Pitching a project
The goal when pitching a project in front of a panel is to create in them the desire to know more, and eventually this desire will lead to an investment.
To do it we need to identify the questions the board has in mind, and then answer them. Usually the priorities for a VC are first the team and second the idea, from this fact we can deduce the questions we must answer:
- Who am I? Who is my team? Why are we so great?
- What problem are we solving?
- What is the solution?
- Who has this problem? How will we reach them?
- How we are going to make money? What is the plan?
- Who is our enemies competition?
- How much money do we need?
From this we can build a deck that answers them. The order of the dock really depends on you taste and you way of presenting, the following order is the way I like them.
- Me: I always start introducing myself and a little bit of my track record.
- Project name
- Mission: a short statement of the reason why the project exists.
- The problem: define what is the problem. I make it easy to undersand by using examples.
- The solution: describe in a plain way how we are going to solve it and what are our advantages. Introduce your technology.
- The business model: explain how we are going to make money from the solution.
- The market: go back to the problem and define who has it. The size of the market and what value we do provide them.
- The marketing plan: briefly explain how we will reaching the customers: sales force, advertising effort, guerrilla marketing, partnerships… Whatever we think will help us to sell more.
- The team: I introduce the other members of the managing team and explain why we are the best team to execute this project.
- Status and timeline:a brief report on the current status and the following steps. Including major milestones and financial projections
- Financing requirements: how much money do we need to fulfill the planning.
- Summary and call to action: recapitulate the most important points and focus on the opportunity cost. You want to leave your investors wanting to act now.
Now it’s your turn to modify this deck to fit your project and your style of doing presentations, by the way I recommend presentation zen to learn how to do awesome presentations. But it’s really important to make it beautiful, maybe you want to get help from a designer with it.
