During the seed stage of your startup, your pitch likely followed the 10-20-30 rule. That is 10 slides, for 20 minutes with a 30 size font.
But now that you are past the seed stage and moving on to subsequent rounds of funding it is time to upgrade your pitch deck and get it prepped and polished.
From my own experience, I have created a 20-20-20 rule for pitches from series A and beyond. So what does this stand for?
20 Slides
At the seed stage, 10 slides were the right amount. They allowed you to explain the problem, your solution, your team and how you planned to execute it. Now that you have started growing your pitch deck should evolve to between 15 and 25 slides. In my experience, it is impossible to keep to a 10 slide deck at this stage without overreliance on the appendix which ruins the flow.
20 Minutes
Even though the number of slides has increased, the duration of your pitch shouldn’t. In my experience, this is more related to the amount of time you can keep an audience engaged than the amount of content you need to deliver.
Keep each slide to about 1-2 minutes of presentation time and regularly engage your audience throughout.
20 Size Font
This isn’t a hard and fast rule but I believe it is important to allow you to go smaller if needed. Of course, if you can present all your information in an uncluttered way with a size 30 font then stick to that. It is just my experience that the option to go smaller is always helpful. Besides the 20-20-20 rule is more catchy.
As your startup grows and evolves from seed to series A and beyond you need to evolve your pitch deck and presentation to accommodate. Increasing your slide count but keeping the presentation time the same will require you to be more concise with the information you are presenting.