Startup Pitch Decks

It's pretty hard to distill an idea worth spending time on into a short presentation that will explain to people why they should care about it. ... Or at least that's what we've been taught. To explain why I disagree, I'm going to compare the business world to computer programming. Don't worry, you don't need any background. One of the in-jokes in the programming world is rubber-duck debugging. You usually don't see rubber ducks in a technical context, so I'll explain what's different here. Debugging refers to the process that a programmer goes through when their program does something it wasn't supposed to. A lot of errors relate to a misspelled word or dropped punctuation, these are fixed in seconds. The error that is the most difficult to fix is the error you don't realize is an error. In one part of the code, you used one model of the world, and in another part you used another model. These ambiguities are fixed only when you find out what things you claimed to do that you really didn't. The technique in vogue is to take a rubber duck, set them next to your computer, and proceed to explain each piece of code. I said "them" there, and it wasn't a cutesy anthropomorphism, it was a conscious choice. By pretending to explain to another conscious being what you did. This same technique works with your business, if you can't explain it, it doesn't need to exist. If you have something to sell and no one to sell it to, you don't have something to sell. This is how we are going to pitch our product, although some more information is provided for context. We explain why our product is relevant to the world, including the reasons that we wanted to make it (because we each want a polished version of this product badly). After that, we explain exactly what our product is, and how it is made currently. Then we prove that their are people to sell it to, and that development is economical. We explain how we are going to make enough money from this (we need to make a certain amount of money to keep the product in production!) and what we are going to do in the future. The final informational slide of our pitch deck is currently an explanation of what resources we need to advance the project to the next major version. Although the whole process needs to be done carefully, we feel that with the proper amount of belief and effort, we will be able to take this project to the next stage easily.