Shaan's Masterclass On Pitching That Has Raised Millions From Investors

alright what's up y'all sean here and this is gonna be a different type of episode this is a i'm calling a master class so master didn't invite me to do a master class because i'm not famous but fd them i'm a do it myself i know how to do some things really really well one of which is pitching and so if you're listening to this on the podcast feed it's gonna be slightly non ideal because i'm gonna share my screen and i'm gonna show i'm gonna give away one of my little assets which is my dummy pitch deck so this is literally a template for how i do my pitch deck that is for any business that's trying to raise money you want to send a deck to an investor and you wanna have them understand what you're doing be excited about what you're doing and cut you the check this is a deck that i have used to raise money i have sent to other founders or help them raise money i also in my power writing course this is one of the modules this is one of the examples one of the templates i give away so normally people pay a thousand dollars to take that course this is one of the little things in there i'm giving this way for free right now so if you're on the podcast feed you're not gonna be able to see my screen so what i recommend you do hit pause open youtube type in my first million that's find our channel subscribe to it and and now you you will be able to see the screen here because it's gonna be a lot better with the visuals but if you're on youtube already alright you're here so here's let's let me pull this up so this is my dummy pitch deck and by the way i'm doing this kind of live and improvise haven't looked at this on a little while so there might be some some funky stuff going on but that's okay well we'll we'll it improvise as we go so the first thing is your title and a small subtitle explaining what you do and as we go through this pitch deck i'm going to write in an example from that that we had done with a founder in our power ready course okay so for example here with the this is your title so they go we are shu and i was like okay what the heck is that and they go you know first they said we are an app for people with insomnia i said okay that's kind of you know that's that's okay what's a subtitle that says the outcome and maybe your special sauce and so this is what we landed on so we go they said we are helping millions millions of people fix their insomnia with skills parenthesis not pills so that took a little bit of workshop to get that one liner but when you have that one liner feel so good when you get that one liner so i think this is great what are we doing we are out here trying to help millions of people fix their and insomnia with skills not pills alright so that's your first line first slide now let's get to the good stuff so this where you wanna us you if you have credibility you wanna lead with it which is basically in the beginning of any pitch an investor is trying to figure out should i even care should i listen and should i listen it's gonna come down to one of two things number one do you have something that i want so that's kinda what the title slide sort of hints at what do you what do you actually do and the second is or are you somebody that is legit are you worth listening to do you have credibility or some some gravity to you about what you've done so if you have accomplishments i like putting that a slight two so bit of credibility if you have some accomplishments set the stage this is your quick intro which sounds polite but it's actually a place to humble brag and if you or a company doesn't have accomplishments then skip this slide don't put this here you don't wanna lead with i'm not that interesting so in shu case i go why you know do you have any credibility and they go well our founder or a partner is this guy matthew walker who wrote this book why we sleep it's a and i was like oh i heard of that book it's like a best seller they go yeah exactly so i go perfect so our title became we literally wrote the book on sleep and then basically i explain our c founders yeah our founders book why we sleep is a new york time best seller with over x million copies sold or whatever the thing is so that's like one of them and then you the other person and i'm ai research scientist who has who was responsible for a five hundred million dollar plus business you know business in at accenture we built this app in five weeks and have over you know whatever x x x downloads with zero paid spent right so something like this you're trying to show that you were highly highly credible and then you know i would put the you know the the like the title of the book you know the the recognizable image or some image here in in big words and again forget the formatting right like i'm not working on slide design right now that's why i just took the times new roman black font white slide because i'm not worried about design that will come at the end we do that later for now it's what is the story what is the storyline that's gonna get somebody hooked so here we're saying we have a compelling initial thing we're helping millions people fix insomnia with skills not pills secondly we're we're legit you should listen to us we literally wrote the book on sleep one of the best sellers if we wrote that i'm a good business person and an engineer that's the dynamic duo that's gonna build this thing okay great so now you're gonna say most customers have this problem and it's gonna be backed by either really compelling data or a personal story and so you know i'm gonna just copy paste kinda what i did for them here so most customers have this problem for that we did twenty five percent of americans have have insomnia that's seventy five million people right and then we added to that the personal story so that became including me i had an insomnia here for years i tried pills but felt yucky i tried to censor some oils that did nothing finally i found something that worked okay so this is your problem slide your problem slide with a big headline number that punches you in the face shows how big of a problem it is and ideally maybe a personal connection to it i had this problem i knew this problem i either i had this problem or i was a doctor and i saw thousands of patients who have this problem i've helped treat thousands of who have this problem right it's something like that that connects you to the problem which is ideal and then you wanna do the current solution so before what what people are tempted to do is say here's my solution here's why we're are so great instead you wanna say here's try to fix it today so what we did for this was we said so how we solve it today we did americans spend seventy five billion dollars per year on sleep aids to try to fix their sleep problems they barely work they have side effects and they're mostly using fake science right so that's what we put as the the secondary thing here and then here