Investor deck to video

The forwarding problem

A pitch deck is built for a room. Every slide is a prompt for something you say, which is why a good deck is sparse — the words are yours, not the slide's.

Then the deck gets forwarded. To a partner who was not in the meeting, to an associate doing diligence, to someone's contact who might be interested. At every hop the slides travel and the explanation does not, and the sparse deck that worked beautifully in person becomes twelve slides of unexplained assertions.

What the narrated version fixes

A five-minute narrated walkthrough travels with the deck and says the things you would have said. The recipient hears the reasoning behind the market sizing rather than inferring it from a number, and hears why the go-to-market sequence is that order.

It also compresses well: someone deciding whether to take the meeting will watch five minutes and will not read twelve slides carefully. The video is the artefact that survives being triaged.

What not to put in it

The video is a wider-circulation artefact than the deck by construction, and you should assume it will be seen by people you did not send it to — including competitors. That changes what belongs in it.

• Detailed financial projections — signal the shape, keep the model for the data room.
• Named customers who have not agreed to be named publicly.
• Cap table and specific terms.
• Anything under an NDA you have not checked.

Structure

The deck's order usually works, with one change: lead with the traction slide if you have traction. The problem-solution opening is convention, and convention is exactly what a triaging investor pattern-matches past.

Keep it to five minutes. Ten minutes signals that the story needs ten minutes, which is itself a signal. If you cannot do it in five, the pitch is not tight enough yet, and finding that out from a script is cheaper than finding it out in a meeting.

Whose voice

For a fundraise, a founder's own voice is worth the extra effort — investors are partly evaluating you, and a synthesised narrator removes the thing they are assessing.

Record the narration against a rendered visual track rather than screen-recording the deck. Your voice stays, the visuals stay editable, and when the traction number changes next month you re-record one line instead of the whole thing.

Frequently Asked Questions