How To Make A Pitch Deck

Your guide from the person charging to create decks.

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If there's a question that I could answer from my previous 13 years of work, that is how to make a pitch deck. I've created hundreds of decks for various clients who had an idea and others who had startups already worth over $100 million. Some were in the agricultural industry, others were in the artificial intelligence game. So, in terms of diversity, every single startup will need a pitch deck one day or another.

The Reader.

For starters, you need to understand who you're approaching. The key element here is knowing how to structure your deck based on that person because if you don't know who you're approaching with your pitch deck, then the pitch deck, and trust me when I say this, is going to be practically useless. It's going to be a piece of document that is so generic that nobody wants to read.

What you need to do is to fully understand the person you are pitching to. So let's say, for example, your target is to get into Y Combinator, the world's biggest startup accelerator. That means there is a target audience in mind.

I believe Y Combinator itself, as an accelerator, does not require a pitch deck, but I'm giving it as an example.

In this case, what you would do is start exploring what they're looking for. So if the world right now is all crazy about artificial intelligence, then it's important to mention that this is part of your product. I mean, of course, if it is part of your product, and how it integrates as a use case. Let's look at the market right now. The market right now is full of AI products, right?

Now, the question is, if you just say, "Hey, I'm an AI book reader," that is great, you can just pitch that to Y Combinator, but what they want to see, because you have to remember that them as a target audience, they always see pitch decks, hundreds per day possibly, and for that reason you need to immediately say your use case or traction or team, something that would put you in a different segment for them to actually consider you.

So now we know what they are looking for. They're looking for you being distinguished, and this is the starting point of creating a pitch deck. Understanding very, very well who you're approaching. This person might be your father, your mother, your uncle, your cousin, whoever you're approaching needs to understand what they need to hear, and only then will you be able to start actually with the phase of writing a pitch deck.

Storyboarding Your Pitch

Now, secondly, after this, what you need to do is to storyboard the pitch deck. Since you already know who the person you're approaching is, it only makes sense that you would start writing this story, and this story is drafted in however way you want. I personally use a storyboard template that just shows which thought they're thinking of at the exact moment and how they're intending and how I'm intending to pitch it in terms of a slide.

Others would just write on a piece of paper their unique selling points, but they also have to refer to how these unique selling points connect to the audience. Whatever story you write on that document, this audience is going to watch or read or listen to this story. When you keep that in mind, this is when you can truly develop a storyboard, organize it, reorganize it, change the entirety of it, all based on the audience and the reader of this story.

Frankly, it's similar to movie production. You need to really have an audience for the movie and to know what they want to see from the main characters of the story. After you're done with the storyboard phase, which consumes the most time because it requires an extensive level of thinking and projecting thoughts of readers of your deck, then you can start the second phase of it, which is writing the actual pitch deck.

Writing Your Pitch Deck

Now, writing the actual pitch deck should not be that difficult, because if I say the words, "I am using artificial intelligence in the book industry," versus "an industry-first book reader," it shouldn't make that much difference. At the end of the day, they're not going to say, "Oh, you said it perfectly," or "Oh, your grammar is great." What they care about is the actual information, and that's why writing is a relatively straightforward task.

Of course, there is copywriting that is better than another, and this is what experienced consultants know better. But founders, from my statistics, do quite a good job at pitching their startup and writing what they need to write.

So everything before that is the challenging part, but in terms of writing, you as a founder could actually write it in a good way. Since you already know what you should write about at each slide, writing about that thing shouldn't be difficult.

Of course, the job of a consultant or an external party is to simplify things for you, because you are extremely biased towards your company or your startup, so you're just going to keep talking and talking about a single point, which investors or readers might not really want to focus on that much. They might be looking for a one-word answer. So while keeping that all in mind, you need to start your writing process.

Do a few iterations of writing a few slides in a different way, and as much as possible, simplify and throw things in the appendix. That's always my rule. If you are not sure whether this exact piece of information is critical to the first meeting with this investor, then put it in the appendix.

The truth is, most startups are pitchable with around five slides. In five slides, a reader would know what your startup is all about and would be able to get the full picture. The more you talk about it, the more you lose the reader's interest. While keeping that in mind, always put things in the appendix.

Designing Your Deck

Then comes the design phase. I personally work with a designer for years because, well, I run a consultancy company, but in your case, you have a few options in terms of design.

You can either hire a designer to do your pitch deck and this, in terms of cost, varies significantly. It could go from a hundred bucks to, and I've received these quotes before, $10,000 for just the design of the pitch deck.

Alternatively, you could also use products like Canva or Figma while downloading a template. A lot of my clients tend to download templates as well and design it themselves. Whatever works for you to get the text that you wrote in a visually appealing way.

I personally prefer a designer because templates are good if you're exerting a lot of effort in actually converting their components into what you exactly are looking for, not the other way around, because a lot of people download a template and prefer how the template looks and then alter their texts and their storyboard based on the template, which is a huge mistake.

So what you should always keep in mind is that the template is designed so that it would be helping you, not the other way around.

Pitching and Persistence

After the design phase, you can simply start pitching to investors out there and remember, usually it takes a long time, especially if you're a first-time founder rather than an experienced founder with exits.

It is normal for it to take a long time. My advice to you is to always try to run your product in an MVP phase, get a few paying customers. If you get a few paying customers, then you have traction, and traction is always king.

For that reason, diversify your effort – Yes, you have a pitch deck, yes, you need to talk to investors, but that's not the only way. It's never the only way. Companies like Midjourney bootstrapped their startup to hundreds of millions of revenue without external investors. If they can do it, surely you can as well.

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