How do you use this template?
Take the fourteen slides above as the skeleton, and fill them with the words your own customers use rather than the words the template suggests. Slideable ships this as a 14-slide pitch deck template, one of 94 layout archetypes in the library, and it opens in the browser with no account, so the shape is on screen in under a minute. Set the Brand Kit once — typeface, accent, logo — and every slide obeys it, including the ones you add at midnight the day before the meeting. That kills the largest time sink in deck work, which is not writing and not design. It is the hour spent making slide 9 look like slide 2.
Every layout slot carries a character budget, the maxChars the box was drawn for, and the editor audits the deck against those budgets. This matters more than it sounds. A headline three characters over budget does not break; it reflows onto a second line and pushes the chart under it down forty pixels. You will not notice on a laptop. A room with a projector notices immediately. Writing into the budget is the same discipline as writing a headline to a column width, and it improves the copy: the version of a sentence that has to lose four words is usually the one you should have written first.
What order should you write the slides in?
Not the order they are read in. Reading order and writing order are different problems, and confusing them is why so many first drafts die somewhere on slide 2.
- Traction first. Slide 8 is made of facts you already have, so it cannot be procrastinated, and what it says constrains every other slide. A deck with real revenue argues differently from a deck with a waitlist.
- The ask second. The size of the round has to be defensible against the number you just put on slide 8, so write them next to each other.
- Problem and solution third. These are the two slides you will rewrite most often, which is exactly why they should start earliest.
- The middle in any order. Why now, market, model, go-to-market and competition can be written in whatever sequence you have evidence for.
- Cover last. The one-line description is the hardest sentence in the deck, and you cannot write it until you know what the other thirteen slides claim.
Charts belong in this pass rather than a design pass afterwards. There are eight chart types and they are edited in place, with no spreadsheet step, so the traction slide gets built while you are still thinking about what the number means. That is when you notice the growth reads better monthly than quarterly, a discovery that arrives too late once the chart is a pasted image.
How long should a pitch deck be?
Fourteen slides for the deck you email, ten or eleven for the deck you stand up and present, because you will be interrupted and you want to be. The figures most often quoted from deck analytics put average time on a seed deck at under three minutes, with roughly a quarter of that spent on two slides. Assume you get about twelve seconds per slide on the first pass. That is the design constraint: every slide has to be legible in one glance and its claim has to be in the headline, because the body text is read only on slides that have already earned it.
A pitch deck is not a document about your company. It is an argument that your company should exist, laid out so a stranger can check it in three minutes.
When should you break the order?
When one slide is so much stronger than the rest that burying it is dishonest to your own case. Growth of thirty per cent a month belongs on slide 2, ahead of the problem, because it changes what kind of conversation you are having. Deep tech moves why now and team forward, because the first question is whether this is possible at all and whether you are the people to do it. A regulated market moves the regulatory slide up next to why now, since it doubles as the barrier to entry. Everything else stays put. Reordering because the standard shape feels boring is not a reason — the shape is boring because it works, and an investor who reads twenty decks a week is navigating yours from memory.
How long should this take?
Two working days of writing, spread across a week so you read each draft cold at least once. Budget half a day for traction and financials, because those are the slides where you are reconciling numbers rather than composing sentences, and a day for problem, solution and the cover line, which is nearly all rewriting. Design should take close to zero: if the Brand Kit is set and you are using library layouts, there is no layout work left to do. Any deck that takes three weeks is one where the argument was unresolved and slide-fiddling stood in for the decision.
Who should read it before you send it?
Someone who does not know your company, and who you can watch. Give them the deck without narration, take it away after three minutes, and ask what the company does and what you are asking for. If they cannot answer both, the deck fails on slide 1 and slide 13, whatever else is in between. An MCP server exposes 14 tools, so an agent in Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI or VS Code can read, write and review the same deck alongside you — a fast way to catch the two failures a founder never sees in a draft: a claim that appears on three slides in three forms, and a slide whose headline states no claim at all.
Common questions
- How many slides should a pitch deck have?
- Fourteen for a seed or Series A deck sent by email: cover, problem, solution, product, why now, market, business model, traction, go-to-market, competition, team, financials, the ask, and a closing contact slide. Cut to ten or eleven for a deck you present live, because questions will consume the time you budgeted for the extra slides. Anything past twenty means the argument has not been decided yet, and appendices are where the detail belongs.
- How long do investors actually spend on a pitch deck?
- Under three minutes on average, according to the deck-analytics figures most often cited in the industry, and a large share of that lands on two or three slides — usually team, traction and the financials. That works out to roughly ten to fifteen seconds per slide on a first pass. Design for that: one claim per slide, stated in the headline, legible at a glance. Body text is read only after a headline has earned the reader's attention.
- What is the difference between the deck you send and the deck you present?
- The sent deck has to stand alone, so headlines carry the full claim and a slide may hold a sentence of context underneath. The presented deck is a backdrop for you talking, so it should be shorter, lighter on text, and heavier on one big number or image per slide. Maintain one deck rather than two: write the sent version, then present a trimmed copy of it. Two separately edited decks drift apart within a week and one of them will be wrong when it matters.
- Should a seed pitch deck include financial projections?
- Yes, but three years rather than five, and driven by four or five assumptions you write on the slide itself. At seed the numbers are not a forecast anyone believes; they are evidence that you understand what drives your own business and roughly what scale you are aiming at. A five-year projection ending in nine figures does active harm, because disbelief in year five spreads backwards and makes year one look invented too.
- What makes a pitch deck get a second meeting?
- One number that is genuinely hard to dismiss, and a story in which that number is the natural consequence of everything else on the slides. Second meetings come from specificity: a named customer, a real retention curve, a channel with a measured cost per acquisition. Polish does not produce them, though sloppiness can prevent one — a deck with inconsistent fonts and a chart nobody can read signals that the underlying numbers get the same treatment.