What should be the ideal startup presentation? (part 1)

A detailed study of the project DocSend answers the question "what should be the ideal start-up presentation?". The number of slides, the content of the presentation, the design and all that. Everslide recommends - such analytics is rare.

Why do some startups take off? What is the best way to submit a project? How to organize the process? DocSend, in conjunction with Prof. Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, conducted a survey and answered these questions. 200 fundraising campaigns have been studied, from the seed stage to the “A” round. The total financing of these companies amounted to more than $ 360 million.

DocSend is a tool for the sales department that collects statistics for each page of the document used and is distributed among the founders, since allows you to send presentations for a couple of steps. This allowed us to conduct a unique study. For research, we chose companies that use our service. When sending documents through our service, the companies answered the detailed questionnaire and told how the process of searching for investors proceeds. Some of the companies that participated in the study were “August Locks”, “Panjo”, “Shift Cars”, “Back to the Roots”, “Wiser”, “Tiggly”, “20twenty”, “Boomtrain” and “mNectar”.
')
The main conclusion: the process of obtaining investment at an early stage is very difficult. Getting an investment is a necessary step for many technology startups and this is not a transparent and frustrating process for those who are new to this. That is why we decided to shed light on how the process of searching for investments at the sowing stage usually looks.



Seven tips for those who plan to attract investments at the seed stage, from hundreds of companies that succeeded:

1. No more than 20 slides. Remember that the average viewing time is 3 min. 44 sec.
2. Finding investments at the seed stage will take much longer than you think. Do not despair if there is no result for several months.
3. Try searching among private investors, because they can give you funding for just a few meetings.
4. More meetings don't mean more money. Focus on meeting investor quality. Quality, not quantity.
5. It's easier for you to meet with 20-30 investors and much more difficult if there are hundreds of investors.
6. Engage your presentation, bring it to perfection. Remember that the optional financial part is the most viewed.
7. Do not include the terms of the transaction in the presentation, and inform in person. Conditions may vary from investor to investor.

Develop a successful presentation for the planting round

As we have already found out, the average volume of presentations is 19 slides and, for the most part, have a similar structure and format. Below we show which types of pages and how often they are commonly used. Also consider how much information to include in each slide presentation. Slides are sorted according to the list of recommended categories from Sequoia Capital.

Recommended presentation structure

The structures offered by DocSend and Sequoia Capital differ in just a couple of places:



The structure of the slides is almost identical, except for information about the project team. This information appears either at the beginning or at the end, but has never been in the middle. In those 200 companies that we studied, information about the team was located only at the end of the presentation. This practice is in line with the recommendations of Reil Hoffman, who recommends making investment presentations rather than team presentations.

View on mobile devices

The average duration of viewing a presentation is 3 minutes 44 seconds. It seems too small, but it is much more than we expected. For comparison, their own presentations take a little more than two minutes.

12% of investors view presentations on mobile devices, so make sure your presentation looks equally perfect on any screen.

What is most important?

A few questions to get you started: Where will you give presentations? If you imagine that you have a lot of time to create a presentation, on which pages do you need to focus your attention? Where can questions arise? The following shows how much time is spent viewing one page in each category.



Interestingly, the financial part takes the first place, but only 57% of successful presentations contained this section. The refusal of this section is due to the fact that at the sowing stage most of the companies do not yet have financial results. Almost all presentations of the sowing round, and many “A” rounds, do not contain any serious financial calculations.

If you include the financial part, then think carefully over its content, because This will be the most viewed section. Also, make sure that the section with the team looks impressive.

An important point, almost all presentations did not contain information about attracted investments and conditions. This information is best presented personally to the investor, because It may vary depending on the investor.

Presentation examples

Some companies that participated in our study agreed to use their presentations. If you wish, you can use these excellent presentations as a template to create your own.

• Boomtrain
• Panjo
• Shift cars
• Yoga trail
• Smart host
• Sunshine
• Dineserve
• Docsend

To be continued…