Draft Your Pitch Deck as a Plain-Markdown Outline You Own

Write your pitch as a plain-text outline before you open any slide tool. A pitch is a narrative first and slideware second — one argument, in order, with one idea per line. Draft and version that argument as a Markdown file you own, then design the deck last. The slides are the final ten percent.

This inverts how most founders work. They open a template, fall in love with a layout, and let the boxes decide the story. The order of the argument — the part investors actually grade — gets retrofitted to fit the design. Plain text removes the temptation. There is nothing to style, so the only thing left to get right is the thinking.

Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, put the underlying principle in one line: "Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last" ¹. Your pitch outlives every deck you build from it. Treat the words as the asset and the slides as a disposable render.

Why draft a pitch deck in Markdown first?

Because investors skim, and skimming rewards a legible argument over a pretty one. The DocSend and Harvard study of more than 200 pitchdecks, from companies that had raised $360 million in total, found that VCs spend an average of just 3 minutes and 44 seconds on a deck ².

A clean text outline forces you to make those minutes legible before you spend a day on layout. Drafting in plain Markdown does three things a slide tool cannot. It forces one idea per line, so a slide that secretly holds three arguments shows up as three lines you must cut or split. It versions cleanly, so you can keep last week's draft and diff the change. And it survives every tool — the outline you write today opens, unchanged, in whatever deck software you use next year.

What order should a seed pitch deck be in?

Lead with purpose, problem, solution, and market — in that order — and put the ask last. DocSend's analysis of seed decks found that "founders who open their decks with the first four sections above are more likely to raise funding than those who opt for other approaches" ³.

Order is not decoration; it is the difference between a deck that gets read and one that gets closed. The canonical sequence is stable across the people who have studied it. A workable nine-section spine: company purpose, problem, solution, why now, market size, product, business model and traction, team, and the ask. Draft it in that order as headings first. If the argument does not hold as a bare outline — purpose, then pain, then fix, then proof — no layout will rescue it.

How many slides should a pitch deck be?

Aim for a handful of big ideas, not a fixed slide count. The "ten slides" canon comes from Guy Kawasaki, who wrote in 2005 that "a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points" ⁴.

His reason was cognitive, not arbitrary: ten is "the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting" ⁵. Treat that as a ceiling on ideas, not a rule about pages. Y Combinator's Kevin Hale reframes the target as memory, not count: "These 5 to 7 points are the ones you want investors to remember" ⁶. And real send-ahead decks run longer than the live-pitch version — DocSend recommends "building a 19-20 page deck" for the version investors read alone ⁷. The honest rule: five to seven big ideas, one per slide, and a deck length that fits the room.

What makes a pitch slide legible?

One idea, large type, and nothing the eye has to decode. Hale's whole design thesis is three words: "Slides should be legible, simple, and obvious" ⁸. His legibility test is brutal and useful: "Legible slides are ones that even old people sitting in the back row with bad eyesight can read" ⁹.

If a slide fails that test, it is carrying too much. This is exactly what a plain-text draft trains. A Markdown heading with two bullets under it is already close to a legible slide; a heading with nine bullets is a warning you can see before you ever open a design tool. Writing the outline first surfaces the overloaded slides while they are still cheap to fix — a paragraph to trim, not a layout to rebuild.

The Markdown pitch-outline template

Here is the centerpiece: a copy-pasteable outline you own. Each of the nine sections carries three things the viral one-line versions leave out — the one-sentence job of that slide, the diagnostic questions you must answer, and the failure mode that gets the slide skipped or skimmed.

Save it as pitch.md on your own device, fill in the answers as plain prose, and design slides only once the argument reads clean.

# Pitch Outline — [Company]
> Draft the argument here as plain text. One idea per line.
> Design slides only after this reads clean, in order, on its own.
> A clean outline makes a good idea legible. It does not manufacture one.

## 1. Company purpose
Job: say what you do in one plain sentence a stranger repeats correctly.
Ask yourself: What do we make, for whom? Could a non-expert retell it?
Failure mode: a vision statement instead of a sentence; jargon hides the product.

## 2. Problem
Job: name the specific pain, for a specific person, that exists today.
Ask yourself: Who hurts? How do they cope now? Why is that cope bad?
Failure mode: a problem so broad ("productivity is broken") nobody feels it.

## 3. Solution
Job: show how you remove the pain — concretely, not abstractly.
Ask yourself: What is the before/after? What does the user actually do?
Failure mode: features listed before the pain they answer is established.

## 4. Why now
Job: explain what changed in the world that makes this possible/urgent today.
Ask yourself: What shifted — tech, cost, behavior, regulation — in the last 1-2 years?
Failure mode: no timing argument, so a reader thinks "why didn't this exist already?"

## 5. Market size
Job: show the opportunity is large enough to be worth funding.
Ask yourself: Who pays, how many are there, what would they spend? Top-down AND bottom-up.
Failure mode: a giant top-down number with no bottom-up path to reach it.

