The market of Switzerland will force you into creating pitch decks one day or another. So, you’ll need to know what a pitch deck is and why it is necessary for markets like Switzerland or startup incubators like Silicon Valley and similar regions. A pitch deck is a short document that pitches your product idea or what you’re doing in your business. I’ve been a consultant for over 12 years.
My consultancy firm focuses on investment preparation here in Switzerland in Zurich, and there are a lot of things you ought to know about the essence of a pitch deck—what makes a good pitch deck versus a bad pitch deck. The first thing you should know is a pitch deck is similar to a T-shirt. There are different colors. There are different drawings. There is different material. Every single pitch deck designed is different compared to each other.
Creating a Storyboard for Your Pitch Deck
So how do we create pitch decks? A pitch deck is a story—that’s the first thing you should write down in the back of your mind. Knowing that, how do you tell a story? You tell a story by imagining who the viewer of this story is or who the listener to this story is, and from there you can advance to actually design a proper story. For that purpose, we always start our pitch decks with creating what we call a storyboard. A storyboard is a document that simply lays out your objective for this whole pitch deck on a piece of paper.
You might be looking for a pitch deck to raise investments—that’s the most common reason for creating a pitch deck. But others would create a pitch deck for potential founders or co-founders. Some would create it for employees so that they know what they’re signing up for, and other major corporations would create pitch decks just for simple products to pitch the products. There are no limits to what a pitch deck could be, hence there are no limits to what a story can tell, so you need to design your storyboard.
We have a few templates on our website to showcase how you can do that, but the most logical way of creating a storyboard is to start thinking about the people reading it and what they want to know. If you’re approaching an investor in the environmental sector, per se, and you’re working on a company similar to Tesla, you could keep saying sales, sales, sales, but what they would want to read about is your environmental impact. So your whole pitch deck should be structured around this frame or around this idea, that Tesla is good for the environment. When you put this investment thesis in your mind, only then will you be able to start designing the pitch deck that is good enough to be shown to these people, and that’s what a storyboard is all about.
Building and Designing Pitch Decks
Once you’re done with your storyboard, you can start working on creating your pitch deck. Now, there are lots of options on how to create your pitch deck. If you’re in Switzerland or in a market that is promoting startups in general, you have the following options.
Number one, you can create it yourself by purchasing a template for a PowerPoint or Google Slides. We actually have a few free templates on the website that you could check out if you’re interested, and from there you could just modify the template as your business. This is what usual co-founders do because they know the startup more than anyone, but in time and as the company has more resources, it does not make sense for a founder to focus on a document for raising investments. They ought to focus on what matters, which is actually growing the company. For that reason, you might be interested in hiring people like our agency, which is a startup consultancy focused on pitch decks.
Another option is to head to Fiverr or Upwork. These are freelancing websites where you can hire freelancers who could actually help you out with creating this document. That is also a very common option amongst entrepreneurs and founders out there.
Using AI Tools for Pitch Deck Creation
Now, the final option is something that is growing in popularity. It’s growing slowly, but it is gaining a bit of traction, which is using artificial intelligence tools like GPT to create a pitch deck. But it’s usually not well designed and is usually extremely generic. Remember that a pitch deck is a story, so if your story is extremely generic and similar to all other stories, then why would investors be interested in a generic story?
That’s why GPT has a flaw when it comes to investment documents. For that reason, there are tools evolving online like a website called tome.app, for instance, that is also just focused on creating presentations with AI. It’s not that good right now, and it’s still growing as a business, but it will take a little bit of time for this market to grow properly. We’re working on a similar initiative called Intensify.AI, which simply translates our knowledge of business documents into a module that you can use, sort of a middleman between consultants and users, the middle person being an artificial intelligence model like GPT or Claude.
Final Thoughts on Creating Pitch Decks
So these are the options you have if you want to create a pitch deck. Just always remember that it’s your story, and you have to tell it in a way that gives a genuine aspect of what your startup is really all about.