Shaan's Masterclass On Pitching That Has Raised Millions From Investors

All right, what's up y'all? Sean here, and this is going to be a different type of episode. This is a— I'm calling a masterclass. So, uh, Masterclass didn't invite me to do a masterclass because I'm not famous, um, but F them, I'm gonna do it myself. I know how to do some things really, really well, one of which is pitching. And so if you're listening to this on the podcast feed, uh, it's gonna be slightly not ideal cuz I'm gonna share my screen. I'm gonna show, I'm gonna give away one of my little assets, which is my dummy pitch deck. So this is literally a template for how I do my pitch decks. That is, uh, for any business that's trying to raise money, uh, you want to send a deck to an investor and you want to have them understand what you're doing, be excited about what you're doing and cut you the check. This is a deck that I have used to raise money. I have sent to other founders or help them raise money. I also, in my Power Writing course, this is one of the modules. Uh, this is one of the examples, one of the templates I give away. So normally people pay $1,000 to take that course. This is one of the little things in there. I'm giving this away for free right now. So if you're on the podcast feed, you're not gonna be able to see my screen. So what I recommend you do, hit pause, open YouTube, type in My First Million. That's— find our channel, subscribe to it, and, and now you, you will be able to see the screen here because it's going to be a lot better with the visuals. But if you're on YouTube already, all right, you're here. So here's— let's— let me pull this up. So this is my dummy pitch deck. And by the way, I'm doing this kind of live and improvised. I haven't looked at this in a little while, so there might be some, some funky stuff going on, but that's okay. We'll improvise as we go. So the first thing is your title and a small subtitle explaining what you do. And as we go through this, pitch deck, I'm going to, um, write in an example from that, that we, I had done with a founder, uh, in our Power Writing course. Okay. So for example, uh, here with the, this is your title. So they go, we are Shuni. And I was like, okay, what the heck is that? And they go, um, you know, first they said we are an app for people with insomnia. And I said, okay, that's kind of, you know, that's, that's okay. What's a subtitle that says the outcome? And maybe your special sauce. And so this is what we landed on. So we go, they said, we are helping millions, millions of people fix their insomnia with skills, parentheses, not pills. So that took a little bit of workshopping to get that one-liner, but when you have that one-liner, feels so good when you get that one-liner. So I think this is great. What are we doing? We are out here trying to help millions of people fix their insomnia with skills, not pills. All right, so that's your first line, first slide. Now let's get to the good stuff. So this is where you wanna, you, if you have credibility, you wanna lead with it, which is basically in the beginning of any pitch, an investor is trying to figure out, should I even care? Should I listen? And should I listen is gonna come down to one of two things. Number one, um, do you have something that I want? So that's kind of what the title slide sort of hints at. What do you, what do you actually do? And the second is,, or are you somebody that, uh, is legit? Are you worth listening to? Do you have credibility or some, some gravity to you about what you've done? So if you have accomplishments, I like putting that as slide 2. So a bit of credibility. Uh, if you have some accomplishments, set the stage. This is your quick intro, which sounds polite, but it's actually a place to humble brag. And, um, if your company doesn't have accomplishments, then skip this slide. Don't put this here. You don't wanna lead with, I'm not that interesting. So, uh, in Shuni's case, I go, why, you know, do you have any credibility? And they go, well, our co-founder or our partner is this guy Matthew Walker who wrote this book, Why We Sleep. It's a— and I was like, oh, I've heard of that book. It's like a bestseller. They go, yeah, exactly. So I go, perfect. So our title became, we literally wrote the book on sleep. Um, and then basically I explained our co-founders, or, you know, our founder's book, Why We Sleep, is a New York Times bestseller with over X million copies sold, or whatever the thing is. So that's like one of them. And then, you know, the other person, and I'm a AI research scientist who has, who was responsible for a $500 million plus business unit at Accenture. We built this app in 5 weeks and have over, you know, whatever, XXX downloads with zero paid Spent, right? So something like this, you're trying to show that you were highly, highly credible. And then, you know, I would put the, you know, the, like the title of the book, you know, the recognizable image or some image here in big words. And again, forget the formatting, right? Like I'm not working on slide design right now. That's why I just took the Times New Roman, black font, white slide, because I'm not worried about design. That will come at the end. We'll do that later. For now, it's what is the story? What is the storyline that's gonna get somebody hooked? So here we're saying, uh, we have a compelling initial thing. We're