Guides · 6 min read
How to make a pitch deck investors can follow
A pitch deck has one job: to get you the next meeting. Investors see a lot of decks, so the ones that work are short, clear and in an order they recognise. Here are the slides they expect, what each one should say, and how to keep the whole thing tight.
Start with the story, not the slides
Before you open any software, write your pitch as five sentences. What is broken, what you built, who pays for it, why it is working, and what you need. If you cannot say it in five sentences, more slides will not help.
Those sentences become the spine of the deck. Every slide should move one of them forward. When a slide does not, it goes in the appendix or in the bin.
Remember that most decks are read before they are presented. Someone will open your PDF on a phone between meetings. Each slide has to make sense without you in the room, so use full sentence titles that state the point.
The slides investors expect, in order
There is no single official template, but the outline popularised by Sequoia Capital and repeated by many accelerators is a safe base. Investors know it, so they can find what they are looking for quickly. A typical order looks like this:
- Title: company name, one line on what you do, your name and contact.
- Problem: the pain your customer feels today, described in their words.
- Solution: what you built and how it removes that pain.
- Why now: what changed in technology, regulation or behaviour that makes this possible today.
- Market: how big the opportunity is, built up from real customers and prices.
- Product: screenshots or a short walk through of how it works.
- Traction: revenue, users, growth, pilots or letters of intent. Your strongest evidence.
- Business model: who pays, how much and how often.
- Competition: the alternatives customers use today and why you win.
- Team: the people, and why they are the right people for this problem.
- Financials: a simple view of the next few years and the key assumptions.
- The ask: how much you are raising and what it will achieve.
What makes each slide work
The problem slide is where most decks are won or lost. Make it specific. Name the customer, describe the moment the pain happens, and show what it costs them in time or money. A vague problem makes even a great product look unnecessary.
For the market slide, avoid simply quoting a huge industry number. Investors trust a bottom up estimate more: the number of customers you can realistically reach multiplied by what each one pays you. Show your working in one or two lines.
Traction deserves the biggest numbers in the deck. If you have revenue, show it as a simple chart over time. If you are early, show pilots, waiting lists, repeat usage or customer quotes. Move traction earlier in the deck if it is your strongest card.
The ask should be one clear figure and a short list of what the money buys, such as the hires, the launches and the milestones you will reach before you need to raise again.
How long should a pitch deck be?
Most investor decks land between 10 and 15 slides. Guy Kawasaki's well known 10/20/30 rule suggests 10 slides, 20 minutes and no font smaller than 30 points. You do not have to follow it exactly, but it is a good reminder that less usually reads better.
Keep a separate appendix for detail that only some investors will ask for: unit economics, cohort data, technical architecture, the full financial model. It lets you answer hard questions without crowding the main story.
Design that helps, not distracts
Investors are not judging your taste in fonts, but they notice clutter. Use one typeface family, one accent colour and plenty of white space. Put one idea on each slide and let the title carry it.
Turn numbers into visuals where you can. A growth line, a market built up as nested circles or a simple bar comparison is understood in seconds. Tables of figures are better left for the appendix.
Make sure the deck works as a PDF. Fonts should be embedded, images should be sharp, and nothing should depend on animation to make sense.
Common mistakes to avoid
These come up again and again, and every one is easy to fix before you hit send.
- Opening with a long company history instead of the problem.
- Claiming you have no competitors. Customers always have an alternative, even if it is a spreadsheet.
- Hiding the ask or leaving it out entirely.
- Using projections with no stated assumptions.
- Sending a 30 slide deck when 12 would do.
- Titles like Market or Team that state a topic instead of a point.
Building the deck faster
If you already have a one pager, a business plan or a set of notes, you do not need to start from a blank slide. PPTlover is an AI presentation maker that reads a PDF, a Word file, text or a short brief, plans the story and designs every slide in one of 76 styles. Market charts, traction numbers and roadmaps come out as visuals rather than bullet lists.
You can export a PDF to email investors and a PowerPoint (.pptx) file to present live, and choose Editable text if you want to adjust the wording in PowerPoint. The first slide is free, and a 12 slide deck at 2K uses 120 credits.