Building a pitch deck

Fundraising and pitching

The 10-12 slides investors expect: problem, solution, market, traction, team and the ask.

A pitch deck is a short presentation about your company. It is important to understand its job: a deck does not close the investment on its own. It helps you get a meeting or supports the conversation. Before deciding, an investor talks to you, asks questions and meets your customers. The deck is the door to that process.

The one-sentence description

Before any slides, you should be able to explain your company in one plain sentence: what you do and for whom. For example: "We help small shops manage goods sold on credit and the debts that come with it, from a phone." If that sentence is full of jargon or stretches to two paragraphs, work on it first. Someone who hears a good sentence can pass it on to others.

The core slides

Problem. Who has what problem, and how painful it is. Give a concrete example from your customer conversations.
Solution. How your product solves it. If you can, show the product itself: a screenshot or a short video.
Why now. Why this solution has become possible or necessary right now.
Market. How many customers there are and how much they might pay. Numbers counted from the bottom up, with clear sources.
Traction. Number of customers, revenue, growth rate, retention. Give a date for every number.
Business model. How you make money and how much one customer brings in.
Competition. How customers solve the problem today and how you differ. Do not say "we have no competitors": at the very least, Excel, a notebook or doing nothing is a competitor.
Team. Why you in particular can solve this problem: experience, skills, knowledge of the field.
The ask. How much you want to raise, what it will be spent on and what result it will lead to.

Writing rules

One main idea per slide.
Little text, in a large, readable font.
Numbers precise and dated: not "many customers" but "48 paying shops at the end of September".
Plain language. An investor may not know your field; avoid jargon.
Make the order of slides a story: problem, solution, proof, future.

On language: depending on the investor, you may need a version in Uzbek, Russian or English. Prepare an English version for foreign investors and have a native speaker check it.

Common mistakes

Too many slides. Ten to twelve is usually enough; put extra material in an appendix.
Big unproven numbers and calculations like "if we get one percent of the market".
Listing product features in detail and forgetting the result the customer gets.
A team slide with only job titles, and no experience or achievements.
A missing or vague ask.

Two kinds of deck

You will often need two versions. The first is sent by email and must make sense without you there, so it carries a little more text. The second is shown in a meeting: little text, and you say the important things out loud. The substance of the two is the same; only the form differs. Update the deck after every important change: new numbers, new customers, new conclusions. Out-of-date numbers undermine trust.

If you have no traction yet

At a very early stage it is natural to have no revenue and no big numbers. In that case, show what you have learned and how fast you move:

how many customers you have interviewed and what you found out;
pilots, letters of intent or advance payments;
how many people are on your waiting list and where they came from;
how much you have done in a short time, for example how many weeks it took to ship the first version.

An early investor often looks at how quickly the team learns and acts.

Try this

Write your company in one sentence and read it to three people from outside your field. Check whether they understood. Then, in the order above, write one title and one main idea for each slide. Finish the substance before you touch the design.