⛳️ Red Flags in a Pitch Deck

👋 Hi there - it’s Egemen. Thanks for reading Scalable.

Over the past few years, I’ve reviewed hundreds of decks.

VCs receive tens of new decks to review every single week - and they’re constantly looking for prospective deals.

Your pitch deck is essentially the CV of your startup, and you don’t want that to be thrown away into the shadow realm.

Today, I’m sharing some red flags to avoid in your deck, so your chances of success increase.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s in the menu today:

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Avoid These 4 Pitch Killers

This is an area where you can get conflicting inputs from different mentors, so let’s work on an hypothetical:

If you’ve setup a meeting with a potential investor, it means VCs are actively looking invest in your startup.

As a founder, you absolutely need to be sharp, to-the-point, and must provide the right level of detail to build confidence in the audience you speak to.

Here’s an overall rule that you can apply: The KISS Principle.

Yes, keep it simple, stupid. A bit polarizing of a title, but it helps you remember.

This should be the overall theme of your deck.

In accordance with that principle, here are 4 absolute red-flags that you should avoid (or green flags to help you out):

1. Send your deck before the meeting

I can’t emphasize how overlooked this is.

When pitching investors, time is tight—make sure they leave with no unanswered questions and all the info they need to decide.

You’ll get better questions and make more progress when everyone has context upfront.

2. Don’t overwhelm them with complexity

Whether it’s your product roadmap, projections, or financials - make sure your listener gets the key theme of the picture. Do not brain-dump your entire knowledge in an area.

This works because of two reasons:

• you won’t look like overselling (which counter-intuitively makes you look less confident)

• you naturally allow them to be curious and ask questions

3. Never say “there is nothing like this in the market”

Investors often want to see a key differentiating factor and a unique edge about your solution, regardless of your industry.

If you go ahead and boldly claim that you are the only player in the market that solves for this problem, you’ll absolutely run into problems.

• an investor will find an alternative via quick Google search

• you’ll look like you haven’t done proper research about your space

Therefore, it’s always worth mentioning the competition, and why you are uniquely positioned to win in this space, but not them.

4. Keep it short

10-12 slides are the gold standard. Longer pitch decks are often dismissed.
Simple as that.

🎙️ Working on a startup? Grab some time with me.
Tell me what’s going well - or not so well. I’m here to help.

🗺️ Method: A Pony Pitch Deck Exercise

Well, this is an entertaining piece of content, I hope it gives you a couple giggles.

Jokes aside, this is a representation of what not to do in terms of length, but also a good example in explaining an idea and business proposition.

This is whopping 76 slide deck. Try to do this exercise for 5-10 minutes and narrow it down to 10 slides, it’ll be much faster that way.

This’ll help you understand how VCs think.

🙌 I hope this comes in handy for you when you need it - it’s yours!

⚾️ Catch

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