The Magic Ingredients in Startup Pitch Decks, Part II

In my last post, I gave some background about startup pitches and spelled out some of the key ingredients in pitch presentations, and I ended with a little peek into one of those presentations by Spool. In this post, I'll break that presentation down even more to explore why I found it compelling. Spool is a very promising startup with a great pitch presentation/speech about their products. They don't have fancy presentation slides, they don't have very emotional, touching personal stories, and the speaker doesn't really try to be humorous. However, when I saw him pitch, he managed to tell a logical, convincing, and well-organized story about his product in a genuine and succinct way, and that won my trust. So here's a look at how he did it. (I thought the Spool guys handled the Q&A pretty well, too.) I did a bit of transcription so I could easily see the structure and order of the presentation. Spool had a very simple live product demo, so I put together some of the slides and images from it below. (Some of the images are from their website.) That's one big thing for startups: If you have a very cool and working product, the live product demo itself is worth more than a thousand words. You need the slides more when you are showing a concept, but if you have a live demo, then just show the demo. Also, Spool only took a minute or two to explain the technology behind the product. I feel a lot of startups are trying to sell the sophistication of the technology they use — even before going into their idea. The tech side of the product is indeed crucial; however, you need to let your audience buy into your idea first. Get them up to speed with your concept and product, then tell them just a little bit how hard you worked on the technology behind it. That's when they'll really be convinced and start to appreciate the technology.