Your Deck Has 30 Seconds To Prove You're Different - 10/15

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📰 Today's Edition: Your Deck Has 30 Seconds To Prove You're Different

One of the things we spend the most time on with our portfolio companies is storytelling in their pitch decks.

It sounds easy, but it is usually frustrating, even for founders who are excellent presenters.

How much time does your deck actually get?

If an investor doesn't know you, your deck or your blurb gets roughly 30 seconds before someone decides whether to keep reading.

Most VCs are seeing hundreds or thousands of decks per month. At Hustle Fund, our funnel looks something like this: 1,000 decks reviewed, 50 to 100 meetings taken, 3 to 7 investments made per month.

Ugh. That means most companies never get a meeting. Which means you never get the chance to explain the good stuff you were saving for the call.

Everything compelling about your company has to be sitting inside the deck.

(I review decks too. Hooves make scrolling difficult, so I am even less patient than the humans.)

What makes a deck compelling?

Three things: clear, concise, and differentiated.

Founders who are good at presentations usually get to clear and concise after a few rounds of iteration. Cut the jargon, kill the wall of text, put one idea on each slide.

But even if you are a former McKinsey superstar, differentiation is where it falls apart. That one is inside baseball. You are being compared against every other company that investor saw this month, and you have never seen a single one of those decks. You're graded on a curve you can't see since you don’t know who else is pitching.

Some ideas are pitched by so many founders that investors have gone numb to them. Other ideas were exciting two years ago and burned a bunch of investors, and now the same slide triggers a flinch instead of a meeting. And other ideas yet are unique and exciting. 

Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing which bucket you're in from the inside. The landscape shifts every few months, and you're building a company instead of reading 1,000 decks a month. One way to figure this out is to cold email investors and figure out what words they use in a pass.

When you hear "this space feels too competitive" or "we're not sure this is differentiated" or "we've seen a lot of this lately," you have your answer. Treat it as free market research from someone who reviews more decks in a week with magical rainbows than you'll see in your life.

What's the jiujitsu move in a crowded space?

So say you get the “it’s too crowded” response. Now what?! 

Acknowledge the space has gotten a lot of attention AND why everyone in it is doing it wrong and why your approach is different.

Here's what most founders send instead. Take mental health platforms, an area where we've already invested years ago and where investors now see the same pitch weekly:

Problem slide: Billions of people worldwide are struggling with mental health.

Solution slide: We're a mental health platform.

That deck gets no meetings. It tells the investor nothing they didn't already know, and it puts you in a pile with a thousand identical companies.

Now the jiujitsu version:

Problem slide: There are thousands of mental health platforms. But they are all going about it the wrong way because of ABC.

Solution slide: We approach mental health by doing DEF, which nobody else is doing.

Same company. Completely different read.

It works anywhere. Generative AI writing tools are the current version of this. Nearly every deck an investor opens right now has AI somewhere in it, so "Problem: generative AI is popular. Solution: we built a generative AI writing tool" is dead on arrival.

"Problem: there are hundreds of generative AI writing platforms including Claude and OpenAI and they all fail to do X. Solution: we do Y and deliberately don't do X" gives an investor a reason to reply. But make sure your solution actually is good!! If Claude and OpenAI are good enough and people won’t pay an extra $20 for your writing tool per month, then that’s not a good take.

Most businesses are in a crowded space. You are far better off assuming the investor has seen 100 companies doing what you do, and arguing that all 100 have a bad take than assuming you’re a unique snowflake. (Though Hippocorns have never seen snow.) 

Did our own story work the first time?

When we raised Hustle Fund's first fund, our narrative was terrible. It was basically: hi, we're two people, we worked together, we went to fancy schools, we worked at fancy places, we've invested in a bunch of hit startups, please invest in our Fund 1.

Do you know how many funds pitch exactly that? Hundreds. Just change the permutation of schools, workplaces, and hit companies.

That story sounded good to us, because we hadn't yet seen what every other VC was putting in front of the same LPs. Once the feedback came back that we weren't differentiated, we rewrote the narrative.

The version that worked: there are thousands of microfunds that look just like us. They are all investing the wrong way. Here's specifically what they get wrong. Here's our approach and why it's completely different.

That's how the fund got raised. Roughly 20 deck iterations later.

What does a bad story cost you?

Unfortunately, every investor is one shot on goal. Send a weak story and you probably don't get a second look from that firm, even after you fix it six weeks later.

So don't blast 200 investors with version one. Test the deck on a small batch you can afford to lose, collect the pass language, tweak the narrative, then go wider once the story holds up.

Most founders skip this entirely. They rush the deck, call it done, and get back to building. Even with no direct competitors, you are competing for calendar slots against founders with sharper stories.

Test a version and send it to five investors you're willing to burn. Read the passes. Tweak. Repeat.

But what do I know as a purple hippocorn? Your mileage may vary.

Until next time,

Dunky, the "pitch designing" hippocorn

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