How Startups Create an Investor Pitch Deck That Makes Sense

You’re not pitching your startup, you’re pitching an investment

Joe Procopio
6 min readSep 17, 2020

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Raising money is not an indicator of how successful your startup will be.

In fact, raising money can almost be seen as a necessary evil. It takes all your time, it comes with a lot of strings attached, and it starts you and your company on a treadmill that’s going very fast that you’re not gonna get off of for a while.

But let’s face facts. There are business opportunities that just can not be realized without the fuel of outside funding. I say this as a dedicated customer-and-revenue-first entrepreneur, and also as an entrepreneur who has been through the funding roadshow more than a dozen times. Because it was necessary.

A lot of entrepreneurs look at an investor pitch deck like a homework assignment they need to finish. I used to, then I realized that what I was pitching wasn’t a startup, but an investment.

In this post, I don’t intend to play VC-whisperer, but I will go over the basics of how to put together a pitch deck that makes sense if you’re raising money for the right reasons.

I’ll start with some DON’TS.

Don’t ask randos to review your pitch deck.

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Technologist. Innovator. Humanist. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com