Customer Story

How an Aspiring Entrepreneur Raised Funding for Her Startup With Piktochart

venus wong stanford

Venus Wong

Psychologist and Affiliated Scholar, Standford University

Being a startup founder isn’t easy. In order to secure founding and win the hearts of your customers, you need to stay ahead of the competition and constantly bring fresh ideas to the table.

Old way won’t open new doors.

This story is about trying new approaches and how this can help you to win.

As part of our #PiktoChat series, Wilson had a brief chat over Zoom with Venus Wong, a Psychologist and Affiliated Scholar at Stanford University, to discuss the importance of visual communication for entrepreneurs.

As an aspiring entrepreneur, Venus is on the verge of launching her startup in mid-2021. Her business idea focuses on improving healthcare access in the United States. Venus wants to make sure that families will receive the support that they need to thrive.

Her passion in supporting families in their local communities was birthed during an aha moment. She realized that she could potentially bring a change to the whole healthcare system instead of just the specific people.

Going beyond PowerPoint

When Venus started working on her startup idea, she faced limitations with the design tools such as PowerPoint, Photoshop, and Illustrator. She needed something more. Something that would help her become more efficient.

Although she enjoyed the process of learning these tools, she admits, that it took her too much time to create a simple design. She needed a solution that is better than Powerpoint but less design-intensive than Photoshop or Illustrator.

Venus reached out to her designer colleague looking for a solution that would allow her to create a better pitch deck. This is how she discovered Piktochart.

Piktochart was exactly the right fit for what she was looking for from a design tool.

Pitch decks for effective communication of ideas

As an aspiring entrepreneur with a passion to drive social change, Venus sees a lot of potential in visual communication. She perceives it as a more effective way to build a connection between the audience and the problem she is trying to solve. She does it through pitch decks.

Visual communication became her approach to telling a story. It helped her to present concepts clearly and more effectively by having her audience follow her pitch decks.

One of such pitch decks eventually led to her startup receiving investment funding and according to Venus, Piktochart was instrumental in this successful milestone.

Additionally, Venus has created pitch decks using Piktochart to present to potential customers across community-based organizations and non-profits.

“Everything I do is on Piktochart right now. It’s so easy for me to modify different decks and it saves me so much time with the variety of templates.”

Venus Wong, Founder at Project Formula

Bringing the audience on a journey

When speaking with community-based organizations and non-profits, Venus aims to invite them on a journey. In this particular deck she used an icon of a car car to bring her audience on a journey through the product roadmap.

project formula roadmap slide

Initially, Venus tried creating this roadmap with Adobe Illustrator but she was unable to do it due to her lack of expertise with that tool.

With Piktochart this task was trivial. She created a roadmap that she wanted within just 10 minutes. On top of that, she had fun putting it together.

She simply made use of the different elements such as circle shape, color blocks, and dotted lines that are available on the platform to make this roadmap a reality. This is by far her most favorite creation on Piktochart.

“I do not have any expertise in design but Piktochart turns people like me into a designer.”

Venus Wong, Founder at Project Formula
project formula roadmap design

Design tips for getting your message across

After working on multiple pitch decks, Venus learned that it’s important to stick to one main message per slide.

Overall, she suggests to not go beyond four main messages throughout the whole deck. Essentially, what matters is telling a story effectively to the audience. If you do it, then they should be able to grasp the message clearly.

White space is another tip recommended by Venus. She implements white space by not over-saturating the design of her pitch deck. She use the black space for the imagination of the audience.

Finally, according to Venus, color is an important aspect of a visual. Venus expresses that those in academia sometimes pay less attention to color and are not taking full advantage of it. However, consistent usage of colors that represents a brand and its mission can be a powerful medium to evoke the emotion of your audience.

Saving more time with Piktochart

Out of the many features on Piktochart, Venus finds that the photo frame feature is her favorite one. She utilizes it frequently in her pitch decks.

“If I don’t have Piktochart, I have to go back to Photoshop or Illustrator and it will take me a longer time just to put a photo into a particular shape and frame.”

Venus Wong, Founder at Project Formula

Hence, time is of essence to Venus as she juggles between her work, being a psychologist, and working on her startup. Putting time to learning tools like Photoshop and Illustrator can be challenging for entrepreneurs who are always on the go.

For Venus, Piktochart is her one-second solution as she can easily add an image into a shape and frame without any difficulties.

All in all, Venus enjoys the beautiful templates on Piktochart that she can rely on for all her visual needs.

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