General Tips

1. General Tips This is your final presentation, so we are expecting more effort than usual in creating a quality presentation. While we recommend the following slides, this is just a template. You absolutely must change and adapt the slides and flow to feel comfortable in telling your own story. You should also change backgrounds, fonts and graphics to suit your team’s story. You will be telling your story when presenting in person. Don’t write everything on the slides, or your presenter role will be useless. Use the slides as support for your passionate conversation. A professional and coherent design is a must, but don’t go overboard. People should not get distracted by the style – that is not the goal. Use relatively large fonts. The audience might be viewing from far away. Make an effort to write shorter focused statements with what’s really important.

2. Team Name Tagline if you have one While it isn’t traditional for a pitch deck, please insert the pictures of your team. Catch the audience’s attention: You can have a great, imaginative and catchy image or full-size background image.

3. Problem to Solve • One simple and clear statement to explain what you do. Explain the problem (pain) you solve or the gain you create. • We help [customer group] • achieve better [benefit], • thanks to [key ingredient of our solution]. • or • Every year [some terrible waste happens]. • With [our smart idea], • [customer group] can [reap a benefit]. • Common mistakes: • Write a long paragraph, or even worse several paragraphs. • Spend 5 minutes on this slide. This is just an appetizer to set the stage.

4. Market Size & Potential This slide should quantify the magnitude of the problem, which should be stated in some combination of number of potential customers, dollars spent on competitive products, procedures or tasks performed, economic value lost through lack of solution, or number of products sold that would incorporate or be replaced by your technology. Use one or two clearly readable charts if they help make your point, but not more than two charts. Reference credible third party sources (market research, annual reports, or serious news sources). Add any important strategic pattern about this market: emerging/mature, consolidated/fragmented, local/global, or growth rate. Common mistake: Invent a huge global market size that is not one addressable market, but the sum of many. If you’re selling children’s car seats, your market is not car owners, but parents who own cars.

5. Lessons Learned Total Interviews Completed: ___ Look at your interviews in aggregate. What have you learned about your customer segment? What key features do your customers have in common? What did your customers tell you about their problems? Draw out the overarching points and feedback you heard over and over. If it fits your needs include a chart or quantified data, i.e. 70% of customers said they have this specific problem or need this feature. Include a direct customer quote if it is illustrative of what you learned. Make sure to highlight any unexpected feedback or any customers whose feedback greatly differed from others.

6. Our Solution • This is your slide for a picture, CAD drawing or graphic showing what your Minimum Viable Product it likely to look like. As an alternative, you can prepare a graphic chart showing how the different users interact with the solution. You can explain verbally the different interaction flows and how it works. • Also, list no more than 3 main items competitive advantages based on the customer needs you documented. Why 3? Because of the « Rule of Three » (Google it). 3 sticks. 4 is too much. If you have one « unfair » or « sustainable » competitive advantage, better to focus on this one than diluting its value with 3-4 weaker claims. • Common mistake: Show technical architecture details. We need to understand what your users can do with your solution, not what’s inside the box.

7. Business model canvas Explain what you learned in the program. What customers did you talk to? How did your value proposition change?

8. Next Steps • List 2-5 steps you plan to take within the next 6 months to advance your product, process or service. Will you continue customer interviews, pursue a particular source of funding, go to a conference to meet customers, or run customer-specific tests on your prototype? Let us know what’s next and how the I-Corps administrators and network can help.

9. And… the best tip ever • Once done, go back and change all of your slides titles. • Instead of what the slide is about, write WHAT IS THE KEY MESSAGE you want to get across. Some examples: • Competition > « Fragmented non-tech incumbents » • Market size > « An addressable market of $3B » • Execution so far > « Strong growth demonstrated » • Business model > « 84% gross margin » • The new title should make the key messages clearly stand out. • Try copying just your slide titles on a separate document. You should still get the story from the titles, and the key messages people should remember when walking out.

10. Other Resources www.pitchenvy.com - large gallery of presumably real decks Slideshare - tons of shared decks Get inspired with Facebook’s first sales deck… not bad but you can do better! http://www.digiday.com/platforms/how-eduardo-saverin-sold-facebook-ads-in-2004/