Investors will spend 24% less time looking at pitch decks in 2022 compared to 2021. On average, it takes less than 3 minutes to convince an investor to come to a meeting with you. In fact, for that deck, failure Investors give up after just 2 minutes and 13 seconds to raise money. It doesn’t take long to make a first impression, so it should be taken seriously.

I rarely get to talk to pitch deck geeks as much as I do, but when I finally get to talk to a DocSend research leader, why not? Dig deeper into what the data is telling you about metrics without

The biggest trend shift in how investors view pitch decks is that investors are spending significantly less time on slides overall. Where The time spent is changing.

“This year, we know that investors are spending less and less time on pitch decks. The amount of time spent remains very low.” “What’s surprising to me is that the product and business model section of the deck is where investors actually want to go, especially for early-stage companies.” But investors have almost halved the time they spend on these sections at the pre-seed level.Investors are still scrutinizing these sections, but they’re doing it faster than ever. So founders have to think really hard about their business, but they need to keep their communication simple.”

One of the biggest changes is that investors are spending more time on what DocSend describes as the purpose of its startup slides: the “why are we doing this” part of the story.

“Founders have to think really hard about their business, but they have to communicate it succinctly,” laughs Izzo. It’s not easy, but founders should strive for it. ”

Funding timelines vary. This year, 25% of startups raised money within his six weeks. 58% funded within his 12 weeks. 70% procured within 18 weeks. 90% procured within 24 weeks. The pace was a little slower last year. Graph credits: Doc Send.

The third-longest-viewed section is the company purpose section (following the product and business model section), but Izzo says this section is usually just a small part of the slide deck and is often , pointing out that it’s just one or two lines of text. On deck he slides one or two.

“Usually it’s a to-the-point, balanced statement about what the company is about. What struck me at times was that the past two years have been mediocre in terms of viewing time,” says Izzo. “This year has really surged and investors tend to use this section as a sort of gatekeeper. I would like to know in

It makes a lot of sense. Business purpose statements are often formulated as “Venmo for funding”, “Transforming the customer experience with human-centric AI”, or “Issue tracking SaaS for physical product developers” . By the way, these are all examples from the Pitch Deck Teardown series. The great thing is that investors can use these statements to see if an investment potentially fits their investment theme. If you can’t complain about it, it’s a very easy filter to give the startup team a “no”. Dive deep into your product, team, or market size.

“The key is whether founders can communicate vision and concreteness, but whether they can communicate what their company does in a compelling way. It’s going to show that this paper fits, and investors are ready and ready to read the rest of the story,” says Izzo. “And you know, it’s hard to do this in a sentence, a sentence and a half, or something like that. we are watching.”

Successful and unsuccessful deck slides

The DocSend team analyzed 320 materials to see which slides were included in each. Teams was the only slide that worked for 100% decks, both successful and unsuccessful, but things start to change a bit from there.

successful deck. Graph credits: Doc Send.

The most interesting difference between successful and unsuccessful decks is the missing slides. I was surprised to find that only about a quarter of the startup decks contained financial information (trust me on this one, they really need an operational plan), but the decks that failed did contain financial information. I’m not surprised there wasn’t.

Slide on the failing deck. Graph credits: Doc Send.

Another big difference is the competition slides. Every deck should have an overview that covers the competitive landscape.

“The first thing that is often missing is the competition slide. I use it as a tool,” laughs Izzo. “I always say include some analysis of other players in the field, but you can define the field however you want.”

DocSend’s team created a kind of fundraising playbook and a “state of the union” report on fundraising, comparing shifts from 2021 to 2022.