Kestrel Demo Day Pitch
Demo day pitch deck
Five minutes on a stage, in front of several hundred investors, most of them standing at the back. This is a demo day pitch for Kestrel, an invented company that puts a camera above an injection moulding press and stops the machine when it starts making scrap. Eight slides, no screenshots, no video, and the revenue on slide two rather than slide seven.
Every slide, in order
The whole deck as it renders, one slide after another. Read it the way the audience would.
The structure
What each slide is doing, so you can reuse the order even with different content.
- Slide 1cover
- Says what the company does in one line a non expert understands, before anything else.
- Slide 2metrics
- Leads with the number rather than saving it, which is the single rule of a demo day pitch.
- Slide 3takeaway
- One sentence of problem. A demo day audience does not need the problem explained twice.
- Slide 4checklist
- The whole product as five short declarative lines, legible from the back of a large room.
- Slide 5metrics
- Sizes the market bottom up, in machines and price, the way demo day investors demand.
- Slide 6metrics
- The growth curve, drawn big enough to read from the back row.
- Slide 7pillars
- Three facts about the founders, one panel each, with nothing that is not genuinely notable.
- Slide 8closing
- One next step with a name and an address on it, which is all a demo day close is for.
What makes this deck work
The number goes first
Slide two is one figure filling half the screen. A demo day audience decides whether to keep listening inside twenty seconds, and revenue held back to the end is revenue nobody heard.
The market is counted, not quoted
Machines in reach times price per machine equals the number. No global manufacturing figure, no one percent of a trillion. Three numbers on one line that an investor can check in their head.
Nothing on a slide needs a squint
No screenshots, no product tour, no dense chart. The whole product is five short declarative lines, because the back row of a demo day room cannot read anything smaller.
Questions people ask
How many slides is a demo day pitch?
Five to eight. Y Combinator ran a two and a half minute format at five to seven slides for years and now runs a sixty second single slide format. Techstars gives around five minutes plus questions, which is where an eight slide deck like this one fits.
Should the demo day deck include a live demo?
No. Y Combinator says demos seldom work on a demo day stage and videos are almost never a good idea, because the audience is there to judge the founder rather than the software. Describe the product in a few short lines instead.
What should not be in a demo day deck?
Financial projections, a competitor matrix, use of funds, exit strategy and deal terms. Those belong in the deck you email afterwards. On the stage they cost you the seconds you need for traction and the ask.
How does it differ from the deck I send to investors?
They are two different documents. The stage deck is spare, visual and read from twenty metres away. The follow up deck is dense, self explanatory and read alone on a laptop. Sending the stage deck by email is the standard mistake.
Build your own in about a minute
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