you’ve learned above. Yo, you can go. If possible, you should wait to read the remainder of the series before you present it again. I can promise you a better reaction from your audience.