The "Pitch" Deck of Cards

Week of 11/2 - 11/8

During these past few weeks, I mentioned in my other blogs that my team and I are working towards our final pitch deck. With the pitch deck being less than a week away, I am pretty nervous about where I will end up. This is the one thing that can make or break the startup of my future and everything matters at this moment. Every week I have learned something new about our product and its future in the market that has allowed me to utilize that information to make some changes or add things to my product. I am quite surprised by how less we had to change our product. I hear startup success stories that had to change their product thousands of times to even hit the market. However, I do believe that changing our product will come further along our path. In fact, we'll know that we have to change based on our feedback from the final pitch deck.

To give you a little description of how exactly our pitch deck works, we have about five minutes to pitch our idea. Five minutes? That's all for a pitch? That is the reality of our pitch deck time and I can say that this is going to be quite the challenge. I have looked at other pitch decks from Uber and Airbnb to get an idea of what to include in our pitch deck and how to not only sell our startup but sell ourselves. I came across this one template made by an entrepreneur known as Guy Kawasaki. His template includes 10 simple slides for the perfect short pitch deck and I couldn't be more amazed to find this out. As I looked through the template, I started including details that would help us better convey our product to investors. Using different phrasing in your pitch decks can completely change how you market your product and what you want people to buy.

In these last few days, I hope to polish up the finishing touches of my pitch deck with my team and make sure that all of our ideas are properly conveyed throughout our presentation. My goal is to win the pitch competition and get the $500 that we can use to invest in our startup. Furthermore, we can advance to the Global Startup Battle and gain more knowledge and insight into how we can make our product better. A successful pitch deck is just the beginning of a huge journey I will encounter and whether I win or lose, hope to take away some knowledge from it, since that's what is truly valuable to a startup.