helping millions of people fix insomnia with skills, not pills. Secondly, we're, we're legit. You should listen to us. We literally wrote the book on sleep, one of the bestsellers. We wrote that. I'm a good business person and engineer. That's the dynamic duo that's gonna build this thing. Okay, great. So now you're gonna say most customers have this problem and it's gonna be the backed by either really compelling data or a personal story. Um, and so, you know, I'm gonna just copy paste kind of what I did for them here. So most customers have this problem. For that, we did 25% of Americans have, uh, have insomnia. That's 75 million people, right? And then we added to that the personal story. So that became, including me, I had insomnia for years. I tried pills but felt yucky. I tried essential oils. It did nothing. Finally, I found something that worked. Okay, so this is your problem slide, your problem slide with a big headline number that punches you in the face, shows how big of a problem it is, and ideally maybe a personal connection to it. I had this problem, I knew this problem, I either I had this problem or I was a doctor and I saw thousands of patients who had this problem. I've helped treat thousands of patients who have this problem, right? So something like that that connects you to the problem is ideal. And then you wanna do the current solution. So before, what, what people are tempted to do is say, here's my solution, here's why we are so great. Instead, you wanna say, here's how they try to fix it today. So what we did for this was we said, so the how we solve it today, we did Americans spend $75 billion per year on sleep aids to try to fix their sleep problems. They barely work, they have side effects, and they're mostly using fake science, right? So that's what we put as the, the secondary thing here. And then here I would maybe put some images of the categories, right? So I would put like, You know, whatever, some shape here. So let me get a little shape. I'd be like, uh, you know, pills or, you know, sleeping pills is X billion dollars. Um, whatever, you know, nasal strips is this, you know, whatever the other sleep aids, you know, essential oils or whatever people use to solve this problem. So I would kind of show they try A, B, and C, none of that shit works. And this is where you now come in with the Steve Jobs moment. You get your turtleneck on, And you say, but what if instead there was a simpler solution, a beautiful solution, a solution that totally fixed this problem with no downsides whatsoever, right? This is essentially what you're gonna say. And so, you know, this is where for them, we basically came in and we said, you know, instead, here's our solution. You know, instead we built an app that will take teach you how to sleep without having to take medicine. So that's the headline that would come here. And then beautiful picture of your product. Um, and then you, you kind of reinforce it, right? Like that's us, we do that thing. Um, you know, so if you, if you gave a hypothetical here, like what if there was an app that did blank, blank, blank, blank, then you say that's us, we do that thing. Or in this case, just put it all on one slide. That's fine. Now here's a key thing that most people miss. So what they do typically is they go solution, And then they just go solution, solution, solution. They just start talking about how the solution works under the hood. Everything about the solution. As an investor, you don't need to know how the whole product works yet. You instead need to know, is this big? Am I going to make money? Right? That's what the receiver of this presentation really wants to know. Am I betting on credible people? Are they solving a big problem? Does their solution make sense? And how big can this get? So now we go here, we state the dream. So we explain the big plan, the big vision for how big this company could become. You know, this is where you might say we're, we're building Uber for freight trucking, right? That's like we're building this big thing in this big industry. Um, that's a $100 billion industry that's totally broken. Um, you know, so I, so as an investor, I'm thinking, wow, if they actually fix this problem, that would be a big deal. Um, so, you know, for these guys, what they did was we said, This, our dream, what Calm and Headspace, you know, $2 billion company, $1 billion company did for meditation, we are gonna do for insomnia, depression, and anxiety. And then, you know, we then added the, the sort of subtext. These are $200 billion annual markets. It's 50 times bigger than meditation. And then we, we follow on again. We make this even more persuasive. So you wanna anchor it to something that they already know and then you want to, um, so why did we use Headspace and Calm or why do we use it's Uber for X? Uh, because it anchors it to something they understand, something that they know, right? We're building, you know, I built an esports app and I said, we're building Little League Baseball for Fortnite or for esports. Okay. Little League Baseball produces X hundred million dollars a year. Um, we're gonna be able, but, but more people play Fortnite than play baseball. This is gonna be a bigger business than even the Little League is. And so we were able to take this, something that sounded very niche, right? Like youth esports, but make it sound a lot bigger by