i would maybe put some images of the categories right so i would put like you know whatever some shape here let me get a little shape i'd be like you know pills or you know sleeping sleeping pills is x billion dollars whatever you know nasal strips is this you know what whatever the whatever the other sleep you know essential oils or whatever people use to solve the problem so i would kinda show they try a b and see none of that shit works and this is where you now come in with the steve jobs moment you get your turtle on and you say but what if instead there was a simpler solution a beautiful solution a solution that totally fixed this problem with no downsides whatsoever alright this is essentially what you're gonna say and so you know this is where for them we basically came in and we said you know instead here's our solution you know instead we built an app that will teach you how to sleep without having to take medicine so that's the headline that would come here and then beautiful picture of your product and then you you kind of reinforce it right like that's us we do that thing you know so if you if you gave a hypothetical here like what if there was an app that did like my blank then you say that's us we do that thing or in this case just put it all on one side that's fine now here's a key thing that most be miss so what they do typically is they go solution and then they just go solution solution solution they just start talking about how the solution works under the hood everything about the solution as an investor you don't need to know how the whole product works yet you instead need to know is this big am i going to make money right that's what the receiver of this presentation where they wants to know am i betting on credible people are they solving a big problem does their solution makes sense and how big can this get so now we go here we state the dream so we explained the big plan the big vision for how big this company could become you know this where you might say we're we're building uber for freight trucking right that's like we're building this big thing in this big industry that's a hundred billion dollar industry that's totally broken you know so i so as an investor thinking wow if they actually fix the problem that would be a big deal so you know for these guys what they did was we said this our dream what common and head space you know two billion dollar company one billion dollar company did for meditation we are gonna do for insomnia depression and anxiety and then you know we then added the the sort of sub text these are two hundred billion dollar annual markets it's fifty times bigger than meditation and then we we follow on again we make this even more persuasive so you wanna anchor it to something that they already know and then you want to so why did we use heads space and calm or why do we use it's uber for x because it anchors it to something they understand something that they know right we're building yeah know we i built an esports app and i said we're building literally league baseball for fortnite or for esports okay literally league baseball produces x hundred million dollars a year we're gonna be able but but more people play fortnite than play baseball this is gonna be a bigger business than even the little league is and so we were able to take this something a sounded very niche right like youth sports but make it sound a lot bigger by pitching it and connecting it to something that's already big and then saying we're doing that but in this big space so so you know here's here's where this slide landed people with these illnesses are sick of taking pills for every problem we can get clinically verified results with habit based app therapy and i think the key here is what this thing you recognize recognized did for the x we're doing for y y is much bigger than x fifty times bigger than x and people really have this problem alright so now you're gonna get to your traction slide again as an investor i'm trying to figure out is this actually going to work the easiest way to answer that question is to say it's already working look at this shit so so far so good and this where you put an impressive chart so your what is your hero chart how can you show that this thing is working so what is your what is your most hero metric and this is where pitching can't save you if your chart sucks your pitch is gonna kinda suck you know no pitch can fix a terrible business you shouldn't be pitching a terrible business you should be pitching a business that's working or going to work and so you wanna if it's already working you wanna show that if it's going to work you wanna say why you believe it's gonna work maybe you have a waitlist list that's really big maybe you have a track record of doing this with other products you know what can you show that would give me faith this is an all just talk there's some evidence so is where you put your hero chart now you go back to under the hood so now you're gonna say alright now you're interested correct i told you the problem the solution the big vision of how big this can be and the evidence that we're on our way so now what you're gonna do is you're gonna say let me tell you how we're different right does this already exist is this really that different than anything else and this is where you're gonna highlight your differentiator what most people do is they just explain their features that's not what you wanna do you wanna say everybody does x and we do why right that's the core differentiator so let me tell you how our approach is different yet sensible others do x we do why and this is where you're talking about either your product strategy your business model your growth strategy etcetera right everybody else charges for this stuff we give it to them at cost but we have a annual subscription that's costco it might be product you know everybody else tries to solve this problem with pills we do it with skills through this app that teaches you it daily habits right everybody else tries to grow through paid marketing but we do youtube content that gets millions of views and therefore we're able to you know acquire customers for pennies where everybody else is paying ten dollars right this is the the type of thing that you're gonna do product business model or growth strategy how are you different than everybody else our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot easy you to adopt and actually looks gorgeous i think i'd love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better now we zoom out is there a bigger trend that you're part of again this is all about instill confidence confidence confidence confidence are you know one way to it's instill confidence is we're not alone doing this this is something you're seeing the whole world is moving remote you know the you know the way that peloton did this for fitness we're doing this over here in this other space so you wanna be able to zoom out and show