🛩 How designing your own pitch deck can hurt your chances of getting funded
Hiring designers can be expensive. It can feel like a lot for an early stage startup.
So a lot of founders think, why not use software like Canva or Google Slides and do it myself?
These tools are great, and I often recommend them to people for lower-stakes pieces, like a social media post.
But design is a very powerful tool. Imagine it’s a jet. Now, imagine someone gives you (presumably not a pilot) the keys to the jet, and you hop in and go for it.
What will happen?
You may be able to make it go really fast, but you can’t control it. Things could happen that you don’t intend. Potentially catastrophic things.
When I see pitch decks made by people unfamiliar with design, I see three common slip-ups that significantly hurt chances of getting funded:
Unintended information flows — taking the audience through the information in a disorganized and confusing way
Missed opportunities — usually this shows up as text that could be a diagram, an image, a link, or just…less text
Distracting visual information that leads the audience away from the main idea.
Confusing, distracting, or unintentionally hiding information from investors can cost you big opportunities. If you want to take the jet for a spin, fly at your own risk.