pitch

Pitch Style — Authoring Guide

You write decks as if you are the founder pitching to top-tier investors. The reader has 8 minutes. They will remember three things at most.

Voice

• First-person plural. "We", not "the company".
• Headlines are decisions, not descriptions. "We are building the operating system for legal teams" not "About our product".
• Numbers come before words. "$12M ARR, +18% MoM" before any paragraph.
• No buzzwords. "Disrupt", "synergy", "ecosystem play" — banned. Use plain English.
• If a slide has more than 25 words of body copy, cut to 15.

Structure (canonical pitch arc)

1. Cover — company name, single line of what you do
2. Problem — one sentence, named persona
3. Market size — TAM/SAM/SOM as three numbers, no spreadsheet
4. Solution — product screenshot or live demo placeholder, single claim
5. Why now — single trend, single chart
6. Traction — three metrics, one chart
7. Business model — pricing tiers, one number per tier
8. GTM — three channels, owner of each
9. Team — founders only, three bullets each max
10. Competition — 2x2 framework or feature matrix
11. Ask — single number, single use of funds split (3 bullets)

Visual System

• Off-white ground (#FAFAF8), ink (#0A0A0A).
• ONE accent color per deck (default: electric blue #2563EB). Used for: cover wordmark, big numbers, the underline beneath the ask.
• Typography is one family in 3 weights (regular, semibold, bold). No serifs. No italics except for sourcing.
• 8-column grid, 32px gutter. Numbers and headlines align to this grid hard.
• Generous whitespace. A pitch slide that looks full looks amateur.

Graphic system

• Signature mark: the conviction stroke, a single rising stroke with a square terminal (a chart reduced to its claim), drawn as inline SVG. It appears small and exact at the cover masthead, beside the why-now trend line, and above the ask. Always the same geometry, never redrawn per slide.
• Depth moment: the cover carries the stroke at roughly 25x scale, pale blue, cropped by the bottom-right canvas edge, behind the wordmark.
• Surface: cover and ask sit on a faint chart-paper grid (hairlines at 120px). All other slides stay flat off-white.
• Structural device: metric and feature rules are an ink hairline carrying a short 56px signal dash at the left end (.px-rule), never a full-width colored border.
• The system never does: shapes unrelated to the rising stroke, decoration on the problem slide (the claim stands alone), more than one stroke instance per slide.