How to create a pitch deck.

A pitch deck has one job: to get the next conversation. Investors spend only a few minutes on a first read, so every slide should make one point, clearly, with evidence.

Before you open the slides

• Know your one sentence. Who you help, with what problem, and why now. If you cannot say it in one sentence, the deck will not fix it.
• Gather your evidence. Customer numbers, revenue, retention, pilots, quotes. Traction beats projections.
• Check you are ready to raise. A great deck cannot rescue a business that should not be raising yet.

The 12 slides

1. Title. Company name, one-line description, your name and contact details.
2. Problem. Who has it, how often, and what it costs them. Use a real customer example.
3. Solution. What you do, in plain words. A screenshot or short demo beats a paragraph.
4. Why now. What has changed (technology, regulation, behaviour) that makes this possible or urgent today.
5. Market. Your serviceable market and how you will win your share of it. Show the bottom-up calculation.
6. Traction. The single most impressive chart you have, with the period clearly labelled.
7. Business model. How you make money: pricing, average contract value, gross margin.
8. Go-to-market. How you find, win and keep customers, and what it costs.
9. Competition. The alternatives customers use today, including doing nothing, and why customers choose you.
10. Team. Why this team wins: relevant experience, not job titles.
11. Financials. Three-year summary: revenue, gross margin, burn and headcount, with key assumptions.
12. The ask. How much, what it buys (use of funds), and the milestones it reaches before the next round.

Two versions

• The send-ahead deck is read without you, so it needs more words and must stand on its own.
• The presenting deck supports what you say, so it needs fewer words and bigger visuals.

Common mistakes

• A top-down market slide (“1% of a £10bn market”). Show the bottom-up number instead.
• Hiding the ask. Say how much you are raising and what it achieves.
• Financials with no assumptions. Investors test the assumptions, not the totals.
• Too many slides. Put the detail in an appendix or the data room.