Quick Rules for Sharing Pitch Decks

Ash Rust
2 min readMay 19, 2020
Click to start the video
  1. Not needed for the intro, wait until they ask.
  2. Must send something if asked.
  3. The email deck can be no effort, a subset of full deck.
  4. Send the full deck after you’ve pitched it.
  5. DocSend is fine, allow downloads, use unique links.

Transcription:

Hello, everyone. Today, we’re talking about sharing decks. Lots of conflicting advice out there about this one. My Approach is to keep it simple only send what you’re comfortable with and here are my quick rules for just that.

  1. You do not need to send the deck in order to get an introduction. It’s completely fine to wait until a potential investor asks for more information. Of course, you are saving yourself some back and forth.
  2. If the potential investor does ask for a deck you must send something. insisting on a meeting while providing zero materials will almost certainly result in a quick pass.
  3. Don’t put any additional effort into the email deck. You can use your existing slides from your current deck. Perhaps just covering team traction problem and solution.
  4. After you’ve pitched the full deck don’t be afraid to send it, given they’ve already seen it there shouldn’t really be a problem and it will also help keep you top of mind.
  5. It’s absolutely fine to share links rather than attaching decks to emails. Some people have really strong opinions about this, but you can argue that you’re giving people the most up-to-date version. Plus, you can always allow downloads of the PDFs from services like DocSend and, of course, you can use unique links for everyone that you send it to so you can see abuse and cut it off should it occur.

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