There Is More to Making a Deck Look Great than Design

So imagine this, we are back in early 2013 and pitchXO doesn’t exist (scary thought!). You have a new startup and things are going great! You want to raise a new round of funding and have made the perfect pitch deck. You have spent a few days scraping lists of VC’s and Angel investors who could be interested in your product and you want to send them an email with the PDF attached. This sounds great right, so you have formulated the email and made sure everything is perfect and each word has been carefully chosen.

A day goes by, a week goes by, two weeks go by.. you have email tracking enabled (a feature of Streak CRM which pitchXO is fully integrated with!) so you can see that the recipient has opened the email but they have not replied. You can’t understand why they have not even written anything back when you were so sure that they would be interested.

IMAGINE if all your hard work is destroyed by having a presentation which does not display correctly. For all you know that VC may have really liked your email and may have been keen to look at the presentation but then they see something like this;

These guys are pretty busy and get a ton of pitches a day. If they receive a presentation displaying like the page above then you can be assured that they won’t lose sleep over it. They don’t have time to follow up and go into a dialog with you as to why this is the case. They simply move on to the next pitch. It is important to remember that there is more to making a deck look great than the initial design.

At pitchXO, we deal with quite a large number of pitch decks and have seen our fair share of presentations which do not display properly on all devices, be it Mac, Windows, Android, iPhone or different versions of the above. We are surprised when actually thinking about it in more detail, in around half of our cases we have had some issue with presentations.

In this screenshot, the problem with the presentation is that a font was chosen on a mac when creating the presentation which isn’t supported on Windows machines and thus whatever great figures you may want to show are reduced to zeros.

Obviously, we did not want these issues to persist and we want you to be confident in what presentation you are using will look the same for everyone and thats why within pitchXO we have deployed top of the range industry standard converters to ensure that no quality is lost within your document and that everything looks great every time, you can even preview your documents to see how they look before publishing.

We are pretty confident you will enjoy what you see and now when you have a great startup and send out your emails to VC firms you can be confident that they will see your awesome pitch in the same way you see it.