Cynical Sally← Contents
Pitch Deck · How to / How not to

How to Build a Pitch Deck (and How Not To)

Most pitch decks are eleven slides of confidence and zero slides of evidence.

By Cynical SallyIssue Nº 1

A pitch deck has one job: get you the next meeting. Not the money, not the marriage, the meeting. Yet founders treat it like a personality test they're determined to fail with flair, stuffing in mission statements, a slide called 'Why Now' that could've been written in any decade, and a market size borrowed from a McKinsey PDF nobody read past page two.

This is what you getA real Full Truth, in full
Cynical SallyPitch Deck

The Full Truth

on A 29-year-old founder's seed-stage SaaS pitch deck

4.2
out of ten
Slide 3 says 'We are the Uber of compliance,' which tells me you have neither a moat nor a metaphor.
The Investigation
  1. 01

    The market slide is a top-down fantasy

    Critical

    You slapped a 62B dollar TAM on slide 5 with no SAM or SOM beneath it. Investors don't fund a percentage of a giant number, they fund the slice you can actually reach. Build it bottom-up: target accounts times your price times realistic year-one capture.

  2. 02

    Traction is hidden because it's thin

    Critical

    Your 12 design partners are mentioned once, in 9pt grey text, on the team slide. If they're paying, that's your loudest slide, not a footnote. If they're not paying, say 'pilots' and show the conversion plan instead of disguising it.

  3. 03

    The ask buys nothing in particular

    Notable

    'Raising 2M to accelerate growth' is a sentence that means nothing. Tie the number to a milestone an investor can grade you on later: which metric, by when. Vague asks read as 'I haven't planned past the wire transfer.'

The Copy Clinic

We are a next-generation AI-powered platform revolutionizing the way enterprises think about compliance.

Compliance teams still copy-paste audit evidence into spreadsheets by hand. We pull it automatically. Three banks now close their quarterly audit in 4 days instead of 19.

Raising 2M to accelerate growth and capture our massive market opportunity.

Raising 1.8M to go from 8K to 40K MRR in 18 months, funding two enterprise AEs and SOC 2 Type II, the gate every prospect asks for before signing.

The Action Plan
  1. 1Cut the deck to 11 slides: problem, solution, why now, market (bottom-up), product, traction, business model, competition, team, ask, vision. Kill everything else.
  2. 2Rebuild the market slide from the customer up and show the arithmetic, so the number is one they can check instead of one they have to swallow.
  3. 3Promote your paying customers to their own slide with logos, MRR, and a retention or expansion number. Make traction the spine of the deck.
  4. 4Rewrite the ask as a fundable milestone, then add a one-line 'use of funds' breakdown so they see exactly what their money turns into.
Yours for the price of a coffee.Printed with disdain
Your turn

That was a stranger's pitch deck. Drop yours, I will go just as hard.

One coffee, from €2,99. No mercy.

The good ones are quiet. They state a real problem, show that real people pay to make it go away, and prove the team has done this before or learned the hard way. Everything else is set dressing. Below is how to build the version that survives a 9-minute attention span, and how to build the version that gets a polite 'keep us posted'.

How to do it right
  • 01Open with the problem as a story, not a statistic. One real person, one real pain, one moment where they reach for a credit card.
  • 02Put the ask, the use of funds, and the milestone it buys on a single slide. 'Raising 1.5M to reach 50K MRR in 18 months' beats any vision paragraph.
  • 03Show traction as a line going up over time with the axis labeled. If the line is flat, show retention or unit economics instead and own it.
  • 04Build the market size bottom-up: customers times realistic price times what you can actually reach. Then show your math so they trust it.
  • 05Make every slide survive being read alone in an inbox. The deck gets forwarded without you in the room, so it has to talk on its own.
How not to
  • A 'Team' slide listing six advisors in suits and zero indication of who writes the code or closes the deals.
  • A TAM of '47 billion dollars' with no SAM, no SOM, and no explanation of how you reach even 0.01% of it.
  • A 'Competition' slide that is a 2x2 grid with you alone in the magic top-right and everyone else clustered in the loser corner.
  • A revenue projection that is a flat line for three months then a hockey stick to 40M, triggered by nothing on the slide.
  • Eighteen slides of vision and one buried line of traction, because the numbers are embarrassing and you hoped nobody would scroll.