that you're part of a bigger trend so in their case i asked them this question i said what bigger trends are you you guys a part of and they ended up telling me we didn't we didn't design the slide but there's three big trends one is app based coaching calm head space they've proven that people will do app app based schedule the next one is telemedicine there are a billion dollar companies now that people are comfortable getting doctors and doctor's advice over the phone and lastly is that insomnia depression anxiety rising due to technology overload the pandemic the recession the whatever else and so we are we are surfing these big waves we're not the big wave ourself we are surfing the big waves now you wanna answer the why now question so can you explain why this idea would work today but it wouldn't work three years ago five years ago or ten years ago what has changed did a rule change did technology change did social behaviors change and so yeah know for example in their case when we brainstorm and again it's not about slide design it's about being able to make a persuasive case and so each of these slides is part of your persuasive case this is your why now so why now well this one have worked five years ago regulation did not allow for digital therapy with licensed doctors so there's regulatory inflection point also in the last two years due to covid everybody had to have a telemedicine experience we went from ten percent of people having tri telemedicine to eighty percent in two years so the whole world got to sample this and now has an experience doing this there are gonna be more comfortable today than they would have been you know x years ago okay why are you the one to do it what's your track record of your credibility your expertise you wanna reinforce what we did up up top or if you didn't write that up top you wanna write it here so this is your why why you okay now the business part how do you make money doing this if i give you some money what you know what will happen and so this is where usually i i i actually kind of left one out here so what i would do here is i would separate these i would do how the money gets made this is where you do your unit economics so you show that you've actually thought this through that the business is sensible you know we put in x dollars it cost us wide to produce the product or service and z is the the net profit at the end of at the end of it and so you know for these guys they were able to say we make a hundred dollars per session at twenty five percent net margin here's our and then they had a graph of their use unit economics and their payback period so they their payback period was they acquired users for x dollars and that means they break even in three months on that user so this support three months is a good good payback period so that's the unit outside now you're gonna do the what milestones will you hit so if i give you this money how will you make this the user how will you make this the the big you know the big big results so you know here's you know you know how will you make progress so that the valuation goes up and my shares become worth more so you know this is what we came up with for them which was they're raising two million to do their pilots to get our first five thousand paying customers key drivers allow people in from the you know what are we gonna do to get we're gonna allow people in from the wait gonna hire three more coaches and we're gonna roll out our company plan that lets corporations buy this for their employees so those are the key things we're gonna do to get to one million arr and now i'm telling you if you give me two billion dollars i'll turn that into one million of annual recurring revenue also on the why we had a good version of it for them so you know i'm a fan of being bold with this stuff so we're the team for this we're rolling renowned sleep experts and ai engineers instead and then we wrote this instead of trying to get people to play eight hours of candy crush per day we've decided to help people help everyone get gets better sleep at night right so i kinda like this this vocal style of being a little bit balls not everybody loves that and sure it could turn some people off but you wanna attract the type of investor that likes you and so you know as long as you attract as long as some people love it it's okay that some people hate it you you you know as long as it's just not everybody hates it alright now this is one thing i see a lot of people miss out on sweet in the pot so you wanna take some of your good news and move fifteen percent of it to the end of the end of the show so what can you say for the end it's like your little good news dessert at the end of the at the end of the thing so for them their pot sweetener was this oops they said one last thing we just secured a partnership with nih they're gonna be giving us five hundred thousand in this round dilution there's over two billion in sleep funding grants available and we will tap into this as we grow nice just a little bit of good news at the end that shows more momentum more progress a key partnership you just had maybe it's a revenue milestone or it's you know some some key thing that's that you didn't put in your main traction you just took a little bit of good news out saved it for the end to leave them on a high note and this is at the end call to action so get in touch you know well we're closing out this round if you're interested email me here here's my email address and that's the that's my dummy pitch deck i kind of messed up my template here i can i can make this available so if you just go to i'll make a a link for this so just go to sean por dot com slash deck d e c k i'll put a link to this here so you can go and download this and have a copy of this for yourself and you can edit it with your stuff so i'll clean this up i'll i'll revert all these so it goes back to the template and then you can use this for your stuff so try this out let me know what you think it's pretty battle tested so you know i've i've definitely been there the hard part for most of you is gonna be you don't have good stuff to put on some of the slides you don't have a different here or you don't have traction or you don't have a pot sweetener or you don't have a great track record and that's where you you're you will learn what part of your business is weak why would a smart investor not invest in this and you need to go fix those problems because it's if you do use this deck you will be able to raise money as long as you actually have good content to put inside if your business is not very good then don't worry about the make your business better first then go raise the money so anyways that's it that's my masterclass if you liked it let me know if you want me to do more of these i got i got tons of these things so go get this deck sean prix dot com slash deck and and try it out let me know how let me know how it goes for alright that's all