RegioHelden Seed Stage

RegioHelden Deck Guide

Feliks Eyser, the founder of RegioHelden knows getting your deck done is tough so he decided to share his deck so you can learn from his experience.

The pitch deck evolved over ~3 years from 2011 (first 1 million raised) to 2014 (last round before exit in 2015). At the time I was in my early twenties, which I usually never told the investors 😉

I probably used the deck in ~50–70 meetings and ended up raising 10m in total from 6 investors over 3 rounds. The VCs were mostly from Germany and were a mix of institutional investors, business angels and public institutions/banks. I used a very similar deck when I sold the company later.

What to do to achieve the Top 3:

• I tried to keep the whole deck as simple and easy to understand as possible. Now that I’m an investor and receive a lot of pitch decks it always strikes me that founders have a hard time simplifying their message. It’s easy to create complicated, consultant-like slides. Simplify.
• I tried to be as concrete as possible because humans are usually bad at remembering abstract concepts and numbers, but much better at remembering stories. I highly recommend the book Made to Stick. Summary: Your pitch has to be Simple, Unexpected, Credible, Concrete, Emotional and be told as as Story.
• As you will see, my pitch deck doesn’t look very polished design-wise. That actually never caused a problem and nowadays as an investor I’m rather suspicious when I receive a perfectly-designed agency-like pitch deck. I ask myself: Does the founder have the right priorities?
• I always ask myself what “the next question” of the investor would be and tried to create a logical sequence from slide to slide (I’ll explain in the comments). It’s much easier to understand a narrative that makes sense instead of jumping from topic to topic.
• Usually 80% of the questions I was asked were the same throughout different groups of investors. This is why I tried to pitch to the least important (or most unlikely) investors first, ask for a lot of feedback and adjust the pitch for the next investors. Also obviously the pitch got smoother over time with practice.
• I think a good pitch deck (just like a good MVP) is the result of lots of feedback and iteration. I created a new powerpoint deck for every appointment and changed the order & messages of the slides a lot in the beginning.
• When I gave the pitch I always tried to deliver 80–90% of good messages (“Look at how great we are”) and 10-20% of bad messages (“We’re not there yet”, “We still have to develop XYZ”) etc. This created a lot of trust because investors saw that I’m a reflected person and there was still potential to develop in the business. Sometimes they would start to give me advice on how to do XYZ which meant they were mentally moving to my side. It also helped not to oversell.

I used the following structure which I can recommend

• Summary
• Problem & Solution
• Business Model & Technology
• Status Quo & Traction
• Market-size & -dynamics
• Sales & Marketing and Unit Economics
• Investment Round & Finances
• Team

Backup slides

What I generally did in longer pitch sessions or second meetings was to put more information in the backup to answer specific questions. In due diligence, I sometimes had decks with >150 additional slides on things like:

Vision/mission slides

• Org charts and employee info (tenure, maturity etc.)
• Goals / OKRs
• Product margins
• Sales org & process and KPIs
• Cohort analyses, retention & churn
• Competitive environment
• Deeper info on technology, system architecture & IT processes
• IT/feature roadmaps
• Process documentations
• Legal background and info on past financing rounds
• Industry multiples on company valuations

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