I’ve been working with pitch decks for over 12 years. There are a few pitch decks that you would see once in a lifetime and you would think, “Alright, these pitch deck examples are what people should look at. These are the perfect situations of what defines a good pitch deck.”
For that, this article exists. I’m going to tell you my top 4 pitch deck examples and for what reason they are perfect.
1. Coinbase – Future Pitch Deck Example
Coinbase’s pitch deck is brilliant because it pitches a technology that wasn’t known at that time. Most pitch decks right now are trying to explain something that doesn’t exist.
They’re trying to say, “Alright, this is our product. This is new. You should try it or you should invest in it because it has a difference amongst its competitors. Here are our competitors and this is where we are. And that’s why we are different.”
Coinbase does this perfectly. It was way ahead of its time. Reaching the billions of valuations that it had reached was only because of the vision that they had starting with this amazing pitch deck. The challenge in this pitch deck was explaining the concept of cryptocurrency when it didn’t really exist.
You might not be explaining cryptocurrency but you might be explaining something innovative. To explain an innovative or different product, you ought to learn from the Coinbase pitch deck and how they did it by setting a perfect pitch deck example.
2. Dropbox – Visionary Pitch Deck
Dropbox has a very old pitch deck. When you look at it, you feel the age. It showed CDs, floppy disks, and stuff that are extremely old. Then you probably are wondering why would I learn from a pitch deck that is so old like that.
Well, the thing is, age is relative, right? What we’re trying to build right now is for the future and what Dropbox was trying to build then was for now. That’s why it’s also one of the best pitch deck examples that you could look into because it was pitching a product for the future that only relied on the future and that people didn’t have the capabilities to do at that moment.
Contrary to Coinbase, at least cryptocurrency existed at that time. Dropbox was pitching a technology that almost didn’t exist. They were building on the fact that CDs are gonna be extinct. When I personally was just burning DVDs and storing them for the future with all my data, I had a very big portable hard disk.
I had all those things and when I look at Dropbox, I think of it as a joke. I would never have thought that internet speed, uploading speed, would reach the limits that they are today.
Dropbox had a vision and they saw through that and this migration of generations is what you’re looking for when you have a perfect pitch deck. So this is one of my favorite pitch deck examples.
3. Canva – A Bold Pitch Deck Example
Let’s fast forward a bit in time. Canva is a website that does pitch decks, presentations, and templates for banners, Instagram, LinkedIn, or whatever you want. They just have a lot of templates and they’re easy to use compared to Microsoft or Google Slides. People somehow love them for the user experience.
In my opinion, I don’t really think that Canva is an innovative product per se because I personally don’t prefer it compared to Google Slides or PowerPoint. I have been using PowerPoint and Google Slides for a long time and any expert in presentations would still use PowerPoint or Google Slides.
Canva’s tool is not so good, but it is fast. Sometimes you find designs there that are so easy and simple that you just don’t have to think twice and you just do that in a matter of moments and it saves everything online, which makes it easy compared to PowerPoint, so it takes the best of both worlds.
The product is good. Imagine if you were an investor listening to a pitch deck of a company that’s trying to compete with PowerPoint, a product of Microsoft, and Google Slides, a product of Google—those two giants—and you’re nothing, but you want to compete with them.
This is the challenge that this pitch deck shows and that’s why I think it’s one of the best pitch decks ever, because it did not fear the competition and it pitched very well. Not only that, they became huge in the industry and people really relied on them.
They saw an opportunity and they tried to show it as much as possible in the pitch deck. Some people believed in them and were rewarded for that, so it’s definitely one of the greatest pitch deck examples to learn from.
4. Snap – An Innovative Pitch
Now the last example that I ought to show is a different sort of pitch deck. Remember, when you’re creating a pitch deck you don’t have to follow the exact structures like each pitch deck that you’ve seen before. You have to create your own and Snapchat knows that.
If you look at the deck, you wouldn’t really know whether it’s an investor deck, product deck, or a marketing deck. It’s a little bit confusing and I probably would believe that they actually use this for sales more than for investments.
Nonetheless, this pitch deck is perfect because it shows a product. People were aware that Instagram was a giant and that Instagram could have actually ripped off Snapchat when it came to their main product. They eventually did. Instagram benefited largely from it and Snapchat was really hurt by this scenario.
Yet, their pitch deck shows who they are in terms of identity. Until this moment, Snapchat is still a running company with a good market cap. That’s because people believe in what they stand for, and their leadership.
If you look at their branding, their design, the way they’re pitching a pitch deck in a portrait fashion, not landscape, because the world is all about mobile at the moment, it shows that these people have a specific coolness in them. That’s why this Snapchat pitch deck is perfect. It shows a product that could have been imitated but a team that would never be repeated again.
Learn, but don’t imitate
These are my four top pitch deck examples that you can learn from. Remember, whatever pitch deck example you learn from, don’t apply exactly the same structure to your own deck.
Use your own story. Start by building a storyboard. Learn what you’re trying to tell the people out there and then learn from those. Use a slide like Coinbase. Use a slide like Canva. You could think that when you’re pitching a business model, for example, Dropbox pitched a good business model slide, so maybe you’ll make something like that.
That’s how you turn a pitch deck into an amazing pitch deck.