I am seasoned professional who crafts the narrative as well as the design in pocket friendly budget. You can review my behance portfolio link: https://www.behance.net/muhammad_daniyal

Nobody cares about your fancy deck. I need words on a slide in an easily digested format. Most VCs will not waste their time ogling over your expertly designed deck.

A $20 asset library will get you something useably professional pretty quickly. If your team, vision, and early market validation are good enough, investors will forgive a some roughness. These are some good templates for ~$20: https://www.slidecow.com/

That gets you to 80/100.

We then hired professionals for $2000+ to polish it for a big pitch event. I hated spending that much, but the result was worth it. We would’ve looked amateurish next to the series A companies with truly professional decks.

That’s 98/100.

The best deck I’ve seen was made by former Apple designers and animators. Not worth it unless your company’s design skills are core to what you’re pitching.

The most important thing is that you have a graph that goes up and to the right. As long as it’s the right shape, it doesn’t matter if you made it with Google charts.

My partner and I (we are both Silicon Valley investors) review pitch decks all day long and charge a nominal fee for coaching and pitch deck “re-factoring”. We don’t do the rework though, we guide the founders and they do the work. We found this conducive to founder accountability and more importantly that it’s their own voice when it comes to the actual pitching

The pitch deck journey is truly ridiculous. You do an amazing deck, someone say it’s wrong, you tweak it, someone else says it’s wrong. You can do this for 18 months. Tell the right story about YOUR business, make the numbers make some sort of sense, jam it in to powerpoint using a stock template and go sell it (don’t take me completely literally, but you don’t need a well ‘designed’ deck, you need a great opportunity).

I’ll do your deck for something in the middle. Send me details.

If seed round, spend 200 300 max

What stage are you at? I’ve looked at tons of decks. For early stage it doesn’t need to look fancy from a graphics and design standpoint. So if money is a concern, I’d say skip the fancy pitch deck.

I see in your other comments that you are also looking for writing help. I’d be very careful here. Most outsourced options aren’t really great from what I’ve seen. The people who work on it will not be as familiar with your startup and market as you are. It’s really you and your team that need to do the hard work of refining the message and getting it down on paper in a clear fashion. Also many times, a startup will have a half-backed idea, and no outside consultant or designer is going to be able to fix that. The best they can do is point this out to you (hopefully) and try their best to put lipstick on your pig (use fancy design over substance). The trouble in this case is you outsource the deck and aren’t happy with what you get back. Instead of doing the hard work of clarifying your idea, you end up blaming the consultants/designers.

I’d do it yourself and then get feedback from other founders and friends whose judgement you respect. Then refine as you do actual pitches with VCS and get questions and feedback.

I’ve been involved in a few pitches…

If you can’t get initial investment based off a plain PowerPoint - black text on white background, you are in trouble.

As others have said, look at YCombinator pitch decks, copy their basic formatting and go from there. The original AirBnB one is available online and provides a good layout.

The basics of your company is told in graphs, dot points and testimonials.

The value in your company is expressed by you being in front of a potential investor and explaining why your service/ product is 10x that of any existing product/ service.

I have seen you say above in other comments, it may be worth spending x, as your time is worth x times 10.

If you are in the raising phase, your time should be spent on raising. That is where you are creating value for your company, by obtaining funds you need to grow/ expand.

Spend a day laying out the problem, solution, TAM and execution plan.

Don’t rely on others as a crutch. I have done that and countless others have too. Move fast, develop a narrative around your company and get it out there.

Good luck.

It is a scam, none of the wise investors I know will care about the quality of the design as long as it has correct and required data and has quality above certain limit

I spent $285 for the deck itself and $200 on market research.

$375 on the logo.

Spending about $1100 on a 2D render and 3D render of our RV Park as well as an animated fly through.

$235 for a 120 sec video.

$600 for drone footage.

Overall, I’m about $3k in with the marketing.

I’ve shown this pitch deck to some investors and capital raisers and they’ve commented its one of the best decks they’ve seen.

Already have some interested parties wanting to fund the full $5m.

what you convey is key- Idea validation, obtainable market size and team are the most looked slides. Assuming you are pre-seed stage. TAM, financial modelling will look over-cooked at this stage. The target should be to hit PMF, focus on that. After every pitch you will be refining. It’s not one time effort. Been there done that. If you need help DM me.

I spent nothing. I was usings tock template, and managed to secure substantial investment. It even become a hit for local news.

Just pick a template on pitch.com - and look for examples online there’s plenty of them. Even AI can make one for you these days. Pretty easy.

It depends on the stage but as a guess (I think you’re at pre-seed/seed level) you won’t need a $5,000 pitch deck. Investors prefer and in fact are now preferring more data over design.

PS: My Decks have successfully raised funds and they come in <$500 range. Feel free to DM if you need any professional help.