🎞 Pitch Deck Templates

❌ There are no templates.❌ Or at least, there are no good templates. Your first step to creating a great pitch deck is to not start with a template. Start with your story.

You read that right. A pitch deck is merely a medium through which you tell your story. A memo is another medium that can be used for storytelling (although deck is the best medium for most seed-stage companies). The common underlying driver is a compelling narrative.

Without a great narrative you will never have a great pitch deck. No template will change this fact. A pitch deck template can salvage a bad deck, but it can also make a good deck worse by artificially constraining you in terms of the materials you include and the order in which you present them. Since you are aiming for a great deck, you can put aside the notion of plugging your information into a ready made template.

Of course we can still propose a step-by-step method that you can use to create a pitch deck that captures your narrative.

This guide is based on Max Nussenbaum's article, *How to Make Investor Decks That Don't Suck.*

🏗The Process

Process Overview

The steps for creating your pitch deck are listed below. Notice that you don't even need to open your presentation software until step 4:

  1. Create your high level narrative. It does not need to be fully formed in prose right now, but it should be enough so that you can tell your story effectively
  2. Write your narrative out as headlines
  3. Add supporting details to each headline
  4. Put this information in deck form

We unpack each of the steps below

1. Finalize your high level narrative ✅

If you are starting the process of creating your pitch deck that means that you have already framed your narrative by answering give guiding questions and fleshed it out for storytelling effect. Eventually you will need to write it out in prose, but that is not necessary for your pitch deck.

<aside> 🛑 If you are not happy with your high level narrative or have not gotten a chance to revise and polish it, stop here and work on your narrative. Move on to step 2 only after you are happy with your narrative.

</aside>

2. Write your narrative out as headlines

Now that you know the story that you want to tell, write out the main points of that story as headlines. Each headline should be impactful and informative. Each one should be able to stand alone yet also provide a link to adjacent headlines.

🤨 How do you know what to include as a headline?

There are only three reasons that you should put something into your pitch deck

  1. It is impressive
  2. It provides necessary context. How does your business work? What is necessary to understand the problem and your solution? Consider the investor's background and be as concise as possible
  3. Its absence would be suspicious. Sometimes there is no way around including unimpressive information in your presentation, but if you have launched your company and you don't include your revenue then the investor will just assume it is bad and that you're dishonest

🤨 How should you order your headlines?

Order them in whatever way makes sense and does the best job of telling your story. Some ordering is implied. For instance, you should generally explain your problem before going into the solution, but if your company has stellar revenue then maybe you put that right up front.