How to make a pitch deck for investors — a real six-slide deck for $0.203537
An investor deck is six slides, not twenty: where revenue stands, how it splits, the one bottleneck you are honest about, what the money gets spent on, and the ask. The bottleneck slide is the one that decides whether the rest is believed. Below is a real deck built from a single request, delivered as a PowerPoint file, and the reason it is worth reading is what it refused to fake — the charts are drawn shapes rather than real chart objects, and it said so on the slide instead of letting that surface in front of two investors.
How to do it
- Name the slides before you write them Six named slides in the order you want them read. This is the whole brief; everything else is filling them in.
- Put the bottleneck in, on purpose One slide about the constraint you cannot buy your way out of this quarter. A deck without one reads as a deck that has not looked.
- Ask for bracketed blanks rather than invented figures Made-up revenue numbers are worse than blanks, because you will not catch all of them. Bracketed gaps can be found with a single search.
- Check what the charts actually are Open one and right-click it. If Edit Data is greyed out you have a picture of a chart, and you need to know that before the meeting rather than during it.
The exact request
I run a 12-seat specialty coffee roastery. Make me a 6-slide deck for two investors: where revenue stands, the wholesale-vs-retail split, our one bottleneck (roasting capacity), what the next round gets spent on, and the ask. Use clearly-bracketed placeholder numbers so I can drop mine in. Deliver the .pptx file.
What came back
What it cost
| Investor deck run | $0.203537 |
| Total | $0.203537 |
What it got wrong
- The charts are drawn shapes, not chart objects with data behind them. The deck labels them as such on the slide itself and explains the right-click, Edit Data, replace-then-delete-the-label sequence — but until you do that, they are illustrations.
- Every figure is a bracketed blank. That was the request, and it means the file is a structure you fill rather than a deck you present.
- The currency was inferred rather than asked. The run picked Singapore dollars by reading the account's location and said so in its wrap-up note. When that guess is wrong it is a find-and-replace.
- It is written for the business in the request: a 12-seat roastery raising from two investors. The slide order travels further than the content does.
Questions people ask
How many slides should an investor pitch deck have?
Six is enough for an update or a small round: position, split, bottleneck, use of funds, and the ask. The example below is six, in the order the request named them.
What does it cost to have one built?
$0.203537 on the Smart tier, about a minute. The full receipt is on this page, and there is no plan to buy first.
Opens with this request already filled in. You pay for the run, not a plan.