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

Episode 436: Download the deck and follow along at Shaanpuri.com/deck. In a special Friday episode, Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) gives a special masterclass on his pitch deck that has raised millions from investors. Go to the MFM YouTube channel to see examples. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. SHAAN'S NEW DAILY NEWSLETTER --> shaanpuri.com ----- Links: * Shaanpuri.com/deck * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (01:35) - Title (05:41) - Data/personal story (07:30) - Future vision (10:30) - Hero metric (14:15) - Track record (16:30) - Sweeten the pot ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:10Shaan Puri?

  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 did 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 because 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

• 0:54Shaan Puri?

  I have used to raise money. I have sent to other founders or helped 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 a thousand dollars 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 going to 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, uh, and now you, um, you will be able to see the screen here because it's gonna be a lot better with the visuals. But if you're on YouTube already, all right, you're here. So here's, um, let's, let me pull this up. So this is my dummy pitch deck. And, uh, by the way, I'm doing this kind of live and improvise. I haven't looked at this in a little while. So there might be some, uh, some funky stuff

• 1:37Shaan Puri?

  going on, but that's okay. We'll, we'll improvise as we go. So the first thing is, uh, 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 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. Well, it's a subtitle that says the outcome, um, and maybe your special sauce. And so this is where we landed on. So we go, they said, we are helping millions.

• 2:23Shaan Puri?

  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, it 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 want to, if you have credibility, you want to 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 going to 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?

• 3:07Shaan Puri?

  And the second is, um, or are you somebody that 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 two. 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 you or a company doesn't have accomplishments, then skip this slide. Don't put this here. You don't want to 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 a 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.

• 3:51Shaan Puri?

  So our title became, we literally wrote the book on sleep. Um, and then basically I explained, um, our co-founders, you know, our founders 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.

• 4:31Shaan Puri?

  Who was responsible for a $500 million plus is business at Accenture.

• 4:41Shaan Puri?

  We built this app in five weeks and have over, you know, whatever XXX downloads with zero paid spend, 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, 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 going to get somebody hooked?

• 5:24Shaan Puri?

  So here we're saying, we have a compelling initial thing. We're helping millions of people fix insomnia with skills, not pills. Secondly, 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 going to build this thing. Okay, great. So now you're going to say, most customers have this problem and it's going to be backed by either really compelling data or a personal story. And so, you know, I'm going to 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, have insomnia. That's 75 million people, right? And then we added to that, the personal story. So that became,

• 6:09Shaan Puri?

  including me, I had insomnia for years. I tried pills, but felt yucky. I tried to send some 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 have 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 want to do the current solution. So before what what people are tempted to do is say, here's my solution. Here's why we're so great. Instead, you want to say, here's how they tried to fix it today.

• 6:49Shaan Puri?

  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, you know, pills or, you know, sleeping, sleeping pills is X billion dollars. Whatever, you know, nasal strips is this, you know, whatever, whatever the other sleep aids, you know,

• 7:32Shaan Puri?

  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 going to say. And so, you know, this is where for them, we basically came in and we said, you know, instead, here's our solution.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  You know, instead, we built an app that will 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. And then you you kind of reinforce it, right? Like, that's us. We do that thing. So if you if you gave a hypothetical here, like, what if there was an app that did blah, blah, blah, blah? 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

• 8:50Shaan Puri?

  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 explained 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. That's $100 billion industry that's totally broken. You know, so I, so as an investor, I'm thinking, wow, if they actually fix this problem, that would be a big deal. So, you know, for these guys,

• 9:30Shaan Puri?

  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 going to do for insomnia, depression, and anxiety. And then, you know, we then added 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 want to anchor it to something that they already know, and then you want to, so why did we use Headspace and Calm, or why do we use, it's Uber for X? Because it anchors it to something they understand, something that

• 10:11Shaan Puri?

  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. We're going to be, but, but more people play Fortnite than play baseball. This is going to 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,

• 10:48Shaan Puri?

  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. 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 going to 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. 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.

• 11:31Shaan Puri?

  If your chart sucks, your pitch is going to 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 you have a track record of doing this with other products. 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 going to 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.

• 12:14Shaan Puri?

