What to Do Before You Build Your First Pitch Deck
The hardest work happens before you open a template. Here is what to gather, what to expect from the process, and why the story matters more than the slides.
Every few weeks I get on a call with a founder who has sent me a deck ahead of time, and I open it up and I can see everything they know sitting right there on the slides. The technology is real, the market is real, the numbers hold up. Somewhere around slide four I realize I have no idea what I am supposed to feel about any of it, which means an investor is going to have the same problem, except they will never tell you about it. They will nod politely through the entire meeting and then quietly stop responding to your emails.
This comes up most with deep technology founders, the ones whose work has years of real research sitting behind it and who can defend any claim you throw at them. The feedback I end up giving is that the deck is too broad to be investable as it stands, and that has nothing to do with the quality of the science. Everything in it is true and most of it is impressive, and an investor is still going to leave the call without a clear picture of what they are being asked to fund. Narrowing a big idea down into something a person can hold in their head is a few weeks of work on its own, and all of it happens before a single slide gets designed.
This article is about that earlier stage. There are already a thousand posts out there about slide order and what belongs on slide seven, and none of them will help you if you skip the thinking that comes first.
Investors are underwriting you
Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital has a line about early stage investing that I come back to constantly. His point is that when a founder hands him a deck at the seed stage, he already assumes the product is wrong, the pricing is wrong, the go to market is wrong, the team is incomplete, and the technology is not built yet, so the only thing genuinely left to bet on is the founder. He built First Round here in Philadelphia, incidentally, which is one of the reasons that framing has stuck around in this ecosystem.
The data lines up with that in a way that surprises most people. DocSend tracks millions of deck views a year, and their research has repeatedly shown investors spending more time on the team slide than on the business model. Their 2026 numbers also put the average review time for a seed deck at three minutes and forty four seconds, with only about 58 percent of decks getting read all the way to the last slide. So you have under four minutes, a good portion of your readers quit before the end, and the slide they spend the longest on is usually the one founders throw together at eleven o'clock the night before they send it.
When I say that investors are backing a person, that is an operational observation about how these decisions actually get made. They are handing money to somebody who is going to face fifty decisions over the next three years that nobody in the room can predict today, and the only thing they can really evaluate is whether you are the kind of person who makes good calls under pressure with incomplete information. Your product is evidence in that argument, and so is your market, and so is your traction, but the argument itself is about you. A stack of accurate facts will not make it on your behalf.
What to gather before you start
Before I build a deck with a client I ask for a pile of raw material, and it is always more than they expect. Broad source material is much easier to narrow than a thin outline is to expand. If you show up with everything, we can cut, and if you show up with a half filled template we are starting from zero anyway. Here is roughly what belongs in that pile.
The full origin, including the parts you think are boring. What were you doing for a living when you first ran into this problem, what made you certain it was worth walking away from something stable, and what did you try first that did not work. Founders skip the failed attempts because they read like weaknesses, and they are usually the most convincing material in the whole stack.
Every proof point you have, no matter how small. A beta customer who has been running it for two weeks counts, along with a letter of intent, or a licensed professional in your field who reviewed your output and said he would put his name on it without hesitating. Founders regularly tell me about an early user who got a result in a matter of days and turned into their loudest advocate before any money ever changed hands, and a story like that does more work in a deck than another market size chart. Collect the names, titles, logos, and one sentence from each of them, and get video if anyone will give it to you.
Your numbers, along with the assumptions underneath them. Investors will accept big projections as long as you can defend them, and what actually costs you credibility is a number you cannot explain when somebody asks. If you are estimating, say you are estimating and show your inputs. A founder who publishes their assumptions has given an investor something to argue with, and an investor who is arguing with your model is an investor who is engaged.
An honest read on the competition. Please do not put the words "we have no competition" on a slide. I have watched investors mentally check out at that phrase in real time. The stronger move is to list the closest things that exist, put your numbers next to theirs, and let the investor decide on their own that these are not really the same category. When the paradigm shift is their conclusion instead of your claim, the whole conversation changes.
The ask, traced backward. The founders who handle this well can walk the chain backward without notes. They need a particular number because that number funds a specific validation milestone, and reaching that milestone requires specific equipment, and that equipment carries a lead time that is quietly driving the entire schedule. That chain of cause and effect is the real ask. A dollar figure sitting on its own is just a number on a slide.
The things you are not sure about. Every founder has a short list of open questions they are quietly hoping nobody raises. Write them down anyway, because you will either find answers or you will find an honest way to frame the uncertainty, and both of those beat getting caught flat in a room full of people writing checks.
What the process actually looks like
A few expectations worth setting up front, because I would rather be honest about this now than have you frustrated in week three.
Plan on two to three months. The first version of your deck goes out into the world, you get reactions, and you adjust, and the second version comes out better for it. Usually it is the second or third round that starts genuinely resonating with people, so build that into your timeline from the beginning.
You are building more than one deck. The main presentation runs twelve to sixteen slides and it is what you walk people through in the room. Fewer than twelve tends to feel thin and more than sixteen tends to lose them. Then you cut that down to a five or six slide version with the details stripped out, which is what you send ahead of time to somebody who will read it without you sitting there, and its only job is to make them lean forward. Last comes a due diligence deck that might run thirty slides or more, full of the detailed material nobody wants in a live meeting but everybody wants to know exists. Most investors will never ask for it, and they still want to see that you have it.
