Avoid These Common VC Pitch Mistakes

The world of startup funding is unstructured and noisy. Snagging a VC's attention is hard. VCs are busy, skeptical creatures, and they've seen it all. To catch their attention and get a meeting, you have to have a strong VC pitch deck that balances length (no more than 10 slides) and amount of info (ticking all the boxes without over-sharing).

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There are many places where things can go wrong with your deck, and I won’t be able to cover everything in one post. However, here some of the most common mistakes that I often see.

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1. A story line that falls off the track.

You have only a few precious minutes to grab an investor's attention and your deck needs to be tight and punchy. I see many decks start strong with the target audience, the pain point, the solution and the opportunity but then sidetrack to discuss long term (as in 10-years down the line) opportunities.

At that point the pitch train goes off the tracks. 🙅‍♂️ ⚠

Investors, especially early stage investors, want to FIRST understand the immediate opportunity, how you're going to move from 0 to 1 and how your next round is going to look like. They can't process anything else before they bought into the short term plan.

Here’s a checklist of slides that are a must-have for your pitch deck.

2. Failing to validate through data.

Too often founders expect investors to to fall in love with the opportunity based on big picture thinking and overall vision (i.e. the same way that founders do). As a founder, you need to remember that while you are 100% consumed with your startup 24/7, investors are spread thin over lots of investment opportunities, each has the potential to become big. For them, the difference isn’t in the potential but in the likelihood of that potential becoming a reality.

Hence, investors tend to be skeptical in nature and look for “signs of reality”.

The best way to alleviate this skepticism is through data. There’s a huge difference between an idea and a bunch of assumptions and statements, and actual in-market results.

Make sure to include data points that validate the market trends, the pain point, customer expectations, perceptions, ,etc. as well data points around the value and why your solution is 10x better than current options.

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3. Ignoring the sales funnel

‍It's a known that commercialization (aka go-to-market) is harder than product development. FACT - most early stage companies go bust because they fail to drive traction.

Why? That’s because with product development, you're dependent only on yourself. You plan, execute and release the product. Job done. In GTM, you are trying to drive actions that are supposed to be performed by other people, the users and customers. You are dependent on others. You’ll need to convince, move them, change behavior, etc. ... but in the end, you have only partial control over things.

For that reason, investors want to see sales data and the sales funnel is absolutely a critical part of it. However, it's usually unaddressed by the founders.

Even if you don’t have a clear funnel yet, any data around pipeline, funnel stages, velocity, etc can make a big difference. It reassures the investor that the founders understand the importance of commercialization, that they are focused on it and that they know how to execute it.

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As a final word, avoiding the pitfalls above will not guarantee a check from investors, but for sure it will separate you from the rest and guarantee some interest. Good luck.