## 6. Product
Job: make the thing real — a screenshot, a flow, a demo line.
Ask yourself: What does it look like? What is the one moment that makes it click?
Failure mode: telling instead of showing; no concrete artifact a reader can picture.

## 7. Business model + traction
Job: how you make money, and the evidence it is starting to work.
Ask yourself: What's the price, the unit, the early signal (users, revenue, retention)?
Failure mode: thin or vague traction — the slide skeptics dwell on longest.

## 8. Team
Job: explain why this specific team wins this specific problem.
Ask yourself: What unfair advantage, earned insight, or relevant scar do we have?
Failure mode: a list of logos with no line connecting the people to the problem.

## 9. The ask
Job: state how much you're raising and what it buys (the milestone).
Ask yourself: How much, for what runway, to hit which next proof point?
Failure mode: an ask with no milestone — money requested, outcome unspecified.

The diagnostic questions are deliberate. They are the difference between a teaser and a tool: the viral versions hand you nine labels, while this hands you nine arguments you have to win on the page. The failure modes are sourced from where investors actually spend their attention — DocSend found the traction section "gets the longest look from VCs" and that "we found that VCs spend 80 percent more time evaluating the traction of companies that didn't raise money successfully" ¹⁰. Weak traction is not skimmed; it is interrogated.

Common mistakes when outlining a pitch

The same failures recur, and a plain-text draft catches most of them early. Watch for these before you ever touch a design tool:

• Designing before deciding. Layout choices made before the argument is settled lock in a story you have not finished thinking through. Write the words first.
• More than one idea per line. A bullet with two claims is a slide with two slides hiding inside it. Split it now, while it is one line.
• Burying the ask, or stating it without a milestone. "We're raising $X to hit Y" is a complete ask. "We're raising $X" is half of one.
• Mistaking a clean outline for a fundable company. This is the load-bearing caveat. Structure makes a good idea legible; it does not invent traction, market, or team. The DocSend study found companies needed an average of 40 investor meetings and took a little over 12 weeks to close a round ¹¹. A tidy file shortens none of that. It only makes sure a strong story is not lost to a weak layout.

Why keep the outline as a file you own

Because the outline is the asset, and the slides are the disposable copy of it. Decks die in proprietary formats, locked behind one tool's account and one tool's export menu. The argument underneath — the part you actually labored over — should not share that fate.

Keep it as plain Markdown, on your own device, where it opens in any editor, in any year, with no login. That is the same instinct behind owning any structured document as plain text, like a résumé you control rather than one trapped in a builder. A pitch outline stored as local-first, open Markdown works offline, versions cleanly, and outlives the deck tool you happen to use this quarter — it is yours to carry into the next pitch, and the one after that. One such place to keep it is mnmnote.com.

Frequently asked questions

How many slides should a pitch deck be? The canon is roughly ten slides, but the truer target is five to seven big ideas, one per slide. Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule sets ten as a ceiling on concepts a viewer can absorb ⁴; Hale frames it as "5 to 7 points" investors should remember ⁶. Real send-ahead decks run longer — DocSend suggests 19-20 pages for the read-alone version ⁷.

What order should a seed pitch deck be in? Lead with company purpose, problem, solution, and market — then product, business model and traction, team, and the ask. DocSend found founders who open with those first four sections raise more often than those who reorder them ³. Draft the order as bare headings first; if it holds without slides, it will hold with them.

Should I write my pitch before making slides? Yes. A pitch is a narrative before it is slideware, so settle the argument as plain text first and design the deck last. Writing one idea per line surfaces overloaded slides while they are still cheap to fix — the same legibility discipline Hale calls "legible, simple, and obvious" ⁸, applied before any layout exists.

How long do investors spend on a pitch deck? Not long. The DocSend and Harvard study of more than 200 decks measured an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds per deck ²; DocSend's later seed-deck analysis put it at "three minutes and 20 seconds" ¹². Either way, your argument has to be legible in minutes, which is the case for getting the order right before the design.

Which pitch deck slide do investors look at most? Traction and business model. DocSend found the business-model section "gets the longest look from VCs" and that investors "spend 80 percent more time evaluating the traction of companies that didn't raise money successfully" ¹⁰. A weak traction slide is not skipped; it is studied. Draft it with the most care.

Will a clean outline get me funded? No, and any guide that implies it will is selling something. A clean Markdown outline makes a good idea legible — it does not manufacture traction, market, or team. The same study found companies averaged 40 investor meetings over about 12 weeks to close ¹¹. Structure removes one avoidable way to lose; it cannot supply the substance.

This builds on the people who actually defined the form — Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule, Kevin Hale and Y Combinator's "legible, simple, and obvious," and the DocSend and Harvard study of how investors really read. Credit them, then keep your own copy of the work.

Write the pitch before you build the deck, and the deck gets easier — because the hard part is already done, in a file you own.