The DocSend team found that more and more successful slides have one thing in common: a really good summary slide. In this article, we'll look at a bunch of great curated examples.
Why you need a summary slide
As the founder of a startup, the company must be designed to make mistakes as quickly as possible. In other words, if what is being built is impossible, discover it in order to recover the previous life and try to start another business if you want. Basically, a summary slide exists to help the fundraising journey fail quickly, causing the investor to decide not to invest.
Here I call it "fracasoBut what we're really doing is preventing the founder or potential investor from wasting their time: There's absolutely no point in coming into a meeting and talking like crazy for 45 minutes if it turns out they'd never invest because the company is at the wrong stage. .
The summary slide should include enough correct information that can help an investor check the box that says, "Yes, this startup fits our investment thesis." Specifically, it helps cement your company over time and place by helping investors determine how much you're raising, what stage your business is at, and, well, what the heck the company is actually doing.
How to set the stage
The summary slide will probably be the first or second slide. Many prefer to let the cover slide on in a rather minimalist way, but giving more depth is still required. The first two slides of a pitch deck set the stage, and by extension, the first two slides together create the context for what is about to be shown.
In the first two slides, you should consider:
- El name and logo Company.
- Una mission or vision for the company and what it hopes to achieve.
- Business model high-level: B2B, B2C, B2B2C, development tools, platform, marketplace, etc.
- Un line of business summary: “Airbnb: A marketplace to help homeowners rent free rooms to travelers” or “Twilio: Making SMS messaging easier for developers”, etc.
- overall stage in which the company is located: «pre-product», «pre-revenue», «adaptation of the market to the pre-product» or «growth», for example.
- financing stage of the company: "initial round" or "Series B", and so on.
- La amount you want to collect, that is, raise a round of $4 million.
- La industry in which it is located: medtech, proptech, fintech, blockchain, smart home, etc.
- Foundation date: If relevant, it helps to indicate how long you have been working on the problem.
- Any major milestone recently achieved, ideally in the form of concrete metrics.
You have to remember that the goal is not to go into a great deal of detail about each of these things. The “order” and “use of fund” slides will tell more about how much is being raised and for what. The business model will come out later in the process. The industry, milestones and traction will be discussed in other parts of the slides. The goal of the first few slides is to level and ensure that everyone has the context that is needed. It has to be a slide with “force”.
Examples
- Positive: Arkive creates a very clear picture of what its mission is on this slide.
- Improvable: A mission statement alone is not enough as a summary.
- Positive: Includes revenue graphs, top metrics, and shows company stage (thousands of active members) and round (Serie A). The company also lists "Precision Nutrition Health Optimization" and "Series A" on its front page, which works very well.
- Could be better: could say more about what it does and who it does it for. Care must be taken when using projected numbers in summaries unless you are truly certain that those numbers will be achieved.
- Positive: Includes important key metrics (foundation date, number of characters, and videos produced). The cover slide also includes a mission statement: "Bringing the human to the virtual."
- Could be better: Could have included more about how much the company is raising now and a clearer idea of what their mission is. It would also have been helpful to make explicit what it does: “AI-powered, character-based video generation for enterprises.”
- Positive: Great and clear mission statement. The cover slide just says "Series B."
- Improvable: It doesn't say much about what it does or how far it has come.
- Positive: Alto's cover art reads, "Finally, a pharmacy that overdelivers," which really helps set the tone. Then it goes to this slide, which uses a bunch of metrics to show why it's a good investment. Very well done.
Improvable: You don't mention how much you're raising or your mission and where you're going.
An example that works
As can be seen from the actual pitch deck examples above, there are a few examples of companies that really get the summary slide right.
BeerSub may have been viewed before; is a fictional company created as a template, along with a bunch of notes on what to focus on for each slide.
- Good: "Netflix for Beer" is somewhat simplistic, but it helps convey that it's a B2C game with a consumer brand. “Powered by AI” hints at the technologies at play, and the word “subscription” warns investors that this is a subscription business model. “Raise $2,5 million” suggests that this is an initial investment and the “launch in three strategic markets” sets the pace.
- Room for improvement: light in vision and “launch in 3 markets” doesn't really say anything about whether a product is on the market or how many customers are already using it. That would be useful; It looks possible from this slide that this is a very successful company already active in one or two markets. If that's the case, that's quite a different company from a pre-launch, pre-product, pre-revenue company.
So how do you increase your cover slide message? With a summary slide checking the rest of the boxes:
Adding a summary slide to round out the information available on the BeerSub cover slide covers all the bases from the checklist above. Between these two slides, include everything needed for the summary:
- The name and logo of the company, BeerSub, although, obviously, the "logo" is bad.
- A mission or vision: "Boring beer is forbidden."
- High-level business model: B2C subscription business model.
- One line summary: "Better beers for individual customer tastes, delivered via subscription."
- General stage of the company: You have test customers and some income.
- Company financing stage. This does not explicitly name the round, but shows the amount, which suggests a previous round, probably the first institutional round. For perfect ratings, I would have made it explicit here, but it raises the suspicion that investors will be able to connect those dots.
- The amount — $2.5 million.
- The industry you're in: Food and beverage, specifically beer subscription.
- Here the foundation date is omitted; it might have been useful to calculate how long it took to get those 200 customers.
- Major Milestones: 15% weekly growth is impressive, and $100,000K annual recurring revenue isn't going to surprise anyone, but it's better than many early-stage companies.
Summary
It may seem like a lot of information is being given on the first two slides of a presentation, but that's okay. It helps to set the level of what your investors are about to see. The things that are important to growth-stage companies are less important to early-stage companies. Making sure everyone is on the same page makes storytelling so much easier.