Narrowing is the hard part. Taking a large concept down to something an investor can hold in their head is difficult work and it usually takes a couple of weeks on its own. Going the other direction, adding substance to a deck that is too thin, takes months, because first you have to go create the substance.
Silence is the feedback you should worry about. A meeting full of head nodding and no follow up questions is a bad meeting. You want them interrupting you, asking how something works, pushing back on a number, asking to see the slide behind the slide. Questions mean they are building a model of your business in their head, and nobody builds a model of something they are about to forget.
Telling it as a story instead of a list of facts
A founder laid out a rule about investor questions for me a while back, and I have repeated it to a dozen people since. There are excellent questions, which are the ones where you know the answer and you have a slide for it. There are good questions, where you know the answer and you do not have a slide. And there are bad questions, which are the ones where you do not know the answer, and the entire point of preparation is making sure nobody ever gets the chance to ask you one of those.
Getting there is a narrative exercise more than an information exercise. A deck that works has an actual shape to it. Something is wrong in the world right now, and there is a reason it has stayed wrong, and that reason is almost always a barrier everybody quietly accepted as permanent. You figured out that the barrier was never permanent. Here is how you figured it out, here is what it means for the people living with the problem every day, and here is what happens next once this gets funded. What that shape does is give the investor a role in the story instead of a seat in the audience.
The other thing a real narrative buys you is permission to leave things out. If you have thirty proof points, you do not put thirty proof points in the deck. You pick six and you arrange them so the other twenty four are implied, and you keep the full list in the diligence deck for the one investor in ten who asks for it. When somebody does ask, you send it within five minutes of the meeting ending and you will probably never hear about it again, because what they were really testing was whether it existed at all.
This is also where most founders get in their own way, and I say that with real sympathy because it is a hard problem to solve from the inside. The trouble is that you know too much. You have lived inside this thing for years, so the parts that feel obvious to you are frequently the parts an investor needs explained, while the parts you feel compelled to walk through in detail are the ones they would have taken on faith. You cannot read your own deck the way a stranger reads it, because you are not a stranger.
The part AI cannot do for you
I use AI models every day, four different ones depending on what I am working on, so I am not going to pretend the tools are useless. They will produce a clean looking deck in twenty minutes. The layouts will be balanced, the copy will be grammatical, and the market sizing slide will look exactly like every market sizing slide you have ever seen, which is where the trouble starts.
Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures has pointed out that AI generated decks carry a sameness problem, and that after enough of them the only thing distinguishing one company from another is the founders' names on the team slide. When every deck arriving in an inbox has the same structure, the same phrasing, and the same confident tone, the deck stops carrying much information at all. Investors have gotten good at recognizing the pattern, and a first draft that nobody bothered to rewrite tells them something about how seriously you took the meeting.
What has gotten genuinely valuable over the last couple of years is precisely the material that cannot be generated on demand. Original research that came out of your own work still carries weight, as does an interactive tool built on your own expertise, something like a calculator that lets an investor plug in their own assumptions and watch your model respond. The same goes for a founding story with real specifics in it, failures included, and for customer feedback in the customer's own words. All of that is hard to fabricate because it is so specifically human, which is exactly why it cuts through a stack of otherwise identical decks.
The tools can make your deck look like the decks that raised money, and they still cannot make somebody believe in you, because belief is a response to a person and the model has never met you.
A word about doing this alone
When founders bring somebody in to work on a deck, design turns out to be the smallest part of what they actually get. The useful part is having a person in the room who has sat on both sides of the table, who does not already know your technology inside and out, and who will tell you which six things to lead with and which twenty four to hold back for later. Somebody has to be able to hear your story the way a stranger hears it, and after enough years inside your own company, that person cannot be you.
There is usually more to it than slides, too. The deck sits next to a website that has to hold up when an investor goes looking you up afterward, a one page summary somebody can forward to a partner, and whatever proof material you can assemble in the time you have. All of that needs to say the same thing in the same voice, because inconsistency between your deck and your site is the kind of small thing that quietly kills momentum.
Where to start this week
If you are getting ready to raise for the first time, go gather the raw material before you open a template. Write out the origin story with the actual dates in it, call the three customers who like you most and ask whether you can quote them, and make the list of questions you are hoping nobody asks. That pile is worth more than any slide layout you will find online, and everything downstream of it gets easier once it exists.
If you want a second set of eyes on what you have, I am glad to take a look. At On-Call CMO I spend most of my time helping founders turn what they know into something an investor can believe, whether that is a first deck, a full capital raise, or the go to market work that starts once the money lands. Grab time on the calendar at oncallcmo.us/lets-get-started and we will get into it.
Sources
Knowledge at Wharton, "What Are Early-stage VCs Looking for? Founders with Grit," June 21, 2018. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/new-companies-get-off-ground/
DocSend, "What VCs really want to see inside your seed deck," 2026. https://www.docsend.com/blog/what-vcs-really-want-to-see-inside-your-seed-deck/
DocSend, "In your startup pitch deck, you need to get the team slide right." https://www.docsend.com/blog/startup-pitch-deck-team-slide/
Alastair Goldfisher, "AI Is Killing the Pitch Deck. And That Might Be a Good Thing," Medium, September 15, 2025. https://agoldfisher.medium.com/ai-pitch-decks-story-925562ae6f4c
Alastair Goldfisher, "This is the One Slide You Should Never Bury in Your Pitch Deck, Even in the AI Era," Medium, August 11, 2025. https://agoldfisher.medium.com/one-pitch-deck-slide-vcs-never-ignore-4a85cbe50fa1
