Grabbing Attention With Your Pitch Deck

What do investors look for in a pitch deck? The first way to make your start-up stand out is to make sure you have a unique solution to a problem and show that there's demand in the market you're targeting. Briefly state the problem in a clear statement or a few neat bullet points. Then demonstrate why your product or service is the best way to solve that problem.

Put information about competitors and your target market into graphs or creative graphics. If you're ready to launch your product or service, you've had to do extensive research on the competition and your target market and probably have hundreds of pages of information on this. But since you only have a few slides to present it, it's important to condense and extract only the key takeaways that make your strongest case to investors.

To make a decision on your product or service, investors demand transparent financial projections and goals that demonstrate potential. If you've already started doing business and are doing well, it's helpful to include a slide showing growth over time. Most investors expect to see at least three years of projections for your business and some want up to fives years. How much you expect to raise is an important part to include, but you need to think through the amount carefully.

Finally, social proof builds confidence in the market reception of your product or service. Include your contact information along with your social media accounts, especially if you have a large number of followers and lots of engagement. If your popularity is growing, it's likely that your profits will soon be growing as well.