8 ms·
Investors don’t look at pitch decks for very long
- malanj 11y agoAverage time could be very misleading here. I would assume that it's a bimodal distribution (or something similar), with many decks that get almost no time and some that get a lot of time. So assuming a VC will spend ~4 minutes on your deck would be a bad idea. They'll probably either toss it out more quickly than that or take a decent amount of time to go through it properly.
- jules 11y agoA natural distribution in this case is the exponential distribution. In the first minute 80% gets thrown out. In the second minute 80% of the remainder gets thrown out, etc.
- marcosdumay 11y agoA bimodal distribution is way more likely. People just do not behave in free of context ways.
- ftio 11y agoThe bit about financials slides mattering most because investors spend more time reading them seems misleading, especially in light of the evidence that "only 57 percent of successful decks have this section." Investors spend more time on financials slides because they're information dense (there's literally just more to read), because they often receive less design consideration than the "softer" slides (slap a table on there because it looks like something an accountant would make), and because they're calculating runway and evaluating business-savvy — not because they necessarily "matter more," whatever that even means.
- pcrh 11y agoI suspect it also has to do with traditions in finance. Due diligence, audits of accounts, etc, are a integral part of how education in finance is conducted. Also, it is easy to do the basic arithmetic and see if proposals "add up". So people are more used to examining financial documents in detail. When it comes to markets, people, sales, etc, people are more used to going with their "domain knowledge" or "gut instinct", which takes only a few seconds.
- frandroid 11y ago> because they're calculating runway and evaluating business-savvy I would agree that if that's what they're doing that on that slide, then it still does "matter more".
- ar7hur 11y agoRemembering pg's great advice before demo day, a pitch has only 2 goals: - Capture the investors' attention -- they'll have to remember your company among dozens - Make them curious to hear more -- you want them to reach out and ask for a meeting None of these requires a big number of slides, or for that matter, time to go through the pitch. Most entrepreneur do a simple mistake and try to put everything that's relevant to their project in the pitch.
- morgante 11y agoMany of these decks are actually used for step 2—after investors have heard the initial pitch and are now interested in learning more.
- eterm 11y agoI'd like to see those graphs redrawn with the outlier who contacted 300 investors removed.
- erikb 11y agoThe four outliers on the two y-axises could be excluded as well.
- pcrh 11y agoSimply removing "outliers" just because you don't like them isn't a rigorous approach.
- erikb 11y agoBut maybe lying outside of the range of the others might be a good reason? I'm no expert. Just a guess.
- pcrh 11y agoDo you actually know what the "true" range is? The data presented is a sample, the "true" distribution might be different from what is shown, and if you start 'cleaning" the data based on subjective judgements, you might never discover the true range.
- minimaxir 11y ago> The data presented is a sample, the "true" distribution might be different from what is shown, and if you start 'cleaning" the data based on subjective judgements, you might never discover the true range. Note that if the sample is large enough and selected uniformly, the need for the analysis on the entire population is unnecessary. In this case, it does't apply, though.
- pcrh 11y agoWhy would it not apply in this case? The sample isn't particularly large, and we don't know the extent of possible selection biases. For example one obvious bias is that the sample is restricted to data sent through Docsend, thus likely does not represent a uniform sampling of all pitches. In any case, there is no prior reason to exclude outliers; any large enough representative sampling of a Gaussian distribution would include "outliers".
- ddebernardy 11y agoThis says mountains on the importance of good titles.
- sago 11y agoI guess then I'm not the only one to think the interpretation of the data in these slides is consistently poor. e.g. The slide with the correlation scatter plots - who devised the model to draw those trend lines? That's just awful statistics. e.g.2. The slide that judges the important pages in the deck based on the length of time they're looked at (important? why? why not 'complex' or 'difficult to grok'?) e.g.3. Observed slide order actually says 'team is never in the middle', but then averages the team to be in the middle of the deck. Hmmm. What an awful piece of data analysis on potentially interesting data.
- beat 11y agoZero is an even number. Two is an even number. The average of two even numbers is an even number. Therefore, one is an even number.
- EliRivers 11y agoThe average of two even numbers is an even number In which universe is that true?
- lgas 11y agoOne where all odd numbers are even numbers.
- beat 11y agoIt isn't. That's the point. Fallacy in the middle of the argument.
- EliRivers 11y agoAt risk of outing myself as massively non hipster, I truly don't see the point. Stating obviously incorrect statements. What's the point of this game? If you're trying to suggest that the original poster made a mistake, grow up and just say so. Sometimes, there is a benefit to demonstrating a point obliquely, when doing so causes people to think about things in a new way and thus reach a burst of enlightenment. That's not the case here. This is just smug hipsterness.
- erikb 11y agoDoes anybody see how the red lines in the "Strive for Quality, not Quantity" diagrams were generated? Looking at the data I don't get the impression that either one looks like it follows the data. Both lines seem to be as good as the other one in either diagram. I'm no expert but from having so many dots on the left sides and nearly none on the right sides I'd say the data is inconclusive. What do the data analysts say?
- coherentpony 11y ago"DocSend, a startup that provides people with a secure and private way of sharing files like offer letters or legal agreements, studied more than 200 pitchdecks ..." If it's private, how were they able to study them?
- conanbatt 11y agoWhen I was younger, my mother had bought a condo to move into when I was living with her without me even getting to check it out. Before going to it, she said "You'll even have a private bathroom". When I see the apt, it turns out she had a suite bathroom, and I had the other one: the guest bathroom. To this day she still claims it was my private bathroom, since she never got into it. TLDR; private for whom? :)
- chaselee 11y agoCompanies opted in. It's on slide 2 of their findings -> https://docsend.com/view/p8jxsqr https://docsend.com/view/p8jxsqr.
- coherentpony 11y agoOh I missed that! Thank you.
- ActVen 11y agoThis is why we used an legal-sized PDF infographic for our initial pitch document. We only raised 400K...but the round was full in 20 days.
- pedalpete 11y agoI was thinking of just this for our 'send around' deck, and then if we were doing an actual in person pitch, then to use a pitch-deck. Any chance you can share your infographic? I'd like to see how it wasy laid out.