If you need to raise funding from a VC for your startup, the initial step is to craft a pitch deck. An investor pitch deck is a brief presentation that helps investors to understand your business. It should necessarily include your product benefits, your business model, your monetization strategy, introduction to your team, and your plan to acquire users.
A pitch deck is a vital fundraising tool that helps you get investor attention - be it just $50,000, $500,000, or a whopping $50 million.
Pitch decks usually run for fifteen to twenty slides.
And although presentations are a short, concise form of your entire story, creating one isn't an easy task. It's another thing if you've done it before. But if it's your first time, and you're a first-time entrepreneur, it can prove to be incredibly daunting.
To help you with this daunting task, we at Pitch Deck have taken cues from top startups who've raised money from angel investors and VCs with effective pitch decks and went ahead with redesigning them. While you can check out these redesigned pitch decks for inspiration, you can also use these templates as a base for your cake.
“ We want everyone to have a great experience building their pitch decks — and with Pitch Deck they get just that”
YouTube, today, is anyone's go-to platform for education, entertainment, and business.
But back in February 2005, YouTube was just a video-sharing website created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim–all ex-PayPal.
The idea is said to have been born at a dinner party–a year before the official launch- in San Francisco. It is said that Karim's idea for YouTube was inspired by two events–Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, and the devastating Tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
The first video that was uploaded was that from Karim himself, named, "Me at the Zoo."
Their breakthrough video that hit more than a million views was that of a Nike ad.
Post this, in November, they landed their first-ever funding ( we will discuss the slides from the legendary YouTube pitch deck later on in the article) of $3.5 million from Sequoia Capital. YouTube officially launched out of Beta on December 15, 2005. At the same time, Google realized that this small company with very little revenue is proliferating with user adoption, and is growing much faster than Google video. Soon after, in 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65B. The rest is history.
Here, we'll look into the YouTube pitch deck that the founders used to raise their initial fund round with Sequoia Capital. The deck has everything why the founders even thought of YouTube. The YouTube pitch deck is very basic - it has only ten slides.
Cover Slide
Cover slides in a pitch deck should stick to the very basics. The YouTube pitch deck does precisely that.
The company purpose
In this slide, the YouTube pitch deck introduces the audience to the driving force that enables the company to define its brand and culture. 'Share, Browse, and Upload' are the three mantras by which YouTube reflects its purpose in the market.
Problems Slide
This slide from the YouTube pitch deck helps identify the existing problems in the market and also provides a holistic view of the specific pain points faced by prospects. It's essential to be as transparent as possible in this slide so that you can get buy-in as quickly as possible. To prove relevance, your problem statement should answer two questions: what is the problem and why is this problem worth my attention. So, in the YouTube pitch deck, once the purpose is conveyed, YouTube jumps to the persistent limitations that have been holding back the enjoyable user experience. The slide uses a textual approach to convey the problems, as opposed to the conventional diagrammatic approach.
Solution
This slide in your pitch deck must outline the solution to the problem that you addressed in the previous slide. Once the problem statement is established, it is inevitable to introduce the solution to keep the flow intact, and that is precisely what the YouTube pitch deck has done. Here, we see the precise textual solution to the problems stated in the previous slide
Market
The Market Size, also referred to as Total Addressable Market (TAM), is the overall revenue opportunity that is achievable by a startup, product, or service if 100% market share was achieved. The calculation of market size is essential for startups and existing businesses because it helps estimate the effort and funding required to allow them to prioritize specific products, customer segments, and business opportunities. In this slide, the YouTube pitch deck talks about the untapped opportunities available in the market.
Competitive landscape
Introducing the audience to the major competitors in the market is the sole purpose of this slide. Competitors mentioned in this slide will help investors gather a better view of what you're going up against, the resources required, and the probability of success. The YouTube pitch deck in this slide shifts the perspective of the investors to its major competitors in the market. The names listed in this slide will help investors get a better idea about your company's standards. For instance, Vimeo and Google are well-known names in the online streaming industry.
Product Development
This slide in the YouTube pitch deck explains the current state of the product, the features in the pipeline, and their future plans to scale the product.
Sales and distribution
Getting together a plan to make sales starts with figuring out how to acquire customers for your products and services is what a GTM slide in a pitch deck will contain. There are several ways that you can go about this, and it takes much planning before you begin marketing, advertising, and targeting customers that you think will stick with the company. This slide from the YouTube pitch Deck talks about the various channels used by YouTube to generate revenue. With an advanced platform for advertising and distribution, YouTube is capable of making revenue through multiple sources.
The Team
The team slide typically contains a photo, designation, and one-liners for the significant professionals in the company. The YouTube pitch deck here follows the same norm. Moreover, the one-liner description should provide relevant information that can invoke a sense of security among investors.
.png)
.png)
