How to make a pitch deck, step by step

To make a pitch deck, write your story and pull your real numbers first, then follow a proven slide order: problem, solution, market, product, traction, business model, competition, team, and the ask. Write one idea per slide, design it consistently on your brand, and cut anything that does not earn its place. Most land at 10 to 15 slides.

I have built pitch decks for my own companies and helped founders prep first investor meetings. The thinking is never what eats the time. You know your business. Then you lose an afternoon nudging text boxes. Here is the process I use, manual path included, plus the version where an agent does the build.

#How do you create a pitch deck? The 6 steps

1. Write the story and pull the numbers in a plain doc, before any slide exists.
2. Pick the slide order investors already know.
3. Write each slide as one claim with its proof.
4. Design it consistently on your brand.
5. Cut and rehearse until it survives a two-minute skim.
6. Send it as a PDF or link, with an editable source kept for yourself.

Steps 1 and 2 are where decks are won or lost, and they happen in a text doc.

#Step 1: Write the story and pull the numbers

A pitch deck is a written argument told in a fixed order. If you cannot say what you do in one sentence and back it with two or three real numbers, no template will rescue it.

I write one line per slide: the sentence I want an investor to repeat to a partner the next morning. What you do, who has the problem and how badly, what you have shipped and what it has done. Then the numbers: revenue, active users, pilots signed, retention, whatever you genuinely have. Pull them a few days early so a surprise in the data does not become a surprise in the meeting.

One honesty rule: do not invent traction. If you are pre-revenue, say so and lead with a waitlist, a pilot, or the depth of the problem.

#Step 2: Pick the slide order

Use the order investors read on autopilot:

Sequoia's template and Y Combinator's seed guidance both land within a slide or two of this. There is no prize for an original sequence: a familiar order lets investors spend attention on your content. For what each slide must contain, see what goes in a pitch deck. For the market slide specifically, my TAM SAM SOM slide guide has a worked example.

#Step 3: Write each slide as one claim

One idea per slide, as few words as possible on screen, and a headline that states the point. "Restaurants lose 3 hours a day to manual scheduling" beats a slide titled "The problem" with a paragraph under it. On the traction slide, the chart is the argument; label it and get out of the way. What you would say out loud belongs in your mouth, not on the slide.

Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule is a good guardrail: ten slides, twenty minutes, no font smaller than thirty points. A thirty-point floor physically stops you from cramming.

#Step 4: Design it without a designer

You need consistency, not a designer. One font, one accent color, your logo, a grid, applied to every slide. Charts get one color and one point each. Investors do not grade typography, but an off-brand, mismatched deck quietly says you do not sweat the details.

The manual path: start from a template, set your brand colors at the master-slide level, then go slide by slide aligning boxes and swapping stock photos. That is the afternoon. The pitch deck template post compares PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Canva for this step.

Here is what the finished structure looks like: a SaaS pitch deck I built on a sample brand. Click through it, or open it as the SaaS pitch deck template and edit it.

#Step 5: Cut and rehearse

Most decks fail because they bury the lead: an investor flips four slides before learning what the company does. DocSend's Q1 2024 data puts the average investor read at about two and a half minutes, so read your deck in that time as a stranger would. If slide one does not say what you do and for whom, fix that before anything else. Then cut: too much text, a hidden ask, traction three slides too deep. Push backup detail to an appendix after the ask.

#Step 6: Send it the right way

Send a PDF or a view-only link, never an editable file, and keep your source to update numbers between meetings. Some investors want a one-pager first; if so, send that and hold the deck for the follow-up. For studying strong decks before you send yours, see these pitch deck examples.

#After the raise: keep the same format

Once you close, the deck habit turns into a monthly investor update: headline metrics, runway, risks, and asks. Same brand, same discipline.

#Can an AI agent make the pitch deck for you?

It can do the build, not the thinking. heydecks is the AI slide creator for AI agents. Your agent, whether that is Cursor, Claude, or ChatGPT, writes the slide copy from your step 1 notes over the heydecks MCP server, and heydecks renders it into hand-designed slide templates locked to your brand via the Brand Kernel. You get a live link, a PDF, and an editable PPTX you keep working in.

If you script it instead, the step 1 doc goes straight into the REST API (the numbers here are placeholders):

curl -X POST https://heydecks.com/v1/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer hd_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "input": "Seed pitch deck. We cut clinic scheduling from 3 hours a day to 10 minutes. 42 paying clinics, $18K MRR, 9% month-over-month growth. Raising $1.5M for 18 months of runway.",
    "brand_id": "brand_abc"
  }'

It returns a job you poll for the deck link. Whatever numbers you put in the input are the numbers on the slides, so use the real ones.

When your notes are ready, the pitch deck generator turns them into the 12-slide structure above.

#Frequently asked questions

#How long does it take to make a pitch deck?

A few days, mostly on the story and the numbers. The slides take an afternoon by hand, or minutes if an agent builds them from your notes.

#Can ChatGPT create a pitch deck?

ChatGPT can write good pitch deck copy, but on its own it returns text you still paste into slides and brand. Connected to a deck tool like heydecks over MCP, it can produce the finished, editable deck.

#How do I make a pitch deck in Google Slides or PowerPoint?

Start from a template in either tool, set your fonts and colors on the master slide, then fill the 12-slide order above with one claim per slide. You can also generate a PPTX elsewhere and import it into Google Slides.

#Do you need a designer to make a pitch deck?

No. You need one font, one accent color, and your logo applied consistently. Spend the real effort on the numbers and the narrative.

#How many slides should a pitch deck have?

Ten to fifteen. Past twenty, you are explaining instead of pitching; move the extras to an appendix.