Pitch Deck Writer for Startup Founders

Before any slides, write one sentence that says what the company does and for whom. Sequoia Capital's pitch outline puts this first, and warns that "it's easy to get caught up listing features instead of communicating your mission."²

Plain and specific beats grand. In Y Combinator's startup library, Michael Seibel offers a model: "Socialcam is a mobile app that makes it easy to take videos and share them with friends and family."³ He tells founders to cut jargon and vague words such as "platform."

Once the sentence is right, put it on the title slide under your company name. You'll reuse it everywhere: in investor emails, on calls and in a Y Combinator application.

Geoff Ralston's seed fundraising guide for Y Combinator says there is no fixed format or order, but the same parts usually appear⁴. In Y Combinator's seed deck template¹, each part after the title slide can take a few slides. One is ideal, and more than three is probably too many.

Then fit the deck to your stage. Before revenue, lead with the problem, what the founders know about it and what the money will prove. Once customers pay, move traction toward the front. For a Series A, lead with growth you can repeat and the unit economics behind it.

Paul Graham's tips for founders presenting to investors put it plainly: "you can afford to be candid about what you haven't figured out yet."⁵ So merge or cut a slide you can't support yet rather than padding it.

A label such as "Traction" leaves the reader to work out what the slide means. A headline that states the point does that work for them, and the chart beneath only has to confirm it.

Kevin Hale, in a talk for Y Combinator startups preparing their Demo Day decks, calls this making the idea explicit. Of a chart with its conclusion written out, he says: "Just writing it out like that means I barely have to look at the graph at all."⁶

Give each slide one idea. Then read the headlines alone, in order: if they tell the whole story, the deck works, and if they read like a table of contents, rewrite them.

Specific numbers stick, so pick a few strong ones. Graham's advice was no more than four or five numbers, and only ones specific to you⁵. For each, say on the slide what it counts, over what period and as of when.

Make the market slide specific to you too: customers you can reach, times what each pays in a year. Seibel prefers bottom-up estimates because a top-down one risks not narrowing down the customer enough³. In his example, an activity tracker for women, the mistake would be counting every woman instead of US women aged 14 to 45. A TAM, SAM and SOM calculator builds the estimate both ways and labels where each figure comes from.

Keep the evidence behind each figure where you can find it: the export, the date you pulled it and how you calculated it. Interested investors will ask, and the seed round pitch deck template keeps a source, a definition and a date for every figure in one sheet.

A deck gets read as well as presented. Ralston's guide describes one you walk investors through and may leave behind so VCs can show it to other partners⁴. So each slide's headline and supporting lines must make sense without you there.

In the room, the slide should carry less and you should carry more. Graham suggested trying to get your slides under 20 words⁵, and not reading them aloud. Put the rest in speaker notes: about 30 to 60 seconds a slide, written the way you talk. If that leaves the version you email too thin, keep a fuller copy to send.

Before it goes out, show each slide to someone who has never heard the pitch and ask what it means. Hale's verdict: "If they don't immediately say your idea, you lose."⁶ For a harder test, pitch deck feedback marks up the finished deck the way a seed investor would read it.

Want a first draft from the notes you already have? The tool at the top of this page writes every slide this way and lists the numbers you'll need to defend.