pitching it, connecting it to something that's already big and then saying, we're doing that, but in this big space. So, um, so, you know, here's, here's where this slide landed. People with these illnesses are sick of taking pills for every problem. We can get clinically verified results with habit-based app therapy. Therapy. Um, and I think the key here is what this thing you recognize did for the X we're doing for Y. Y is much bigger than X, 50 times bigger than X. And people really have this problem. All right, so now you're gonna get to your traction slide. Again, as an investor, I'm trying to figure out, is this actually going to work? The easiest way to answer that question is to say it's already working. Look at this shit. So, so far so good. And this is where you put an impressive chart. Um, so your, what is your hero chart? How can you show that this thing is working? So what is your, what is your most hero metric? And this is where pitching can't save you. If your chart sucks, your pitch is gonna kind of suck. You know, no pitch can fix a terrible business. You shouldn't be pitching a terrible business. You should be pitching a business that's working or going to work. And so you want to, if it's already working, you want to show that if it's going to work, you want to say why you believe it's going to work. Maybe you have a waitlist that's really big. Maybe, um, you have a track record of doing this with other products. Um, you know, what can you show that would give me faith that this isn't all just talk? There's some evidence. So this is where you put your hero chart. Now you go back to under the hood. So now you're gonna say, all right, now you're interested, correct? I told you the problem, the solution, the big vision of how big this can be, and the evidence that we're on our way. So now what you're gonna do is you're gonna say, Let me tell you how we're different, right? Uh, does this already exist? Is this really that different than anything else? And this is where you're gonna highlight your differentiator. What most people do is they just explain their features. That's not what you wanna do. You wanna say everybody does X and we do Y, right? That's the core differentiator. So let me tell you how our approach is different yet sensible. Uh, others do X, we do Y. And this is where you're talking about either your product strategy, your business model, your growth strategy, et cetera. Right? Everybody else charges for this stuff. We give it to 'em at cost, but we have an annual subscription. That's Costco. Um, it might be product, you know, everybody else tries to solve this problem with pills. We do it with skills through this app that teaches you daily habits, right? Um, everybody else tries to grow through paid marketing, but we do YouTube content that gets millions of views and therefore we're able to, you know, acquire customers for pennies where everybody else is paying $10, right? This is the, the type of thing that you're gonna do. Product, business model, or growth strategy. How are you different than everybody else? Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot. Grow better. Now we zoom out. Is there a bigger trend that you're a part of? Again, this is all about instilling confidence, confidence, confidence, confidence. Um, how are, you know, one way to instill confidence is we're not alone doing this. This is something that you're seeing. The whole world is moving remote. Um, you know, the, you know, the way that Peloton did this for fitness, we're doing this over here in this other space. So you wanna be able to zoom out and show that you're a part of a bigger trend.. So in their case, I asked them this question. I said, what bigger trends are you, you guys a part of? And they ended up telling me, we didn't, we didn't design this slide, but there's 3 big trends. One is app-based coaching, Calm, Headspace. They've proven that people will do app, app-based coaching. The next one is telemedicine. There are billion-dollar companies now that people are comfortable getting doctors and a doctor's advice over the phone. And lastly is that insomnia, depression, anxiety are rising due to Technology overload, the pandemic, the recession, the whatever else. And so we are, we are surfing these big waves. We're not the big wave ourself. We are surfing the big waves. Now you wanna answer the why now question. So can you explain why this idea would work today, but it wouldn't have worked 3 years ago or 5 years ago or 10 years ago? What has changed? Did a rule change? Did, uh, technology change? Did social behaviors change?. And so, um, you know, for example, in their case, when we brainstormed, and again, it's not about slide design, it's about being able to make a persuasive case. And so each of these slides is part of your persuasive case. This is your why now. So why now? Well, this wouldn't have worked 5 years ago. Regulation did not allow for digital therapy with licensed doctors. So there's a regulatory inflection point. Also in the last 2 years due to COVID, everybody had to have a telemedicine experience. We went from 10% of people having tried telemedicine to 80% in 2 years. So the whole world got to sample this and now has an experience doing this. There are gonna be more comfortable today than they would've been, you know, X years ago. Okay. Why are you the one to do it? What's your track record, your