Pitch Deck Template

There are a thousand pitch deck templates online and most of them are lists of headings. The headings are not the problem — everyone knows there should be a market slide. The problem is what to write on it so that someone reading their hundred and twentieth deck this month has a reason to reply.

The principle everything follows from

A deck does not sell the company. It buys you a meeting, and it has to survive being forwarded on the way there.

In practice that means you are not the reader. The reader is someone who has never met you, on a phone, between two meetings, deciding within forty seconds whether to open it properly. If it survives that, they read it on a laptop in three minutes — looking for a reason to say no, because otherwise the volume is unmanageable.

Slide by slide

1. Title

Company name, one sentence on what you do, and a city. That sentence needs to contain the industry and the buyer. "We improve team collaboration" is a bad sentence — it could be software for hospitals or for construction. "B2B SaaS for shift planning in hospitals" is a good one.

2. Problem

Specific, with a person who has it and a number that expresses it. Not "the market is fragmented". Closer to: "a head nurse spends six hours a week rebuilding the shift rota in Excel, and rebuilds it again every time someone calls in sick."

3. Solution

What you actually do. One screenshot or one diagram beats five bullet points. Show the product rather than describing it if you possibly can.

4. Why now

The slide most decks skip and the one investors care about most. What changed that makes this possible today and not five years ago? Regulation, the cost of a technology, buyer behaviour, a new distribution channel. Without an answer, "why hasn't someone done this already" hangs over the whole deck.

5. Traction

This is the slide the decision is made on. Real numbers, monthly, on a plain chart with an axis starting at zero. MRR, paying customers, retention. Pre-revenue, show what you do have — pilots, letters of intent, users and their activity. Never put real numbers and projections on the same chart; do that and the investor stops trusting both.

6. Market

Bottom-up, not top-down. "There are 210 hospitals in Slovakia and Czechia, average annual licence €12k, so €2.5M here alone; DACH is fifteen times that" is defensible. "The healthcare software TAM is $40bn" is not — everyone knows that number came out of a report.

7. Business model

How you make money, what a customer costs to acquire, and how long it takes to pay back. If it is too early, say so plainly — an honest "we have three customers to base CAC payback on, here are their numbers" beats an invented average.

8. Competition

Including the one you would rather leave out. The investor will find it, and if it is missing they start wondering what else is. Instead of a two-axis matrix where you happen to be top right, write one sentence per competitor on why a customer picks you.

9. Team

Why you specifically. Not a list of former employers — a reason. "I ran shift rotas in a hospital for eight years and we solved this internally" is a reason. "Ex-Google" is a logo.

10. The round

How much, what it buys, and which milestone it gets you to. Not "team growth and marketing" but "18 months of runway to go from 11 to 40 paying hospitals and open Austria". Setting that number is covered in how much should a startup raise.

What belongs in the appendix

After the last slide, not in the main flow: the detailed financial model, cohort retention, technical architecture, pricing, roadmap, legals, a longer market breakdown. The appendix is somewhere to point during a conversation — and its existence says you have thought this through.

Format and mechanics

• PDF, not a link to a presentation. Links forward badly and some funds will not open them.
• One idea per slide, and a headline that is a claim rather than a category. "Traction" is a category; "0 to 11 paying hospitals in 9 months" is a claim.
• Readable on a phone. If your smallest type is under 16pt, rework it.
• File name as Company-deck-2026-09.pdf. It gets saved on the investor's side and found by name later.

Five mistakes I see most often

1. A first slide that does not reveal the industry. The most expensive mistake, because it kills the deck before anyone reaches the traction slide.
2. A chart whose axis does not start at zero. Investors see this daily and read it as an attempt to mislead, even when it was not.
3. Projections presented as traction. If past and plan are not clearly separated, you lose credibility on both.
4. A competition slide where you are alone in the top right. Nobody believes it, and it suggests you have not studied the competition.
5. No "why now". Without it, the question of why a larger company has not done this stays open.

When the deck is finished, run the forwarding test: send it to someone smart outside your industry, give them two minutes, and ask what you do, who buys it and how it is going. If they cannot answer all three, an investor will not either — they just will not tell you.

If you want it read the way an investment committee reads it, that is what a pitch deck review is for.