How to create a pitch deck for your startup by Walied Albasheer

Waleed Al-Bashir explains how to create a pitch deck for a startup. He covers key elements such as problem and solution, market size, competition, business model, and more. He emphasizes the importance of a strong hook at the beginning of the pitch deck to grab the listener's attention. He also discusses the need to clearly demonstrate the value proposition and how the solution benefits the customer. Additionally, he highlights the significance of addressing the team's qualifications and the financial aspects of the startup. Overall, the pitch deck should showcase the problem, the solution, the market size, the competition, the business model, and what the startup is seeking from investors or partners. Hi, this is Waleed Al-Bashir, and I'm going to talk to you about how to create your pitch deck. If you're a founder of a startup, one of the things that you need to do pretty early in your journey, at the end of the day, is to create a pitch deck that will illustrate what is the problem that you're trying to solve, and what is the solution for this problem, and why now, why you want to do this right now. What is your market size like? What is the competition landscape like? Then dive into your business model, and what is your two sides of the business model, the expense size and the revenue size, what is your market segment, what is your value proposition, and who are your partners who will provide for your activities and provide you resources to do activities that will be able to deliver your value proposition. Then you could dive into your product vision, and what do you see your product down the line, what type of impact are you going to have with your product. Then you get into the team, and team is more important, what is the quality of your team, what is the founder to market fit looks like, how this team is going to deliver, what type of vision is going to deal with the problem and provide the solution, and create that value proposition that you can provide to your customer. Then you get to dive in the financial, and basically the cost side and revenue side, and what sort of business model are you going to deploy, what revenue streams are you expecting, and then what is the expenses that you're looking to use in order to get to these milestones. Then finally you need to talk about the ask, what are you looking for, what from investors, or from partners, or whatever, basically people whom you're pitching this startup for. These are around 12 elements that you need to look at, and it has to always start with the hook, that hook will put the listener in a mindset that will take you serious or not from the first 10-15 seconds, and eventually you need to start with a slide with a mission and stuff like that. Those are the main blocks that you need to address while you're creating the startup pitch deck. We will deep dive in more elements down the line. So start with the title, slide with the mission statement, a couple of points to cover in here. Who are you? Your company core mission in a single sentence. Brief history of the company, including how, when, why it started. Key objective, start the presentation off with the right tools. Everyone should know the basic idea and the value proposition of the company. So getting back to that, you could have your logo, you could have the company name, mission statement under it, and then basically some screenshots about your products or whatever value proposition that you're trying to deliver to your customers. And then number two is the hook. Now, in the hook, there are a couple of points to cover. You need to highlight the most impressive things about your startup. So you need something like boom, a large problem size that you're trying to sort out, or maybe a personal story about a specific problem that you have been suffering from for a long time and now you are solving this problem for yourself. And then this could be also a financial metric, specific production that you have expedited during your journey. And also customer logos or amazing people that have been using your service or whatever. Something to attract the attention of the listener and to make them ready to listen carefully for the slides to come. Now, the key objective is to grab the investor's attention and make them want to learn more. That's it. So here, the hook, you could insert something that grabs the attention like annual rate of revenue, or for example, specific growth in the ARR or net retention percentage or annual contract value increase, anything that can capture this attention, not necessarily a financial metric that I have mentioned right now. You could also insert a couple of logos like these are our customers, this is our monthly rate of return, this is our runway or any stuff that's similar to that. Of course, every founder will figure out which type of hook that could be more suitable for his startup. Now, diving into the problem, there are a couple of points to cover here. Basically, describe the pain of the end customer or user. What are the main pain points that you're trying to solve for them? Not how they address this issue today. It's like how are they doing or solving this issue without your startup? And then you could share any statistics or research around the state of the industry, the impact on the end user or customer, something to clarify the problem and the size of the problem and eventually the impact that you're going to bring by solving this problem. Now, the key objectives here are to first establish the need for your company solution and then convince the room that solving the problem is worth solving. So you could start by something like what is the target client, what is the main problem, and then based on that problem, what is the stakeholder one, stakeholder two, stakeholder three, how do they deal with it now, and then basically a description about the shortcoming of the current solution and identifying point one, point two, point three with a brief description. And eventually, you