  So now what you're going to do is you're going to say, let me tell you how we're different. Right? Does this already exist? Is this really that different than anything else? And this is where you're going to highlight your differentiator. What most people do is they just explain their features. That's not what you want to do. You want to 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. 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 them at cost, but we have an annual subscription. That's Costco. It might be product. Everybody else tries to solve this problem with pills.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  We do it with skills through this app that teaches you daily habits. Everybody else tries to grow through paid marketing, but we do YouTube content that gets millions of views. And therefore, we're able to acquire customers for pennies where everybody else is paying $10. This is the type of thing that you're going to do. Product, business model, or growth strategy? How are you different than everybody else?

• 13:23Shaan Puri?

  Our software is the worst.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:39Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 13:48Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 13:58Shaan Puri?

  The way that Peloton did this for fitness, we're doing this over here in this other space. So you want to 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 guys a part of? And they ended up telling me we didn't design this slide, but there's three big trends. One is app-based coaching, Calm, Headspace. They've proven that people will do app-based coaching. The next one is telemedicine. There are billion-dollar companies now that people are comfortable getting doctors' 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 surfing these big waves. We're not the big wave ourself. We are surfing the big waves.

• 14:44Shaan Puri?

  Now you want to answer the why now question. So can you explain why this ideal would work today? But it wouldn't have worked three years ago, five years ago, or 10 years ago. What has changed? Did a rule change? Did technology change? Did social behaviors change? And so, 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 five years ago. Regulation did not allow for digital therapy with licensed doctors. So there's a regulatory inflection point. Also, in the last two years due to COVID, everybody had to have a telemedicine experience.

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

  We went from 10% of people having tried telemedicine to 80% in two years. So the whole world got to sample this and now has an experience doing this. They're going to be more comfortable today than they would have 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 want to reinforce what we did up top? Or if you didn't write that up top, you want to write it here? So this is your why you. Okay. Now, the business part. How do you make money doing this? If I give you some money, you know, 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.

• 16:11Shaan Puri?

  This is where you do your unit economics. So you show that you've actually thought this through, that the business is sensible. You know, 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 a hundred dollars per session at 25% net margin. Here's our, and then they had a graph of their unit economics and their payback period. So their payback period was they acquire users for X dollars and that means they break even in three months on that user. So three months is a good, good payback period. So that's the unit economics slide. Now you're going to do the, what milestones will you hit? So if I give you this money, how will you make this the?

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  How will you make this the, the big, um, you know, the, the big, big result? So, you know, here's, you know, how will you make progress so that the valuation goes up? And my shares become worth more.

• 17:11Shaan Puri?

  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. Key drivers, uh, allow people, uh, in from the, you know, what are we going to do to get there? We're going to allow people in from the waitlist. We're going to hire three more coaches and we're going to roll out our company plan that lets corporations buy this for their employees. But those are the key things we're going to do to get to 1 million ARR. And now I'm telling you, if you give me $2 million, I'll turn that into 1 million of annual recurring revenue.

• 17:39Shaan Puri?

  Also on the, uh, why you, 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 eight hours of Candy Crush, uh, per day, we've decided to help people, help everyone get, gets better sleep at night. Right? So I kind of like this, this vocal style of being a little bit ballsy. Not everybody loves that. Um, 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.

• 18:21Shaan Puri?

  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, um, for them, their pot sweetener was this. Whoops.

• 18:46Shaan Puri?

  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'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, we're closing out this round. If you're interested, email me here. Uh, here's my email address. And that's That's my dummy pitch deck. I kind of messed up my template here. I can, I can make

• 19:31Shaan Puri?

  this available. So if you just go to, I'll make a link for this. So just go to seanpurie.com/deck, 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 revert all these. So it goes back to the template and then you can use this for your stuff. So try this out. Let me know what you think. It's pretty battle tested. So, you know, I've definitely been there. The hard part for most of you is going to 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

• 20:13Shaan Puri?

  business is weak. Why would a smart investor not invest in this? And you need to go fix those problems because 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. 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 go get this deck seanpurie.com/deck and, and try it out. Let me know. Let me know how it goes for you. All right. That's all.