I came across a super neat tool that was featured on Product Hunt yesterday:
Startup Pitch Decks (from real companies)
In this (non-representative) sample set are 5 Seed decks, 5 Series A, 3 Series B, and 1 Series C & D… = 15 examples…attach.io
“The Best Startup Pitch Decks”
What a cool idea. Basically, it’s a curation of early pitch decks from some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
What can we learn from these pitch decks?
1. Solve A Problem
If you go through all of the powerpoints, you’ll find a few commonalities. The first being a clear emphasis on a problem being solved. I think the biggest consistency among really strong companies that they solve something people care about.
Or as YC would put it:
They build something that people want.
Why is this super important ?
It’s getting easier and easier to be distracted with things you may want or thins you think people want. You never really know what people want until you ask them. Going about asking them in a particular way is a whole nother problem that perhaps I can think into later, because there is a science to it.
Anyways — conclusion here: solve a problem people really care about, that way you’ll be really helping someone. People like help.
2. Simplicity
Another big trait shared by many of these presentations is simplicity. To avoid irony, I’ll leave it at this:
Be Direct. Be Concise. Be Straightforward.
A pig in makeup is still a pig.
3. Room to Grow
You may not recognize some of these presentations or believe that this is how some of these companies started.
It’s probably because the trajectory of many or any of these companies was linear.
It was full of ups AND downs.
People probably hated their presentations. Really smart people passed up on all of these opportunities.
But now, with hindsight bias, we may think that these pitch decks make sense. Hell, I’m writing about it right now.
What does this mean?
- Hindsight bias is real. Naivety is not always a bad thing.
- Ideas are just ideas until you execute them.