Hi, I'm Jan König 👋. I'm one of the founders of Jovo, 28 years old, and live in Berlin. < Go back to learn more.

Pitch Decks are a waste of time (mostly)

betaworks, the startup studio and seed investor I did an internship at 2 years ago, is a powerpoint free zone. And they've had quite some successful product launches in the past. Giphy, for example, started out as a gif search engine and is now integrated into basically everything. And they just secured a $55M Series C investment.

Now imagine you're an investor and see a pitch deck about building a "search engine for gifs," would you invest in that? Most ideas that turn out to be great businesses sound really, really dumb at the beginning. It's always about how well the product is designed and built (at least in the consumer business).

I feel like pitch decks are the new business plans: you put in hours of work, but no one really looks at it. As far as I know, no deal is secured because that pitch deck looked so great. I've invested so many hours into designing, redesigning, and redesigning pitch decks, that kind of feel like a waste of time. I should invest more time in working on our product 💪🏼. 

(We're actually redesigning HashtagNow at the moment, stay tuned for some screenshots)
-Jan

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