A deck has one job: get the next meeting. Partners skim it fast, often on a phone, so every slide has to make one point with real evidence. Pretty helps a little. Clear helps a lot.
1Decide which deck you're making
You need two versions of the same story:
- Send-ahead deck: read alone, with no one to explain it. More words per slide, every slide standing on its own. This is the one that earns the first meeting.
- Presented deck: you're talking, so slides carry less text and more visuals.
Build the send-ahead deck first. The presented version is the same deck with words cut.
2Use the order for your stage
| Pre-seed (about 10 slides) | Seed (12 to 14 slides) |
|---|---|
| Title and one-liner | Title and one-liner |
| Problem | Problem |
| Solution and demo | Solution and demo |
| Why now | Traction (move it up if it's strong) |
| Market | Why now |
| Early traction or validation | Market |
| Business model | Business model and unit economics |
| Competition | Go-to-market |
| Team | Competition |
| The ask and what it buys | Team |
| Financials, 3 years | |
| The ask, use of funds and milestones |
3Write every slide as a claim
The headline of each slide states the point, not the topic.
| Label (weak) | Claim (strong) |
|---|---|
| Traction | 14 clinics pay us, up from 3 in March |
| Market | 38,000 US clinics lose 6 hours a week to scheduling |
| Team | We built scheduling software for 9,000 practices at our last company |
Then keep each slide tight:
- Three points or fewer.
- One key number, real and sourced.
- A table for competition, a chart for financials.
- Where you don't have a fact yet, leave a visible note like "Add: churn rate". Never fill the gap with a guess.
Here's my company facts file: [paste profile]. Build a [pre-seed / seed] deck outline. For each slide: a headline written as a claim, up to 3 bullets of 15 words or fewer, the one key number, and speaker notes. Use only the numbers in my file. Where a fact is missing, write "Add: [what's needed]" instead of inventing it.
4Make the ask concrete
The last slide is where most decks go vague. Say:
- How much you're raising, and the instrument (usually a SAFE at pre-seed).
- What it buys: the milestone and the month you'll hit it.
- Roughly where the money goes, in 3 to 4 buckets.
$[amount] gets us to [milestone] by [month], with [N] months of runway left.
Your financial model gives you these numbers.
5Run the three tests before you send it
6Get it scored, then fix the top three
Run it through an honest review before an investor sees it. Fix the three biggest issues first; they matter more than twenty small ones.
Build it in Google Slides or PowerPoint from the outline above, then run StartWise's free Pitch Deck Check for a score and fixes.
The raise-deck skill builds an editable .pptx from your facts and scores it 0 to 100 across 12 categories, with the investor questions to expect.
StartWise builds the deck with you, runs Deck Doctor, and keeps your numbers in sync with your model.
Do it in StartWise →What's next
A deck makes claims; the model backs them up. Next: build your financial model.
Build the 11-slide investor deck with an AI agent, then get it scored on 12 categories, quoting the exact lines investors will question. The free steps above still work. This is the fast way.