Pitch Deck Builder

A pitch deck is not a document; it is the spine of a 30-minute conversation. It must be skimmable in five minutes when forwarded without you in the room, and expandable into a story when you present it. This skill builds both.

When to use this skill

Use it after [[fundraising-narrative]] produces the five-beat story and [[fundraising-stage-selector]] fixes the ask. The deck renders the narrative; it never invents it.

The 11 slides, in order

1. Title - company, one-line positioning, the ask in the corner. The one-liner is "we help [who] do [what] so they get [outcome]."
2. Problem - the painful, specific, expensive status quo. One customer's reality beats a market abstraction.
3. Insight - the non-obvious truth you have that others miss. This is the slide that separates fundable from forgettable.
4. Solution / Product - what you built, shown not told. A real screen or a 10-second demo, not a feature list.
5. Why now - the shift (tech, regulation, behavior) that makes this inevitable today and impossible three years ago.
6. Market - bottom-up TAM/SAM/SOM with the assumption visible. Pair with [[market-sizing]]; never use a top-down "1% of a huge number."
7. Traction - the hero metric with a denominator and a trend line. Lead with retention or revenue, the metrics that reduce doubt fastest.
8. Business model - how you make money, unit economics, CAC/payback.
9. Competition - the honest landscape and your structural moat. Name incumbents; explain why they cannot follow.
10. Team - why this team wins this specific bet. See [[fundraise-team-hiring]].
11. The ask - amount, the milestone it funds, and the use of funds. Close on the future, not a thank-you slide.

Stage calibration

• Pre-seed/Seed: weight Insight, Why-now, Team. Traction can be qualitative.
• Series A: weight Traction, Business model, Market. Show the engine working.

Design rules

• One idea per slide. If a slide needs a paragraph, it is two slides or a verbal point with a visual.
• Every number gets a denominator and a date.
• Build a tight 11-slide main deck and a fat appendix (cohorts, detailed model, security, roadmap) you reveal on demand in diligence.
• The forwarded deck and the presented deck are the same file; design so it reads both ways.

Anti-patterns

• The "no competitors" slide - reads as naive.
• A wall of logos with no metric attached.
• Burying traction at slide 9. If you have proof, it earns its way forward.
• A vision so grand there is no wedge. Show where you start.

Deliverable

An 11-slide main deck mapped to the narrative beats, a clearly separated appendix, and a slide-by-slide note on the single point each slide must land. Take it to [[pitch-practice-coach]] before any live meeting.