would also explain what are the steps that you are trying to take the customer through in order to solve this problem, what is the key message, conclusion about the problem for the customer and how it's affecting them. So here, the problem statement should have those type of metrics illustrated in them. Of course, they are different between a startup and another, but eventually you will have to decide what is best suiting you within the same frame or structure. Now, your solution, now there are several points to cover while demonstrating your solution. First, you need to demonstrate your value proposition and how the end user or customer benefits. So basically, any business transaction is a transfer of value. So basically, if you have a strong value proposition, then you might end up with very many people paying for you in order to receive this value that you're offering. Now, provide user cases or case studies with anecdotes, like logo, where the slide can live at the end of the section, and stuff like that. So use cases are important because they will explain how the solution is working for a specific client segment. Then you need to highlight elements of the technology that gives you potential for leverage or scale as you grow. Now, this is also very important because, again, technology could add a lot of improvement in the way the value proposition could be delivered. And also you could include screenshots, short demos, or GIF, or how the user journey could be during your solution process. And then the key objective for this is to help your audience understand how you solve the problem and the value your solution creates. Now, this will probably identify what you need to do about the solution. And then basically, you could insert an icon about your business, and then you insert an icon about the customer or product interaction. What does your customer interact, how does your customer interact with your product? Then an icon of your product, and how does your product work for your customer? Then icon of the solution, here you could identify what does your client get after using your product. And then you could dive in into a specific user segment, and then type the benefit for the user related to your customers. So you could identify a couple of benefits here with the description of each benefit. Then basically, you could also have a chart about the customer workflow, and how is this workflow happening between the customer or any other parties. The key message here, or conclusion about your solution. So here you could add a couple of happy customers, logos that you have been working with at this time. And after that, you need to look at number five, which is why now? Now there are a couple of points to cover also in why now, basically showing the historical evolution of this category, and define the recent trend that make the solution possible today. So there might be elements that have not been available, you know, sometime back, that wouldn't allow such a solution to happen. This could be cultural element, could be consumer behavior element, it could be technology element, it could be a disaster like COVID for example. When COVID happened, a lot of stuff has changed, and there was a lockdown and stuff like that. And eventually people needed to do things in a different way than how they used to do this stuff, like buying groceries, or attending school, or conducting meetings. And we see a lot of great innovations that have been showing large production down the line that solve problems for these conditions. So this is the bottom of why now. Now, what analog exists that help convince you this will work, you know? So you need to explain here, you know, why do you believe this will work? And why do you believe this could get production, you know, over the next three, five, seven years down the line? Because it should not be something that is very temporary, and then the value proposition will not be strong enough after that. Now, the key objective of this slide is convince investors that your market is undergoing transformation, and showcase tailwind that your company can harness, you know. So you need to play a big role, or you need to show them that you're going to play a big role in the transformation that's going on in your market, and how your company can harness these changes in the market or the transformation. Now, this could be like a specific trend, you know, what we're talking about, your native AI is a trend right now. If we're talking about, you know, Web3, you know, we're talking about, you know, a lot of this centralized system, we're talking a lot of automation, you know. And we're talking also about, you know, a lot of new frontiers technologies that we could see in terms of bioscience or life science or longevity, FinTech and others. Those are all trends that has proven themselves during specific conditions or specific events that's happening. Now, we will get into market size, slide number six here. And basically, what we need to cover here is identify your ideal customer profile, you need to anticipate specific archetypes of your customers, and try to figure out what is the size of those customers in your territory or in your home market or in your region, and what is the number of those customers, and then you would also need to calculate the total addressable market, you know. There are two ways to do the total addressable market, there's a top to bottom approach and there's a bottom up approach. So top to bottom approach is like, you know, I'm targeting university students in a country, and those university students, you know, based on the statistics, there are 2.5 million university students, and every year we get another, for example, 300,000 university students. So this is a top to bottom approach which will identify the total addressable market. I mean, like, there are no other university students apart from those ones. And the bottom up approach is like, you could look at specific university and you say, okay, this university or this city, for example, has like 