| It's a cool idea, but I strongly suggest you guys find a good ex-IB/consulting person who you really trust to give you some ideas of what an A-tier startup pitch deck looks like. Ideally, this person should have experience with startups as well -- you want someone with both tech/startup savvy and finance/investing savvy, who has a deep understanding of startups and also knows how investors think. You want one of two people. The first is the scrappy 24-year-old ex Goldman/McK/BCG/whatever analyst who can come on board as a potential cofounder. This person will have spent 100 hours a week for 3 years building slide decks, knows the rudiments of effective selling to buy-side people and (more crucially) can happily spam 50-100 people in their extended network for feedback on any given deck. The other option is to find some age 40+ experienced entrepreneur or finance guy/lady to come on board as a mentor, talk to you for 2 or 3 hours a month, and consistently give you steady but firm nudges in the right direction. This person will give you insights like "you guys know how to design but you need to learn about topics X, Y and Z or you're dead in the water, please read these books/articles ASAP". With the help of such a person you'll be able to shift from "we're a bunch of guys who build decks" (commodity) to "we're a small team of business and technology specialists who can help turn your fledgling startup into a serious investment prospect" (unique specialists). You mention UpWork: UpWork is for commodity work, you don't want to do commodity work. And you don't want customers who are even thinking of hiring commodity outsourcers; someone who'd hire an UpWork freelancer to build their startup pitch deck is just dumb. You want founders who are smart enough to know your value. Your decks look nice, but even speaking as a relative outsider to the startup funding ecosystem the content looks unsophisticated and a bit amateurish. Every VC and angel is constantly pitched by newbie founders chasing the currently hot ideas. Everyone reads the same blog posts and pitches the same metrics. To stand out a startup really has to either explain how they've found a strategic edge (the Bezos approach) or tell a bold narrative about how they can build something truly outstanding (the Jobs approach). Hiring a freelancer makes sense for polishing slide designs (which is one of your options at the bottom) but the real money will be made working with founders to figure out their pitch from start to finish. Good founders should understand their technology and target markets, and you should be able to help them understand 1) investor decision-making and 2) effective sales/story-telling. Maybe you already know those things but nothing on your site says that you do. I know this is a lot of unsolicited advice, but I think there's a promising business here; however, you have to know what you're doing to avoid falling into the commodity trap I mentioned above. |