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The NZ Seed Pitch DeckHelping you get started
http://broadleyspeaking.co.nz/
April 2016
Seed Investment stage is one of those areas where investors are taking some of the biggest risks in investment, and founders are at the critical moments of building the foundations of their company.
We’ve come together to help companies with a Seed Pitch Deck starter, for NZers, made by NZers.
This NZ Seed Pitch Deck guide can be used to ensure there’s a good coverage of information coming from companies pitching to investors, making first interactions that much more efficient and fun.
What is this?
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:This NZ Seed Pitch Deck is a guideline only and not a bible.
How do I use this?These are guidelines only, we encourage you to customise this until your heart's content.
Each slide has a topic as the title, and below that advice on the types of information typically contained on these slides. There’s a bonus “Frank and Honest” section you should take warning from founders past experiences.
We’ve highlighted each slide with one or more icons to show when they should be included:
2minPitch
10minPitch
SendingAs PDF
What’s the issue you’re solving, the pain.
Make them feel it.
The problem
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Is this really a pain? Have you heard someone else outside of your trusted circles talk about this problem to someone else? Have you received weird looks when you’re highlighting a new and undiscovered or unrealised pain?
Quoting someone who has this pain in the target audience is a fantastic way to bring authority to you knowing and understanding it.
Using your own conducted research findings and then backing up with other sources outside of your own is a great way to highlight there is a trend.
An example is other competitors all raising money recently.
Why now?
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:If you don’t have a wall of post-its, or sheets of paper with scribbles showing off your background of thinking behind the opportunity then you must be a subject matter expert. Know your market.
Highlight your mission and vision.
Keep it tight and short.
What do you do, why are you doing it, and who are you doing it for.
The company
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Can all of your founders in the company recite the mission and vision statements of the company? No, well it’s like getting into a relationship and finding out you both have different ideas about having children.
Notes and statistics (facts with sources) on the trends in the market right now, excluding competition.
Now’s not the right time for a competition matrix.
The market
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Don’t have any external marketing sources? You’ve not done your marketing research correctly.
Points of difference around your product from the previous slides trends that explain why your product/service fits the opportunity.
The fit
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Don’t know if your product fits the market? Sell the concept to someone in the industry, and ask them for $10 down payment on you delivering on this product. Don’t have $10 in your pocket? Back to the drawing board.
This is a good place to put in a flow chart of the major parts of your product.
Keep away from the look/feel of your product/service, and more to the functional side of it.
Focus on your specific IP that makes you different in the process.
How it works
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:You should have this collateral already, it’s standard UX testing approach. Don’t know what UX is? Go take the flows of how your product/service works and show it to someone in the target audience.
Highlight the currency that is the value to your company. Is it users, revenue, data?
Highlight how you’re going to acquire that value, and the different channels/opportunities you have to achieve those.
How it builds value
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:If you haven’t tested this business model on ten people who aren’t your friends/family, stop now and go do it.
This is where you need to bring to the front your accolades, what have you achieved so far?
A good example is the amount of value you’ve grown in your product/service, albeit user numbers, revenue, business partnerships, awards
So far
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:If you have nothing, get back to building your business and come back when you’ve achieved something.
Show what you’ve done so far, a demo, some key screenshots but not too many.
What we’ve made
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:If are focusing on building a prototype with barely any look/feel, show this. It doesn’t matter, as long as you have the numbers to back it up from the previous slide around “So far”. It’s a seed round afterall!
Highlight the things your product/service has achieved. This is different to accolades, think features/functionality.
Lay this out on a easy to digest timeline, and highlight past / current / future goals and achievements.
Roadmap
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Don’t plan 5 years ahead, 2 years is enough. This is another sense check on how you have done. If it’s not stellar, go out and achieve things you can with your current restraints and come back.
Highlight from the business model you have previously defined where you are now.
What value is there currently in the company, and break it down to different subscription types, or user types, or data types.
Current value
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:A validated product, is a valuable product. If you’ve got value, even if you need to refine your offering later, you still have value to fall back on to do that. This slide helps when you get asked the value of your company.
Now is the time for a competitor matrix, or do something a bit different.
Some investors are a bit matrixed out and gloss over these graphs.
Competition
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:If you think you know about all of your competitors, you’re delirious.One of the best ways to understand the competition is to pretend to be a potential customer.
People don’t care who you are, they care what you’ve done.
So this is why you should first say what your team members have achieved in the past.
Don’t attribute to one person, because there’s no ‘i’ in team.
Team Achievements
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Don’t have anything to put here? This will put your ability to execute in question without examples of past success in these types of areas of attributes.
Now show the team, and their roles.
Team
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Keep it short, a sentence each.
Show the experience you have with you when you run out of it yourself. Ideal is a person who is a subject matter expert, a governance expert and a future opportunity expert.
Why future opportunity? This shows if you’re wanting to head to another country you already have in place a person who knows that area well.
Advisory Board
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:If you have a formalised board by now, we think you’ve been duped. Question the intent of your board members and the drain they are having on the company and its resources at its current stage.
Use this as a resource, to pre-empt any questions you’ve had in the past and were too detailed to put in the previous slides.
By now you have their attention and they want more information.
Don’t overload, as they can always contact you for things like financial forecasts, technology stack questions, IP/Patents.
Appendix
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Pitch, pitch and pitch. At the end of it you’ll get regular questions that are too heavy to be answered in the first 20 minutes. Put the content of those discussions in here if they have come up regularly enough.
A slide to put the frontline person's contact details of who is responsible for the raise in the company. Name, phone number and email.
Keep it to one person, keep all communication through them. It’s important as you need to keep pace and it slows things down when another party has to get introduced.
Contact
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:All the co-founders want to get in on the capital raise, but it’s shown to drop productivity heavily when they do. Keep it lean and targeted. Weekly catch ups are enough and keep a contact sheet going so people can glance over progress.
We built this because we want to help. We’ve worked with a wide range of investors, founders and advisors. Here are the people who have helped so far:
Drew Broadley ([email protected]): Original author, founder and co-founder of many companies.
Simmonds Stewart ([email protected]): Governance and Capital Raising.
Ruth McDavitt ([email protected]): Experienced advisor and has worked with a lot of businesses.
Thanks
Be Frank and Honest with yourself:Want your name here? Help us improve the document.
BROADLEY/SPEAKING is all about helping founders by bringing together those who have done it, with those who are doing it.
If you’re a founder/co-founder of a company, join our Slack Community and here you can ask the deeper questions:
http://slack.broadleyspeaking.co.nz/
Read what it’s about and the communities Code of Conduct here:https://github.com/broadleyspeaking/community
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