Having sat on startup judging panels and seeing a ton of startup pitches, it surprises me how many startup decks miss some of the critical slides needed in a pitch deck.

When putting a pitch deck it’s not there for you to remember what to say – its for your audience to understand what you are saying!

It doesn’t matter if you’re an awesome speaker or not, from the slides an audience should be able to fully understand what you do and get a snapshot into what you are trying to accomplish and its potential.

Remember: good deck flow is more important than the graphic design of the deck, just look at Dave McClure’s decks – a visual nightmare, but an informational paradise.

This ongoing column will spotlight some pitch hacks that I want to share with the Hong Kong startup community.

I was recently on a judging panel for SeedStars World in Hong Kong and like most other pitch events they gave the judges a scoring sheet – but for some reason this is not shared with the startups – we have to score on a scale from 1-10 on 5 different criteria (which is then added up to showcase the startups with the highest scores and then a winner chosen from that pool) usually the startup does not cover at least 2-3 of these criteria in their pitch and the scoring is based more on personal choices than on hitting the key scoring points.

I believe an integral slide in any pitch; and saves wasting time in the Q&A section; is the Competitive Analysis slide.

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