How to Make Your Seed Funding Pitch Deck [The ultimate guide]
- Ink Narrates | The Presentation Design Agency
- Dec 14, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 25
Our client Richard asked us an interesting question while we were making his seed funding pitch deck.
He looked at one of our early drafts and asked,
“How much do investors actually care about the design?”
Our Creative Director replied,
“They don’t—until it makes them care.”
As a presentation design agency, we work on many seed funding pitch decks throughout the year. In the process, we’ve noticed one common challenge: most founders try to cram everything they’ve built, thought about, and imagined into ten slides.
So in this blog, we’ll talk about how to make your seed funding pitch deck tell the story that actually matters.
The one that earns attention, not just asks for it.
In case you didn't know, we specialize in only one thing: making presentations. We can help you by designing your slides and writing your content too.
Why Your Seed Funding Pitch Deck Matters More Than You Think
Let’s get one thing clear. You’re not pitching your product. You’re pitching your potential.
At seed stage, investors aren’t writing checks because your MVP blew their minds or because you’ve unlocked some hidden market insight that no one else has. They’re investing in you. Your clarity. Your thinking. Your ability to frame a problem so sharply that the solution feels inevitable.
And your seed funding pitch deck is the fastest way for them to evaluate all of that.
Here’s what we’ve learned working with dozens of early-stage founders: investors make up their minds quickly. Sometimes in the first two slides. That’s not because they’re impatient. It’s because they’ve seen hundreds—sometimes thousands—of decks, and their brain has built an internal filter. If your pitch doesn’t break through that mental filter fast, you’re done.
And that’s where most founders go wrong.
They treat their deck like a scrapbook. A highlight reel of everything they’ve done. But investors aren’t looking for a scrapbook. They’re looking for a story. A clear, compelling narrative that shows you understand your market, your customer, and your path forward.
A good seed funding pitch deck isn’t just about what you’ve built. It’s about what you believe. And how convincingly you can make someone else believe it too.
If your deck doesn’t reflect that kind of thinking—if it feels like a list instead of a lens—you’re leaving money on the table.
We’ve seen decks with promising products get ignored because the message was messy. And we’ve seen average products get funding because the story was sharp.
The deck doesn’t close the round. But it starts the conversation. And if you’re not using it to make investors feel something—urgency, curiosity, conviction—you’re wasting your shot.
How to Make Your Seed Funding Pitch Deck
Let’s start with a hard truth.
No one funds you just because your slides are beautiful. But they do fund you if your story is clear, your thinking is sharp, and your slides don’t get in the way of either.
At seed stage, you are not a complete company. You’re the promise of one. So every slide in your seed funding pitch deck needs to make a case for that promise. Not with fluff. Not with jargon. With clarity.
We’re not here to give you a generic “10-slide template” that every blog has already rehashed. You can Google that. Instead, we’ll walk you through what those slides actually need to do—not just what they’re called. What they say about you, whether you realize it or not. Because we’ve seen enough decks to tell when a founder knows what they’re doing... and when they’re trying to fake it.
Let’s get into it.
1. The Opening Slide: This Isn’t a Label. It’s a Hook.
Most founders slap their logo and a tagline here and call it a day. That’s a miss.
This is the moment when your audience decides if they’re leaning in or checking their phone.
Use your opening slide to plant one strong idea. Something short and clear that gives a glimpse of what you’re about. One sentence. No buzzwords. Make it feel like a real human wrote it.
For example, instead of saying: "Revolutionizing AI-powered supply chain automation,”
Say: "We help consumer brands predict out-of-stock issues before they happen.”
The second one sounds like you’ve talked to real customers. Which is already a sign of a more grounded founder.
2. The Problem Slide: Don’t Just State the Problem. Make Me Feel It.
This is where many founders lose the room. They either make the problem too generic (“Hiring is hard”) or too narrow (“Our internal workflow for managing freelance contracts is inefficient”).
The right problem sits at the intersection of “big enough to be worth solving” and “specific enough to show you know the pain firsthand.”
And most importantly, show me what’s broken in a way that hits emotionally. Data is useful. But emotion is what sticks.
Let’s say you’re building a tool for remote team onboarding.
Don’t say: "Remote onboarding lacks structure.”
Instead, say: "New hires are spending their first week on YouTube because no one knows what they should be doing.”
That’s a visual problem. It lands. That’s what we’re going for.
