Presentation Guidelines

How to be selected to pitch

To pitch to the NM Angels investor members you must apply for funding and be accepted through our assessment process. What we look for and how we assess companies is outlined in investment criteria.

Pitching advice

Your pitch deck is used in a variety of venues and should be adjusted for each of these. In some cases you are presenting or in a video where you want the attention on you rather than the slides, while in others you are passing a deck on to an investor or including it in your NM Angels application.

One exceptionally useful technique is to pitch to the camera and record yourself side by side with the slides. A popular application to do this with is loom. Make sure the application/approach you use is recording both you presenting and the pitch deck simultaneously. You can create, practice, and share with others to get feedback to help you polish your pitch and presentation style into something really engaging for your audience. Highly recommended.

In your application

In the funding application there is a section that allows you to provide a video. We suggest you use this for a 3–5 minute recorded pitch. Our assessment team will review this before digging into additional application detail and it gives the team an opportunity to get to know who you are. This is a great opportunity to practice and perfect your pitch.

Your application should also contain the full pitch deck to complement the short video version and provide enough detail to enable our team to perform an initial business assessment. This version should have enough detail in it to explain all the points you would normally make as a speaker, but not so much detail that it cannot be read and comprehended in a very short time. One way to do this is to use the version you would use if you were to pitch in person and add an appendix with enough detail to explain key points that reading the first section may not adequately cover.

If selected to pitch to our Investor members

10 minutes with 5 min Q&A. Please practice and ensure you can reliably finish in 10 minutes.

One speaker

Keep the content simple and designed to complement what you are saying. Too many slides, too much detail, rambling rather than concise speech, and you will lose the audience.  

Practice your pitch first with a video app such as loom and then with an audience that does not know who you are or what your business is. Practice is essential, even for pros!

LOOKING FOR MORE ADVICE?

To learn how to pitch, attend our Office Hours or other Roundtable events.