500,000 people, and the university students, they are like 5% or 10% of these people, so there are 50,000 in this city, and then eventually in the region or in the state, there is, for example, 2 million people, and out of these 2 million people, there are 200,000 university students, and then you keep on identifying from bottom to up the total addressable market, and then you need to show the adjacent possible current market size. So, for example, if you're talking about university students, you could talk also about vocational training students or other students who are not in the university, but they might have the same needs that the university students have, and then you could identify what is the potential market size in five years. So if I'm talking about, you know, 2.5 million university students and 300,000 coming to university every year, so I've got like around 1.5 million people coming in five years to university, so based on the graduation rate, you know, this number could increase down the line. Now, the key objective here is to prove that there's a big enough market that you could build big business about, because when you identify the total addressable market, then you have to identify, you know, the serviceable market, and you have to identify your target market, and based on that target market, you have to identify how much you could capture in a year, for example. So if you're going to capture in a year 10,000 university students, and then every one of them is going to pay you $5 a month, so that is $5 multiplied by 10,000, that is $50,000, would that make sense to have a business, to have expenses, to have employees, and a place, and technology, and all this stuff? If it does not have, if it does not make sense, then you would probably look at adjusted markets, or you look at a couple of other stuff. So this point is very important in identifying the availability of your idea or product. Now, the key objective here is to prove that this is an enough market that you can build a big business. You need also to show that you have an interesting wedge into a big opportunity. The market size is sufficient enough for you to build a big business, and you could scale after owning your home market, and then again, basically, you have to explain that you could build a big opportunity out of this. Now, normally there are three famous cycles here. Now, these circles, the first one is the top, totalizable market, then the middle one is the self-visible market, and the smaller one is the target market, and then the target market also you do not achieve right away, you achieve it gradually through the traction that you are performing. You could also look at, this could be worldwide, could be specific countries, specific regions, and stuff like that. And then the bottom-up market of opportunity, for example, sometimes you look at the traceable market, you look at, for example, specific students or specific employees, for example, if it's specific students, so you're talking about, for example, physics students or math students, they are this much at this university, and then you look at them at all universities in the city or the region, and then you look at them at the whole country. So that's how it works, and then you could identify the potential annual contract value for each one, and then you could identify the total market value by multiplying the annual contract value, multiply by the number of leads that you may get. Now, market size with multiple products, also you need to identify specific categories, and what is basically the market size in each category. Now we are done with the market size, we could tab into number seven, which is the competition. Now, what to cover here is the shared metrics of competitors with the strengths and weakness. So you need to identify where do you position yourself in terms of competition, and the best way here is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each and every one, and how are you going to tackle the weakness in other competitors' product or startups. Now, show how you are positioned within the market, whether you are positioned in the top quarter, whether you are positioned in the middle one, and how are you planning to move to higher position. Now, key objectives here is to show your key advantage over competition. You need to demonstrate key reasons why you win. So, these are very important points, you know, and by putting those competitors and aligning them and aligning the gap, and enhance your value proposition to tackle those gaps, to fill them, then here you could illustrate your advantage over competition. Now, also, you need to clearly identify and explain the reasons why you will win this market. Now, this normally goes into a tubular structure, normally like the company, and then several competitors' columns there, and then your column also, and then you look at things like, you know, price, and then, you know, feature, and other feature, other features, and stuff like that, and you identify that, for example, your competitor does not have the full features that you're providing, and the pricing is also identified for you and every competitor. This is one way they do it with like right and cross sort of stuff. Another thing is to have a competition sort of quadrant chart, you know, and in that quadrant chart, then you will identify specific metrics, you know, in terms of high growth or ease of use, and then where you position yourself along with other competitors. Now, competitive positioning, also, you could identify, you know, for example, in terms of client type or client size, and in terms of the suitability of the price, or whatever, then it's like a 2D chart, which you'll have an X and Y axis, and where you position yourself over there. Now, you could also do, you know, negative and positive points, you know, based on a specific customer segment, and where you come in this position, you know. After that, we look at the business model. Business model is very important. It's a maker or breaker when you are talking about