How to Write a Pitch Deck: The Right Way to Start
Most founders write their pitch deck too early. They open a template, fill in the slides, and wonder why it does not land. The reason is almost always the same: the deck came before the thinking. Writing a pitch deck that works starts with a deep dive into everything: financials, traction, customer evidence, pipeline, metrics — before a single word is written. The pitch deck is the output of that work, not the start of it.
We've written this article to present the process that actually produces a pitch deck investors respond to. In our considerable experience, this starts not with slides, but with a question most founders find harder to answer than they expect.
I am the Founder and Managing Director of PitchBuilder - we have built and reviewed pitch decks for more than 500 founders across more than £700m in funding rounds.
The first thing I do with every new client is a deep dive on the business: financials, sales pipeline, traction, marketing performance, customer response, IP, media coverage, metrics. Hours of work before we even start on a narrative.
The reason is simple. You cannot write a compelling pitch deck until you know what is actually investable about the business. And most founders — even good ones, even ones who have raised before — struggle to identify it themselves.
The question that has to come first
Before structure, before slide order, before anything else: what problem do you solve?
This is the specific customer pain your business exists to address. In one sentence, maybe two.
If a founder can answer this question clearly on the first attempt, it is a reliable signal that they are ready to build a pitch deck. If the answer meanders into market context, or product features, or the size of the opportunity — the foundational work is not done yet, and starting on slides would be building on sand.
Everything in a pitch deck is a response to this question:
- The solution slide answers it directly.
- The market size slide shows how many people have the problem.
- The team slide argues why this team can solve it better than anyone else.
- The financials show what it costs and what it returns.
If the problem is not clear, none of the rest can be either.
The deep dive: what I am looking for
The deep dive is not an audit, I am trying to find what is strongest — the specific thing in this business that is genuinely investable, that the founder often cannot see clearly because they are too close to it.
I find that founders are frequently underselling their own strongest assets.
- A trial with a major customer that de-risks the whole commercial proposition.
- Unit economics that hold up in a way the financials do not immediately show.
- A data set built over two years that a competitor could not replicate quickly.
- A founding team with a combination of domain expertise and technical depth that is genuinely rare.
These things are often there. The deep dive is how we find them. Investing the time upfront allows the pitch deck becomes an argument for something real rather than a template filled with aspiration.
The deep dive covers financials (not just projections — the history), traction and pipeline, the raise rationale, and the problem restated in light of everything you have learned. Most founders arrive without a clear answer to why they need the specific amount they are raising. "We are raising £750k" is not an answer. "We are raising £750k to hire three engineers, reach 50 paying customers, and prove the unit economics hold at scale" is.
The Techstars lesson
I was recentlly coaching portfolio companies at Techstars — founders who had already raised, whose original plan was shifting as the market responded. The standard instinct in that situation is to update the existing pitch deck. Tweak the narrative, adjust the numbers, keep moving.
My advice was different: start with a clean sheet of paper.
In this scenario, I found a group of founders who had:
- Run trials with partners
- Actual customer data
- Learned things from working with real customers that their original hypothesis had not anticipated
The original problem they had set out to solve was not quite right — but what they had learned had given them something more valuable: a deep understanding of their customer's actual business.
I told the founders to spend a day on it.
They distilled everything they had learned down to the real problem — the one their customers actually had, that the trial data actually evidenced, that their product actually addressed better than anything else.
When that was clear, the pitch deck was straightforward. Every slide answered a question that followed naturally from the problem. The narrative had a spine. The investor funding followed not long after they presented at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
The slide structure that works
Once the foundational work is done, the slide structure follows naturally. For pre-seed through Series A, twelve slides is the right number. DocSend data shows investors spend an average of two minutes and twenty-four seconds on a pitch deck on first pass, down 24% since 2021. More slides means less of each slide gets read.
The twelve slides:
- cover
- problem
- solution
- market size
- product
- traction
- business model
- go-to-market
- competition
- financials
- team
- ask.
Each slide answers a specific question the investor is already asking. If a slide does not answer a clear question, it probably does not need to exist.
What most guides get wrong
Every template-based guide treats these twelve slides as the starting point, whereas we see them as the destination.
Write the pitch deck last. Do the thinking first.
If you want help with the process — either a review of a deck you have already written or building one from scratch — PitchBuilder works with founders on both. Start with the pitch deck review if you have a deck, or the creation service if you are starting from nothing.
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Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to write a pitch deck?
The slides themselves can be written in a day or two once the underlying thinking is done. The thinking that precedes them takes longer and matters more. Rushing the thinking to get to the slides faster is one of the most common and costly mistakes in the process.
What should a pitch deck include?
Twelve slides for pre-seed through Series A: cover, problem, solution, market size, product, traction, business model, go-to-market, competition, financials, team, and the ask. Each slide should earn its place. Appendices are generally not read — put everything important in the core deck.
Should I use a pitch deck template?
A template is useful for understanding what investors expect to see and in roughly what order. Use it as a checklist at the end, not a scaffold at the beginning. Founders who fill in a template without doing the foundational thinking first produce pitch decks that are structurally correct but narratively empty.
How do I know what to put on each slide?
Each slide should answer a specific question the investor is already asking. The problem slide: is there a real, specific pain here? The team slide: can these people execute? The financials: does this business make sense at scale? If a slide does not answer a clear question, it probably does not need to exist.
What is the most important slide in a pitch deck?
At early stage, the team slide and the problem slide carry the most weight. DocSend data confirms investors spend the most time on the team slide and the financials slide. Both reward specificity and clarity.
When is a pitch deck ready to send?
When a stranger with no context about your business can read it cold and understand clearly what problem you solve, who your customer is, why your team can execute, and why now is the right time. If any of those four questions are left unanswered, the pitch deck is not ready.