Things have certainly changed in the startup landscape. Investors haven’t completely unplugged for the summer, as they had previously. Their offices might have moved to non-sanctuary cities or they may no longer have offices at all. And investment into female founded companies is down.

Okay, so not everything changes, fair enough.

While none of us have any control over investor behavior, and as someone who is hired to ‘fix’ pitch decks all the time and make introductions to investors where and when appropriate, we can tell you that founders can control their own behavior, and give themselves a leg up, by presenting their offering clearly and concisely and grabbing the attention of investors, provided that they’re truly on to something – some of whom might actually write a check.

Here are a few points to consider:

There is information all investors look for in a deck, which we all well know: problem, solution, traction, financials, go-to-market strategy, team, use of funds, how much you’re raising, competition, target market/size of potential market – and not necessarily in that order. At all.

We can’t tell you how many decks we get where the problem slide says ‘Problem,’ solution slide, ‘Solution,’ and so on. Seriously? Investors don’t spend much time reading the deck. Tell me the problem, right up front. And make it an attention-grabber. Same with the solution and so on. Use that space wisely. That headline is a shout-out – don’t waste the opportunity. Besides, investors know the deck format: they see it constantly.

Do your homework. Is there a real need for your product? And do you have the solution that’s going to keep users/customers engaged?

Meta recently released Threads, and there were some 100M plus downloads in the first 72 hours. What investor wouldn’t have put his/her money there had traction like that been achieved by a startup? But it’s what happened in the next few days that was the eye-opener.

“Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes,” CNBC reported.

It’s called product/market fit and it applies to everyone.

Everyone.

Seems Threads didn’t break the internet, as predicted, but it and Meta’s foray into the metaverse seems to have at least broken Mark Zuckerberg’s winning streak and didn’t someone mention the importance of a company’s name and how threads have a tendency to unravel. Well, never mind…

We’re currently working with two successful serial founders. One composed his pitch deck himself – succinct and to the point (14 slides) but it needed a bit of tweaking (the founder is not a professional writer and knew it) – and investor introductions. The second hired a top marketing firm, who clearly knew nothing about investor pitch decks and produced a combination marketing/investor deck with seven slides (out of 23) on the product and the ‘Team’ relegated to one link back to the company website. The team, for the record, was very impressive, but what investor is going to click on that link, then drill down through each team member to discover this? As we’ve said before and even wrote about it (The Product Point that Every Single Founder Overlooks): You are the product. The team is the product. Everyone pivots, but investors put their money on the team. Literally. Include them front and center. Pictures, logos of past employers/education, LinkedIn links. Names at the very least. If you’re spending slide after slide on product and one link on the team, investors will wonder what you’re hiding. We certainly did.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Or the $2M -$5M you need for your seed round.

We would not share the latter company’s deck – without them agreeing to major revisions – with any investors we know and too bad: the company has completely disrupted a very tired vertical – but you’d never know it from the pitch deck. They did the same thing many companies do: buried the lead. In this case, which is also not unusual, they forgot to even mention it! As for the other client with the simple, legible, informative deck, they have a dozen investor meetings now on the books – and counting.

There are many, many more points we can cover as to mistakes/omissions founders make and will in the coming weeks, because founders need to hear them. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with this. Yes, investment in tech is down, but investors are still deploying money. The investment climate might have cooled a bit, but in this summer of record-breaking heat, the last thing investors want to see is a half-baked deck. Onward and forward.