starting a new business, you know, because pretty much everything is glued up into the business model. The main things that you need to identify and explain for your investors or audience is that how do you make money. This is very important. You get to see a lot of startup presentations in which they don't know exactly how they're going to make money, you know. And then you need to look at metrics, you know, and unit economies. Now, unit economies is very important. You need to figure out when are you going to get positive in terms of unit economy, and, you know, if there are any other metrics like, you know, SaaS metrics or a couple of other, you know, metrics that you need to look, like cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value, retention rate, annual contract value, ARR, annual reoccurring revenue, or MRR, monthly reoccurring revenue, and stuff like that. Now, the distribution model, so how are you going to do the distribution. And then here, many of the startups, they use the business model canvas, which is like, you know, about nine boxes, in which from right to left you have the customer segment, and then you have the channels and the relation in the column left to it. Then you get to see the value proposition, and then left to it you will identify what sort of activities that you need to generate this value proposition, and what sort of resources that you require as well to identify this or to deliver this value proposition. And then who are the bartenders you're going to barter with in order to provide this value proposition. And basically, right from value proposition down on the right side, you have the revenue part, and on the left side you have the cost part. Now, the key objective on the business model slide is to show that you understand the operation levels of the business. So, you understand the cost and the revenue side of the business, what are the payable and receivable structure, you know, who are your clients, who are your partners, which type of activities that you need to do, you know, which channels are you going to deal with your customer, how are you going to support your customer, stuff like that. Now, you need to also defend the key assumption underlying the business plan. So, many times as a startup fund or a startup at an early stage, you don't get to do a complete business plan, but a business model canvas could do, but whatever you put there, you need to be ready to defend it. Now, for example, the sale processes, you know, what is the pipeline like, you know, leads, opportunities, demo meetings, deals closing, then you could look at annual contract value, you know, you need to look at sales efficiency, you need to look at lifetime value, cost of customer acquisition, this is a very important metric that a lot of investors look at. You need to look at cost of acquisition payback in months, you know, so it's like if you have the lifetime value, it is like 12 months and your cost of customer acquisition is the cost of the subscription for three or four months and your customer needs to spend four months with you at least to do cost of customer acquisition payback. This is very important because many of the startups, they tend to burn a lot of money acquiring customers and then eventually those customers are not retained properly, there's a lot of churn rate, and basically they would not get to cover the cost of customer acquisition, not even, you know, generating revenue and extending the lifetime value. Now, you know, you need to look at the marketing engine, you know, cost per customer acquisition, what are you going to do to acquire a customer, you know, percentage of the first year contract value. Now, you could acquire customers for conference and events, you know, what is the cost per lead, webinars, what is the cost per lead, retargeting, search engine marketing, what is the cost per lead, outbound marketing, what is the cost per lead, content marketing and stuff, and then eventually get an average on what is the cost per customer acquisition among those different channels. Now, Lambda and Xpand, you need to put some of the case studies describing one customer upsell over time. So you identify, for example, this is an initial contract and then you're upselling more seats if you're providing, for example, email service or any sort of enterprise subscription service, normally starts with one or two users and then you could upsell to more seats. Then you could upsell the second product, which is an additional product, the existing seats, and to more seats, and then you upsell more seats for the second product, and then you realize your potential. Now, this is a way also to explain this part as well, you know. Now, the product vision is the ninth slide in your startup pitch presentation, and here you need to explain what is the vision of your product, you know, show the roadmap of the product, demonstrate how you could expand the pricing and market size, show how you can build the mood for your product, how the product could go viral, how customer engagement could be maintained during the lifetime of the product, how are you going to turn your customers into advocates who would potentially explain the product feature and promote the product on your behalf. Now, the main objective for this slide is to help an investor understand how do you see the future. It's a journey that takes like from three to five, seven years. As Steve Black said, you know, startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model. So basically, you are a temporary organization, just iterating, you know, and doing a lot of adjustment in order to reach that scalable and repeatable within the first two or three years. And then when you identify that, you look into scaling this scalable and repeatable business model, and by that point, you move from startup to scale-up, and then eventually scaling up beyond your hometown, beyond your country, perhaps, and then by that time, you would potentially get a lot of offers to exit. Now, you need to also demonstrate your