Has anyone tried making an interactive startup pitch deck?

DON’T DO ANYTHING FANCY!

Be normal

The fanciest deck I saw was a website, it was called Piccsy (site was taken down).

Seriously, don’t bother trying to do anything fancy. Making a quality deck is hard enough, so trying to make that fancy is totally pointless.

Investors don’t want anything fancy. They have their way of working. You make some website, well they can’t just share that around as they like since some people have no intention of looking at your ‘fancy thing’. They just want a powerpoint (in PDF).

Making something fancy will not impress, just annoy. Just spend that effort on your website and increasing your traction. These impress investors.

Finally, if you make something interactive, then you stop controlling the narrative. Your deck is just to get a meeting, not to close the deal. if you make things interactive, then there might be opportunities to make conclusions that you don’t control. If you are thoughtful, you tell investors what you want them to think and conclude.

The interactive thing is your financial model, and even that you want to explain first.

If you want a long blog to explain this in more detail, read:

• Don’t copy what famous founders do when they fundraise. You’re not famous yet
• Raising without a presentation deck to pitch

An investor’s POV

Andrew Ackerman is an investor. His view is:

Possibly but why would you bother?

As an investor, I’m looking for a certain checklist of information . If you don’t have it all, making an incomplete deck interactive won’t help.

Depending on the startup, you may want to control the order of your presentation such as to maximize your strong points. Making it interactive might even hurt you.

All of the things being equal, I may have minor preferences as to the order in which I consume your information but, as long as it is all there, I’m perfectly happy to read it in the order you select.