3. The Solution Slide: Less is More (Really).
Don’t turn this into a product demo. Don’t list every feature. This is about your approach. Your way of solving the problem that shows you understand the user better than anyone else.
Answer one question: Why is this the right way to solve this problem, right now?
A great solution slide has one clear image—maybe two—and a sentence or two of explanation. That’s it.
And if your solution feels inevitable when paired with the problem, you’re doing it right.
4. The Market Slide: No TAM Acrobatics, Please.
We’ve seen too many decks throw around trillion-dollar markets like they’re trying to win a guessing game.
Here’s what a smart market slide says:
We know who we’re targeting first.
We know how many of them exist.
We know how much they spend.
You don’t need to convince investors that the total market is massive. You need to show them that you’re starting focused, and you know how to capture real value from Day 1.
A better version of the market slide might say:“We’re starting with 1500 DTC beauty brands in the US spending $50K+ per year on packaging logistics. That’s a $75M wedge into a $5B+ global opportunity.”
That’s how you earn trust. By showing you’ve done your homework and you’re not trying to boil the ocean.
5. The Product Slide: Make It Tangible. Not Technical.
Show me what using your product actually feels like. A screenshot is better than a wireframe. A customer quote is better than a list of specs.
And if you’re pre-product, show me a prototype or walk me through a use case. Tell a story. Make it human.
“Here’s how Lisa, a sales manager at a mid-size B2B company, solves her lead-tracking problem using our tool.”
That’s better than “Our software uses a proprietary algorithm to improve CRM data hygiene.”
Remember, this is a deck, not a white paper.
6. The Traction Slide: Use It if You’ve Got It.
And only if you’ve got it.
If you don’t have users, revenue, or partnerships yet, skip the traction slide. It only hurts you to stretch something into a metric it’s not.
But if you do have early signals, show them. Make them visual. Use charts. Show growth over time, not just numbers in isolation.
And always frame traction in context. “1000 users” means nothing unless I know how you got them, how active they are, or what that tells you about the market.
7. The Business Model Slide: Keep It Simple, Please.
We’ve seen decks with 4 different pricing tiers, upsells, channel strategies... for a company that hasn’t launched yet.
You’re not trying to impress investors with complexity. You’re trying to show that you understand how you’ll make money, who will pay, and how much they’ll pay.
If it’s SaaS, say the price, say the buyer, say the churn risk. If it’s transactional, say your take rate and how many transactions you need to break even.
That’s it.
8. The Go-To-Market Slide: This One Gets Ignored. Don’t.
This is where investors separate dreamers from doers.
You need to show that you don’t just have a product plan. You have a customer plan.
How will you get your first 50 users? Not 5000. Just the first 50. What channels? What budget? Who are you targeting? Why will they listen?
Too many decks say “content marketing and partnerships.” That’s lazy. Be specific.
“We’re partnering with three micro VC firms who serve our target audience and co-producing a webinar series for their founders.” That’s specific.
If your GTM is just “launch on Product Hunt,” you're not ready.
9. The Team Slide: Highlight Judgment, Not Just Pedigree.
Your team slide isn’t about showing off resumes. It’s about proving you have the right people for this exact problem.
If your background directly connects to the problem space, spell it out.
For example:“CTO led DevOps at Stripe, saw firsthand how mid-size SaaS companies struggled with X. This product is a direct result of those learnings.”
Don’t just say what you’ve done. Say why it matters here.
And if you’re a solo founder, that’s fine—just be honest and talk about the advisors or hires you’ve lined up to fill gaps.
10. The Ask Slide: Say the Number. Say the Plan.
Don’t dance around it. Investors need clarity.
Say how much you’re raising. Say what it’s for. Break it into 2–3 buckets.
For example:“We’re raising $1.2M to build the core team, ship v1, and get our first 100 paying customers. $700K toward hiring, $300K for product, $200K for GTM.”
And yes, the actual numbers can be rough. That’s okay. But don’t be vague. Vague equals unprepared.
If you’ve got commitments already, show them. It builds momentum. And if you don’t, still own the number.
Why Hire Us to Build your Presentation?
If you're reading this, you're probably working on a presentation right now. You could do it all yourself. But the reality is - that’s not going to give you the high-impact presentation you need. It’s a lot of guesswork, a lot of trial and error. And at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a presentation that’s “good enough,” not one that gets results. On the other hand, we’ve spent years crafting thousands of presentations, mastering both storytelling and design. Let us handle this for you, so you can focus on what you do best.