ambition and size of opportunity. You know, investors are very keen to come into early stage if they believe this is something big. You know, they need to believe that this is something big, it has an impact, the problem size is large enough, and you are aligned as a founder. Founder to market fit is very important. Many of the investors, they identify this is a guy who's going to do this, and he's going to align this to their market. Now, the roadmap could be, for example, phase one, it's innovation phase, you know, basically platform development, some sort of high-value validation, product development, and then after that, you get into calibration, and then support and customer retention, and then after that, you get into domination, you know. So, you are getting into more authority, more markets, and then verticalize, you know, you start to verticalize the solution, and then solution focus, and then you have second solution, or specific, you know, modules for a specific segment, and stuff like that. And then it could be also, you know, category-wise, so you identify the specific category, and then you identify a quality objective for every category. You could also look at innovation timeline. So, you know, this is very common in stuff like bio-science, pharma, and other stuff, which require, you know, a little bit more time to develop the product. So, basically, you are, like, identify brief description of the innovation, and then after a year or so, then you get it into another milestone, and every quarter you identify a specific milestone until you reach that specific successful product. And what we see in life science and pharma and some of the AI robotics, is that you have a lot of innovation, and then you test, and then sometimes you kill some of them, you promote some of them until you reach something that really works. Now, team slide. Team slide is very important because, like, you know, as I said earlier, founder to market feed, teams are the core elements of the company, of the startup. So, here you need to identify and show the roles and backgrounds of the founders and the key executives. This is very important because it's an important factor into the founder to market feed. You need to really show that these guys, they will be able to take this down the line. Now, there should be also a balance between, you know, technology, business development, strategy, vision, you know, go to market, and stuff like that, and that's why many of the investors, they shy away from a single founder sort of stuff because they say it does not pass the bus test, you know, where they ask you, what if you get hit by a bus, you know, eventually. Because redundancy and balance in the expertise of the founding team is very important for the startup success down the line. Nevertheless, there are some startups which are very successful with a single founder, but you cannot generalize this as a standard. Then you need to discuss your unique founder problem fit, you know, and this is also a part of the stuff, you know. If you have an emotional attachment with that specific problem and you are trying to solve it for yourself first, then there's a good fit. Then if you are coming from a specific research expertise or a specific, you know, technology expertise, and then you have been looking at different ways of solving this problem, you are able to identify the gaps and stuff like that. So here you are able to achieve the founder to problem fit and eventually to founder to market fit. Now, after that, you need to share about advisors if relevant. This is also very important. Grey hair, you know, larger number of expertise, you know, which will guide when needed, you know, the startup team. And then you highlight the future hires if relevant, you know. So there might be some gaps in your team. That's okay. It's absolutely okay. But you need to identify, okay, I'm planning to cover those gaps in a specific manner. Now, the key objective of this specific slide is to convince an investor that you have the right team. You know, you have the right experience. You have the right motivation. And this team is here to stay. They're here to stick around. It's very important, the resilience. And also it's very important. What we see now, many of the founders, they do not get to cooperate governance right at this stage, you know, which causes a lot of problems down the line. So founder agreement is very, very important at the very, as early as possible, you know. So wherever is your brother or your wife or your husband or your colleague or, you know, somebody you've been working out with, working with for some time, you need to get a founder agreement down the line. This founder agreement should have a vesting clause. So basically whatever shares that has been awarded to them, it will be vested down the line while they're sticking to the company. So the average term for vesting, you know, founder agreement is between three to four years. So basically if a founder is having a 40% of the share, you could have vesting based on milestone 10% every year for four years. And you've got the cliffs here in which in the cliff, you will identify also specific breaks in which this specific equity is dedicated to the founder or vested to the founder. Now, then you need to demonstrate also that you are good at recruiting, you know, more successful entrepreneurs. They are good at sharing their vision with others and recruiting others around this vision. So sometimes, most of the time, the motive is not money motive, it's that, you know, getting similar brilliant mind to solve a specific problem. Now, if you're not good at recruiting, and you're not able to share this vision in a way that you could get people interested in it, and getting them to join your team, even if it was for less, you know, salary, or it was for less, you know, team size, some of them they might be coming from corporate or whatever, but many of the founders, they're very good into doing this. And they're able to create those, these teams. Investors need to know that you