In 2011, an era when pitch decks were far from reaching the mainstream vocabulary,
2011 was an era in which pitch decks were far from being a household name (at least in the San Francisco and the busy regions of New York City). Nevertheless, Buffer founders Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich constructed a 13-slide presentation in order to raise money for their app that schedules social media posts.
It focused on the numbers: 800 paying users, about $150,000 in annual revenue, and a 97% margin. The simple deck raised almost half a million dollars, after the founders sat through dozens of meetings and pitched in person to hundreds of investors. The whole pitch deck was later published on Buffer's own blog, making it one of the few pitch decks on the internet that you could study straight from the source. It's definitely worth studying as a founder because it separates itself from nearly every single other failed pitch deck: it doesn’t focus on empty promises.
Here’s a key fact: Investors spend around three minutes and 44 seconds looking at a pitch deck the first time they see it. If they don't like it, they'll give up in just two minutes. Typical VCs see at least a thousand decks a year and fund one in a hundred. The math only checks out when they're skimming, and most first-time founders don't make their deck based on that assumption.
Making a deck meant to be read closely with dense paragraphs and exhaustive market research and a financial model with five years of projections when the business might pivot in a month no longer seems like a viable strategy when the investor spends just a few seconds per slide, and has a million other pitches still lingering in their mind.
Here are four tips that every successful founder uses to help them stand out:
Shorter decks raise more money, not fewer. Quite a counterintuitive claim, I know. But not one without numbers to back it up: DocSend’s pitch deck tracking reveals that those with 11 to 20 slides are 43% more likely to secure funding, as opposed to longer ones. The same research later revealed that 10 to 15 slides may be a sweet spot. Many advisors have subconsciously felt this way before the research backed it up. Guy Kawasaki, the investor who advised Gascoigne and Widrich, has coined the "10/20/30 rule.” 10 slides, 20 minutes, and nothing smaller than 30-point fonts. It wasn't meant to be followed as a gospel, but it served as the experience built upon the pattern recognition from seeing hundreds of pitch decks, including many sixty-slide decks deep into buzzwords that didn’t provide value like “first mover advantage.”
Team and numbers over idea. This idea may be hard to accept for many first-time founders who truly believe in their product. However, it’s a truth that makes sense: investors cannot be well versed in every technical advantage of their fields that make up their portfolio. What’s more important to them is whether or not they believe in the team and its potential. DocSend’s data once again backs this up, as they find that investors actually spend more time on the team slide than any other section of the deck. The close second is the financials. Most founders pour their energy into the product slide and the market-size slide, assuming that's where the real evaluation happens. It isn't. Investors are trying to answer one question above all others: is this a team I trust enough to bet on? To that end, Buffer's Team Slide decided to list Proof instead of Job Titles: Gascoigne took the idea to revenue in seven weeks; Widrich took the user base from 200 to 55,000. That's a team slide built for the way investors actually read it.
Prove it, don't promise it. This is where Buffer's deck holds up best. Nowhere does it argue that social media scheduling could become a big market. It shows a $150,000 revenue run rate, 97% margins, and 1.5 million updates already sent through the product. Every number is something that already happened, not something the founders hoped would happen next year. That's a hard needle to thread for an early-stage founder without much traction yet, but it's the difference between a deck that argues and a deck that demonstrates.
One claim per slide. Thirteen slides, each one doing a single job: problem, traction, team, ask. By going super deep on just one topic in a concise manner, Buffer's deck survives 200 different investor conversations by not only presenting the information in an understandable way but also honing in on Buffer's understanding of his own business model. A deck that tries to answer every possible question in one slide forces the reader to work for it. In a four-minute window, that's the difference between getting a reply and getting ignored.
None of this requires a design budget or a professional deck consultant, just ruthless cutting. Buffer’s founders weren't the most published vision in the room and only 9 out of 10 investors said no anyway, but the deck did its actual job: it got them in front of the 18 who said yes.
