Pitch decks: write the story before you design the slides

Most pitch decks fail because the design starts before the story does. Founders open Keynote, drop a logo on slide one, and start filling boxes — and by the time they reach the financials, the narrative has stalled three slides earlier. Before we ever open a design tool, we ask the founder to write the deck as a single page of plain prose: ten sentences, one per slide, in the voice you'd use over coffee. If the prose doesn't flow, no amount of typography is going to save it.

The structural template we use is opinionated. Slide one is a single sentence: who the company is and the change it's making in the world. Slide two is the problem, but written as a person, not a market — "Naomi spends three hours every Friday reconciling invoices" lands harder than "the SME segment lacks integrated finance tooling". Slides three through six are the product, the wedge, the moat, and the proof — in that order. By the time you reach traction, ask, and team, the reader is already nodding.

Once the prose is locked, the design job is mostly restraint. One typeface, two weights. Two accent colours, no more. White-space is not negotiable. The single most-effective edit we make on every deck is removing every bullet point that isn't load-bearing — if the slide reads with the bullet deleted, the bullet didn't belong there. Investors read decks at a meeting cadence, not a textbook cadence; design accordingly.