credibility, your expertise? You wanna reinforce what we did up, up top, or if you didn't write that up top, you wanna write it here. So this is your why, why you. Um, okay. Now the business part. How do you make money doing this? If I give you some money, what will happen? And so this is where usually I actually kind of left one out here. So what I would do here is I would separate these. I would do how the money gets made. This is where you do your unit economics. So you show that you've actually thought this through, that the business is sensible. We put in X dollars, it costs us Y to produce the product or service, and Z is the net profit at the end of it.. And so, you know, for these guys, they were able to say, we make $100 per session at 25% net margin. Here's our— and then they had a graph of their unit economics and their payback period. So they, their payback period was, um, they acquire users for X dollars and that means they break even in 3 months on that user. So that's a 3 months is a good, good payback period. So that's the unit economics side. Now you're gonna do the, uh, What milestones will you hit? So if I give you this money, how will you make this the, um, uh, how will you make this the, the big, um, you know, the, the big, big results? So, you know, here's, you know, you know, how will you make progress so that the valuation goes up and my shares become worth more? Uh, so, you know, this is what we came up with for them, which was they're raising $2 million to do their pilots to get our first 5,000 paying customers. The key drivers, uh, allow people, uh, in from the, you know, what are we gonna do to get there? We're gonna allow people in from the waitlist. We're gonna hire 3 more coaches and we're gonna roll out our company plan that lets corporations buy this for their employees. So those are the key things we're gonna do to get to $1 million ARR. And now I'm telling you, if you gimme $2 million, I'll turn that into $1 million of annual recurring revenue. Um, also on the, uh, YU, we had a good version of it for them. Uh, so, you know, I'm a fan of being bold with this stuff. So we're the team for this. We're world-renowned sleep experts and AI engineers. Instead, and then we wrote this, instead of trying to get people to play 8 hours of Candy Crush per day, we've decided to help people, help everyone get better sleep at night. So I kind of like this vocal style of being a little bit ballsy. Not everybody loves that. And sure, it could turn some people off, but you want to attract the type of investor that, uh, likes you. And so, you know, as long as you attract— as long as some people love it, it's okay that some people hate it. You, you, you know, as long as just not everybody hates it. Um, all right, now this is one thing I see a lot of people miss out on: sweeten the pot. So you want to take some of your good news and move 15% of it to the end of the— end of the show. So what can you save for the end? It's like your little good news dessert at the end of the— at the end of the thing. So So, um, for them, their pot sweetener was this. Oops. Um, they said one last thing. We just secured a partnership with NIH. They're going to be giving us $500,000 in this round, no dilution. There's over $2 billion in sleep funding grants available, and we will tap into this as we grow. Nice. Uh, just a little bit of good news at the end that shows more momentum, more progress, a key partnership you just had. Uh, maybe it, it's a revenue milestone or it's, um, you know, some, some key thing that's, that you didn't put in your main traction. You just took a little bit of good news out, saved it for the end to leave them on a high note. And this is at the end, call to action. So get in touch. Um, you know, we're closing out this round. If you're interested, email me here. Uh, here's my email address. And that's the, that's my dummy pitch deck. Uh, I kind of messed up my template here. I can, uh, I can make this available. So if you just go to, um, I'll make a, a link for this. So just go to seanpourrie.com, uh, deck, D-E-C-K. I'll put a link to this here so you can go and download this and have a copy of this for yourself and you can edit it with your stuff. So I'll clean this up. I'll, I'll revert all these so it goes back to the template and then, um, you can use this for your stuff. So Try this out. Let me know what you think. Um, it's pretty battle-tested, so, you know, I've, I've definitely been there. The hard part for most of you is gonna be you don't have good stuff to put on some of the slides. You don't have a differentiator or you don't have traction, or you don't have a pot sweetener, or you don't have a great track record. And that's where you, you're, you will learn what part of your business is weak. Why would a smart investor not invest in this? And you need to go fix those problems cuz it's, if you do use this deck, you will be able to raise money. As long as you actually have good content to put inside. If your business is not very good, then don't worry about the deck. Make your business better first, then go raise the money. So anyways, that's it. That was my masterclass. Uh, if you liked it, let me know. If you want me to do more of these, I got, I got tons of these things. So, uh, go get this deck, shaunpuri.com/deck, and, uh, and try it out. Let me know. Let me know how it goes for you. All right. That's all.