DT e-Paper 24 February 2017

Feature
17
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2017
DT
Anup Dutta: designing a winning pitch deck
• Nahid Farzana
As a startup, you will eventually
need investment and you need
to prepare your investor pitch
deck. Raising money from an
investor for your startup is not an
describing what a pitch deck is.
“Pitch deck is a fundraising tool
and it’s a way to present your
content (problems, industry,
business model, traction, etc,) in a
way that it becomes invest-able.”
Anup said, “Content is the king
• Market size
• Business model
• Value proposition
• Traction
• Team
• Ask
easy job and it will require a great
pitch. How else do you expect to
get the investors’ attention? On
average an investor is listening to
over 30 pitches each day, so how
would you bring your deck to the
limelight?
Anup Dutta, design consultant
for startups of GPAccelerator,
recently spoke at a session at
GP House titled “How to design
a winning pitch deck”. The
event started with a short info
session about the GPAccelerator
program. The overall idea of the
accelerator program was described
and the application process was
thoroughly talked through for the
audience. After the info session,
Anup, who calls himself a design
entrepreneur, conducted a design
session where he covered all
there is to know about pitch deck
design.
Anup started the session by
of your pitch and design is the
queen. Your pitch deck will be
about your content and the design
should not overdo it, rather it
should complement it.”
Throughout his session, he
focused on the concept that-
“Good design is as little design
as possible”. By this, he meant
keeping the slides very simple.
Overdoing the slide will make it
complex and hard to understand.
Must-haves for pitch deck
Next, he talked about the 10
must-haves that all investor pitch
decks should have. Without the
following 10 topics, your pitch
deck will be incomplete. You will
definitely be asked about them by
the investors.
• Cover
• Who we are
• Problem
• Solution
Three important concepts
After interactively describing these
10 points, he started to talk about
the three important concepts of
designing. These include: fonts
and typography, colour, and
contrast.
Fonts are very important as it
shows the aesthetics of the slide.
Anup suggested selecting fonts
very carefully. Fonts can tell how
serious you are with your work.
He recommended using Serif fonts
for print media and Sans-Serif
fonts for digital media. One easy
choice could be using Helvetica if
you can’t choose the font. Also, he
suggested sticking to one or two
fonts in the pitch deck.
In the case of colour, Anup said:
“Three is a sweet spot.” He advised
using around three colours in the
layout. Also, one should use colour
in the deck that is true to the
brand’s story. Colour psychology
plays an important role for the
deck as each hue signifies and
represents something definite.
About 60% of the tech startups
use blue colours for their pitch
deck design because blue indicates
intelligence.
Then he talked about contrast
which is equally important for the
layout. Without proper contrast, it
will be hard to read what’s on the
slide.
Dos and Don’ts
• Make the slide readable
• The fonts should be large
enough so that audience in the
back can also read it clearly
• Don’t add too much text
• Using hyphenation is a big ‘No’
for slides
• Make it simple and cover only
one idea per slide
• Do not use watermarks in the
slides
• Do not use bullet points
• Use simple bar, line, pie charts
and simple, relatable icons
instead of bullet points
• Visualise the important data
Lastly, Anup said, “The goal of a
pitch deck is to make the investor
interested for a second meeting.
So be concise and take pride in
what you do.” •
PHOTOS: SD ASIA