are good at recruiting. Actually, one of the two main traits of a successful founder from an investor point of view, apart from, you know, the technical and the job stuff, their ability to raise funds and their ability to recruit, like, good resources. If you don't have this ability, you need to build it. Because this is something that you're going to do down the line. If you're planning to scale, always you're planning to recruit more smarter people, people who know more than you on your team, people who can fill the gap, people who can take you to the next stage. And eventually, also by scaling, you need to look at raising funds in order to acquire more market, you know, and create a larger client base that you solve the problems for. And then normally the team slide will have photos with, you know, the title and the name of the teams and what is the best experience of this team. You could have a couple of logos under every team member with a LinkedIn link icon next to each one. Or you could have, you know, an experience, you could have a logo collectively, the companies those teams have been working for. Keep it simple, not a lot of information there. Now, one of the main objectives of your pitch deck is to get the investor excited into follow-on meetings and deep dives and stuff like that. So try not to put everything there, you make it a lot cluttered. The simpler it is, the better it is. And then you need to also identify if those team members have been in startups that have exited before or they have been raising monies from investors or they've been a part of a team of founders who have been doing a couple of other stuff here. Then we come to slide 11, which is the financials, and basically here you need to have, you know, a historical and projected incoming statement. If you are a pre-revenue, you could have the projected one. If you are post-revenue, you could have a historical one compared with the projected one. And then very important is to identify the cash burn on runway. Because in the ask, many of the founders will ask, how do we specify how much money that we need without diluting a lot of equity at this point of time? So most of them learn down the line that they need to identify what is the monthly cash burn. So if your company needs $100,000 to run per month, that means you need $1.2 million to run per year. And if your next milestone is 12 months down the line, a year from now, then probably you will need $1.2 million plus 70% contingency, you know, in case your fundraising period has been extended or you need any other unexpected expenses and stuff like that. So if you're doing $1.2 million, you probably raised around $1.5 or $1.6 million. Basically, so it will cover for you the time till your next milestone. And right after that, you have some contingency for anything that came up. Then you need to demonstrate that you understand your financial statement, make sure that even if you're not a financial guy, you need to understand your financial statement. Many of the founders, you know, get questions by investors regarding a specific part of the financial statement, and they're not able to address it. That's a breaker, you know, that's a really bad thing because eventually these guys are giving you their money. Even if you're not a finance guy, as a founder, you need to understand and educate yourself about how the financial is going and what is the profit and loss and cash flow, you know, and how are you going to fulfill your obligations towards your employees, towards your vendors and others. And then also, you need to show that you have an achievable forecast and you understand your burn rate well, because we see many entrepreneurs, they are not aware of their burn rate. Some of them, their forecast is too wishful thinking, sort of, they do not really bring down the means to sort of deploy this forecast down the line. So these are all points that need to be taken care of, because this is a very critical part. Some of the questions not answered at this point, or weak answers at this point, could be a really a showbreaker for the investor because they do not feel very comfortable that their money is in the safe hand. Some of the financial slides could bring, you know, like an annual reoccurring revenue, for example, and then you look at over three years or over two years if you've been a producer of revenue for some time. Or also it should have, you know, what is the revenue, what is the cost of sale, gross margin as a figure, and gross margin as a percentage, and then what is the total sales and marketing expenses, what is the recession development expenses, what are the general administrative, the total expenses, and then the operational profit or loss. And then the cash flow from operation. This could be like compared between a year and a year, so it shows that, for example, like traction, you know, increasing revenue, how many acts you're doing from a year to another, and stuff like that. It could also show that what sort of funds you have for the next couple of months, you know, like your bank rates, sort of stuff. And then we come to the last slide, probably. It is ask. It's very strange that many of the founders do not include an ask slide, you know. Also, we know that the intention for the whole process is raising funds, and probably you are talking to an investor, and he knows that you are discussing with him in order to raise funds. But having a direct, bold sort of approach to the ask, that's a very important part. It shows that also the entrepreneur is very straightforward, and knows that what he needs, whether it's money, money plus network, money plus advice, or money plus, you know, production to new region, or whatever the stuff. So, at this point, you need to provide the ask slide, and the most common here, as I mentioned earlier, you need to show if you have raised funds also before. So, you need to show what are the previous investment amounts that you have raised, in case if you are in a later stage, or if it is your first investment that you could mention