Preparing a Pitch Deck

The best pitch is when it flows naturally out of you. And the only way that can happen is when you narrate the story of your idea and/or startup and not when you talk numbers or facts.

Here are some tips to help you make a better pitch deck.

1. Remember the application is a tool that supports/betters the action - the presentation.
2. Take a notebook or better still, a long-pad (also known as a legal pad).
3. Draw a vertical line dividing the page into 2/3rd and 1/3rd sections. Do this for all the pages that you will consume.
4. Close your eyes and imagine the following:
• You are standing on the stage or in front of the room.
• You are wearing nice formal clothes (or clothes that are appropriate for the meeting).
• Your audience - the investors, are all sitting in front of you. They are eager to hear what you have to say.
• You are confident and poised. 
• And finally, you start your speech.
5. In the left section, start writing your speech, as the words come to you. Do not bother about grammar, correct words, jargons or impressive terms; just write them as you hear yourself talking in your imagination.
6. Do not stop writing until you have narrated your story and reached the end of your speech.
7. Take a fresh sheet/page.
8. Edit the speech. Move sections around to make your narrative more interesting. Swap lines. Add in words that you missed out the first time. (Don't forget to vertically divide the pages all the time)
9. Repeat until you are happy with what you have written.
10. Once you have written your speech, it's time to start thinking about your deck.
11. For every line, paragraph or section you have written, draw a mock screen in the right section. It doesn't have to be a work of art, but just some scribbles and doodles to give you a fair idea of what your screens should/would look like.
12. Once you have the sketch (and the related text), it's now time to fire up that presentation application and make the fluid pitch deck.

Some additional advice:

• Invest in a good presentation template. Use sites like graphicriver.net to find the right template.
• Invest in ensuring your casing is correct. Learn the difference between sentence case and Title Case.
• If you see a squiggly line below any word or sentence. Fix it right away.
• Be consistent with words and terms. Especially with currency values. If you use the currency designator code (INR, JPY, USD, GBP, etc.) or currency symbols ('₹', '¥', '$', '£', etc.) then use them through the deck. Do not interchange codes with symbols.
• Search the internet for must-have contents in a pitch deck. Make sure your story/narrative covers all those topics.
• Once your deck is ready, that's just 30% of work done. The 65% is the rehearsal and the 5% is the delivery.