How to build a pitch deck, slide by slide

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The order investors read in

The order is not a convention. It is a proof chain: every slide answers the objection the slide before it just raised. Say there is a problem and the room wants to know whose. Show a solution and they ask whether it works. Show that it works and they ask why nobody did it five years ago. Only after that does a market number mean anything.

Two things follow. Reordering breaks the chain — a market slide before a problem slide is a large number attached to nothing. And a slide that answers no objection is not a short slide, it is a slide to cut. Run that test before the design one.

The two slides people put in the wrong place

Why now sits fifth, after the demo. Before anyone has seen the thing, “the world changed” is an assertion; afterwards it answers the question they are already forming, which is why this was not built in 2019.

Competition sits ninth, and the version that works names where you lose. Investors have met your competitors, sometimes in the same week. A grid you win every row of says either that you have not looked or that you will not say.

The twelve slides

Twelve is a middle, not a rule. What matters is that each slide has one job, and that the third column exists at all: it is the half of the deck you say rather than print.

On the slide, or in your mouth

One rule survives contact with a real room: the slide holds the claim, you hold the argument. A slide carrying the argument is a slide the room reads while you talk over it, and reading wins. So print the sentence you would still want on screen if you had lost your voice, and put everything that explains or qualifies in the note.

The note field here is one line of monospace under the slide, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished. A note you can read at a glance while looking at a room is a cue; a paragraph is a script you will start reading from. Notes arriving from an imported .pptx get flattened into one line too — the importer joins a note's paragraphs with spaces — so an inherited deck of half-written speeches arrives as what it always was. Six words per slide is the target.

Where a slide genuinely carries three points, reveal them one at a time. There are four settings and no fifth: by bullets, by objects, by both, or not at all. A bullet build numbers its bullets one to n, an object build uses the step number on each object, and the slide takes as many presses as the longer of the two. Stepping backwards lands at the end of the previous slide's build rather than replaying it — the difference between re-reading one bullet and performing the last slide again.

The numbers they ask about first

Questions about numbers arrive in an order too, and it is not the order your model is built in. Have these six ready as sentences, not as lookups:

• Revenue or usage by month, with the months labelled. A cumulative curve only goes up, and everyone in the room knows that is what it is for.
• Growth over a named period — “3.1× over the last six months” rather than “fast”.
• Burn and runway in months, and the calendar date the money runs out.
• Gross margin, or the reason you do not have a meaningful one yet.
• What a customer costs to acquire and how long they take to pay it back, if you have sold to enough of them to know.
• The ask: the amount, the months it buys, and the milestone it is supposed to reach.

Assumptions get scrutinised harder than totals, so put each one beside the number it produces rather than in an appendix nobody opens. The model behind them is a spreadsheet like any other — 167 functions, including the eleven financial ones (PMT, FV, PV, NPER, RATE, NPV, IRR, SLN, SYD, EFFECT, NOMINAL). A chart reads the table it came from instead of copying it, so a projection you fix leaves no stale chart behind it.

One limit to plan around: a slide object is text, a rectangle, an ellipse, a line or a picture. There is no chart object, so a live chart cannot sit on a slide. In practice that is the constraint you wanted — the model and its chart belong in the document you send afterwards, and the slide carries the one number the chart is about. For the formulas that model is made of, see building the financial projections.

Building it from a document you already wrote

A deck is rarely the first thing written. There is usually a memo, a business plan or a grant application already sitting there, and retyping it into slides is where the weekend goes. Asking for a deck from the open document uses that document's own structure: every section over fifteen words becomes a slide, the headings become the titles, and the bullets are that section's opening sentences clipped to fit. Ask for twelve slides and you get twelve — the count is read out of your sentence and held between three and twenty. Those rules are the local stub's; with a model configured the outline is the model's, and still arrives as a preview you accept or discard.

It creates a new deck project and leaves the document untouched, and nothing is applied until you press Accept. With no model configured, a local stub does the same job from your headings and says that is what it is.

Trimming works the same way. Ask to cut a deck to twelve and it drops the thinnest slides by what they carry, keeps the first and last whatever they weigh, merges nothing, and lists what it removed so you can reject the lot. If your writing lives somewhere that cannot make slides at all, why Notion has no slide editor covers that trade.

Rehearsing with a second screen and a clock

Rehearse the clock before the words. Presenter view opens as a second window: your notes get the largest panel, the current slide's bullets sit beside them with the un-revealed ones dimmed, the next slide shows its title and up to four bullets, and a counter reads 4 / 12 · step 2/3. One button starts the clock and afterwards resets it; it counts mm:ss until a talk needs an hour. Arrow keys, space and Page Down work from either window.

The window the room is looking at is the authority on where the deck is; the presenter window only ever asks it to move. So you can close the presenter view mid-talk and reopen it, and it catches up instead of arguing. The limit is specific, and it is the one to check before a real pitch: the two windows talk over a browser channel, so they must be two windows of the same browser on one machine. Laptop plus projector, yes. Your phone driving your laptop, no. And if pop-ups are blocked the second window never opens — allow them for the site once, in advance, rather than discovering it in the room.

For the person who insists on PowerPoint

Somebody in the process will ask for the file. Export writes a real .pptx: a zip of OOXML parts, 16:9, images embedded as media, the master's footer and slide numbers drawn onto each slide that has not opted out, and a notes part for every slide with a note. Import appends rather than replaces, with a notification naming what it dropped. PowerPoint still wins most of the rows below.

If the file has to live in somebody else's ecosystem for months rather than for one meeting, build it where they already are — how Google Slides compares sets out that side of it.

Questions people ask