that, okay, from friends or family, or from yourself. They need to know that you have the skin in the game, you know, so they need to know that you have done something from your part, so to take it to this level, if you are at early stage. And then, also, if you are at later stage, they will need to understand the last post-money valuation, so, for example, if it is 2 million, about a year and a half ago, at a valuation of 10 million, you would need to mention this for them, because based on that, they will also understand how much you have managed to produce out of this 2 million. And what is your anticipated valuation at this point, this is very important into helping the investor forecast what sort of returns that they would get down the line when they invest in you, in your startup at this stage. Also, you need to discuss what are you looking to raise right now, in terms of figure, what milestone you will achieve with this new capital, this is very important, because at the end of the day, they knew that, for example, you have raised 2 million, 10 million valuation in order to reach a specific milestone, now this milestone has enabled you to be at 50 million valuation, and now you are raising 10 million, for example. So, they know with 2 million, you have reached this point, and then with 10 million, you are going to reach 10 times, for example, this point in terms of customer acquisition, or annual reoccurring revenue, or monthly recorded revenue, they will figure out. Now, these are a couple of important points, don't clutter the slide, make it very clear and straightforward, and the key objective, I think, for this point is that to help the investor understand the capital requirement of your business, and then the progress you will make with this round of financing. Also, it's very common to see that a chart with the use of funds, so if you say you are going to raise 10 million, then it is like, for example, research and development, it's like 20%, 30%, 3 million for research and development, you know, customer acquisition, this much, you know, like hiring staff to scale, this much, and stuff like that. Because sometimes, the investor also might help into covering some of these areas, so if they have the capacity, for example, you have an investor who is like a retailer, and he has outlets, he will help you, you know, with market penetration, and stuff like that. So here, he might look at the part of market penetration, and he would rather give you an incline rather than money, in there, which might tend to be much beneficial than getting the money itself, you know. So this is an important part also to look at, and also, it's very important to identify also, earlier, perhaps in the finance, your burn rate and how much cash you have in hand. Because based on this, you will also educate the investor about the sort of capital call that you are going to make at any point, whether you are getting the investment all up front, or maybe you will receive it on tranches, or whatever the situation. And then also, you need to let the investor know what are you looking for in a partner, you know. Always getting the smart money is very, very beneficial for the startups, and very many startups, they have raised money from investors, but the value that they got out of these investors, as I mentioned earlier, in terms of market penetration, or in terms of industry experts, or the ability to manufacture stuff, or you know, the ability to introduce to further investment around, this can bring a lot of success for the founders, and smart money is very, very important. Some of the time, you know, it's like, or some of the questions that we get from founders, that shall I raise money from only one investor, or I raise from more investors, you know. It all depends on the value you are getting beyond money, you know. If you are getting two smart heads to advise you, and to share their network with you down the line, that will be better than one smart head. If you get somebody, for example, who can support you in market penetration, and another person who can support you with R&D, in terms of, for example, manufacturing capacity, or import capacity, or technical advice, you know, somebody who has been there before, who have had great exit, who could give you guidance on how to scale the company and all. Of course, more investors would add value, would be better for you, but again, you don't want to have so many investors that it is hard to manage the relation with them. So, you need to bring up the value out there. So, the slide for the ask could be like, you know, we are raising XX amount of dollars, you know, a million dollars, two million, ten million dollars, whatever. And then, over the next 24 months, for example, we are going to achieve milestone 1, milestone 2, milestone 3, in a very clear manner, or maybe, you know, you could also identify the investors that have participated in your previous rounds, and then you say, I am raising this much amount. And, you know, this is, I think, overall, those are the 12 main elements that you need to put on your slide. Now, ideally, if you do this with an intro and a closing, thank you, question and answer, then you will end up with 14 slides. Again, you have to keep the rule, you know, three by three, it's more, like, observable by the investors. You have to know that those investors, they see a lot of presentations every day, so you need to get their attention spot. And it's a continuous effort, also, sometimes, you need to customize those for a specific type of investors, or stuff like that. I hope this has been beneficial for you. I think this is an area which is very important, and many of the founders, they could benefit from such, like, structure, because, again, this is a standard structure, most of the investors, they will be seeing those in a standard structure. If you miss one of the slides, then they will figure out something is missing. This is Walid Al-Bashir, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in another episode. Thank you very much.