7 best startup pitch decks: design overview and main learnings
Before you create any pitch presentation, you need to have those 8-10 specific slides. And if you want to interest or intrigue top investors or venture capitalists, you should consider pitch deck examples from successful startups. Indeed, to create winning slides, you should learn from the top ones to get investors on board and scale your growth.
Successful pitch decks demonstrate the main aspects of your project in a visually appealing way. Such decks include only concise and relevant pitch slides like a problem, market, team, etc. If you need help with slide design, it is always better to address a professional presentation design agency to include all necessary and beautifully-designed slides.
Now, let’s look at the best startup pitch decks for you to inspire.
Spotify
Spotify is a Swedish company most of you should have heard of or used. But how did it become so popular? Due to its one of the best pitch decks created by Spotify’s early developer Jon Aslund. The Spotify presentation includes 70 slides, but most have one image, phrase or sentence added. Still, it depicts the product’s value proposition, the team’s technical skills, and the company’s traction.
Key takeaways from the Spotify pitch deck:
- Brief ideas with bold text design create the best decks.
- A stylish dark background design with white text or simplicity will always prevail.
- Investors enjoy crushing stats and get persuaded by traction slides that stand out.
- Incredibly powerful story due to millions of users and millions of their playlists.
As a result, they’ve raised a total of $2.1B in funding over 20 rounds.
Uber
Everyone knows Uber. But a few know why their pitch deck is a fantastic example of a perfectly defined problem & solution combination. Key takeaways from the Uber pitch deck:
- Clear structure from 5 sections: cover, problem/solution, product, market, and traction.
- Each slide touches on one specific topic with the right amount of information.
- A multi-billion $ idea with weak competitors and additional slides to explain newness.
When looking at the presentation, remember it was 2008, so the pitch deck design should differ in 2022. For example, we’d add step-by-step diagrams to show every piece of functionality since there was no app yet to depict it.
Airbnb
AirBed&Breakfast pitch has become one the most addressed references for startups, being the best-designed pitch deck. Key takeaways for the Airbnb pitch deck:
- The problem slide includes 3 clear and undebatable statements.
- Slides have clear headlines and explanations for everybody unfamiliar with the market.
- Presentation avoids tech jargon.
- The business slide assumes an ambitious piece of the travel niche.
- Actual (not made-up) numbers help to evaluate business dimensions.
Thus, Airbnb’s deck is short and to the point, depicting the startup picture perfectly. No wonder it raised $500K in 2009, being a unicorn company.
Their pitch looks like a media kit with product descriptions, growth metrics, and services used to sell ads. The presentation included solid numbers to talk to potential investors with exact facts, which they always prefer over long life stories. For example, the deck included slides like user engagement, market size, and traffic.
And this one of the most successful pitch decks helped Zuckerberg to get $500.000 from the venture capitalist.
Square
Square is a company that offers solutions for business-from secure credit card processing via a dongle. Their pitch deck starts with social proof since they promote a management team that has worked with Google, Twubble, PayPal, and more. After, they display their financial model’s value with annual and prospective revenue numbers.
The only advice we’d give is to choose more attractive fonts and add less text per slide than they wrote.
The LinkedIn pitch deck is more concise than the previous one and still delivers the series B funding phase idea. The deck talks about the power of the network, its solution for professionals, and the unique proposition that distinguishes them from other social networks. They make the main pitch on how they connect to other Internet sources and create a feeling that they lose much without LinkedIn opportunities.
MapMe
MapMe is a platform for creating interactive and universal maps across various fields like retail, real estate, commerce, and more. And most importantly, you can do it without any coding knowledge!
MapMe pitch deck verifies that social proof works best since they make a slide number of active users, average session length, and newspaper mentions. Even though the presentation is only 13 slides long, it gives all the necessary information on the company’s traction and future strategy. As a result, founders acquired $1 million in seed funding as one of the best pitch decks for startups.
Summary
We see many startups struggle to raise around, and you definitely don’t want to join this list. They think they’re doing everything correctly, but there’s a subtle and fundamental flaw ⎼ they rarely and barely overlook pitch decks from top companies to tell a compelling and believable story everybody wants to attach to. Thus, Uber or Airbnb startups had a captivating, well-connected, and convincing beginning, middle, and end.
Making your pitch an engrossing story is easy once you understand the deck and delivery tweaks. In case you need consultation on the design part, make sure to contact us to achieve all goals.
