After 20 years and more than 200 pitch decks, I've seen the same mistakes destroy great ideas over and over. Here are the five I see in nearly every deck that comes through our studio — and the fixes that changed everything about how I design presentations.
Let's get one thing straight: I have been in the pitch deck trenches for over 20 years. I've built more than 200 of them. I've made a 72-slide deck in a single day. I once built a deck with nothing but three little pink snouts on a single slide.
Two completely different projects, same goal: convey a message so convincingly that the people in the room can't look away. Which done do you think was more efficient?
I've helped people present using music. Visual aids. Robots. A box of wisdom teeth. I've also made mistakes in my own decks as a founder… the kind of mistakes where you walk out of the room and think, well, that could have gone differently.
After 200 decks, here's what I know: some mistakes are so common that I see them in about 8 out of every 10 decks that come through our studio. And nearly all of them are fixable — once you know what to look for.
1. Overloading slides with text
Early in my career, I believed that more text meant more information, which meant more persuasion.
Wrong.
A cluttered slide doesn't inform — it overwhelms. The moment an investor sees a wall of text, their brain does one of two things: they try to read the slide instead of listening to you, or they tune out entirely. Either way, you've lost control of the room.
Here's the shift: your deck isn't a document. It's a visual aid for a conversation. If someone can read your deck and get the full picture without you in the room, you haven't built a presentation — you've built a report. And reports don't raise money.
Now, I aim for clarity and brevity. One idea per slide. If a slide needs a paragraph to make sense, the slide needs to be three slides. In roughly 7 out of 10 decks that come to us for review, text overload is the first thing we address — and it's often the fix that makes the biggest immediate difference.
2. Ignoring the narrative flow
I used to focus on individual slides. Early on as a designer, I was obsessed with the screen right in front of me — the layout, the typography, the colour balance. Each slide looked beautiful in isolation.
The problem? A pitch deck isn't a collection of slides. It's a journey.
Think of it like a meal. Sure, you can eat random dishes back to back and call it fine dining. But the meals you actually remember — the ones that stay with you — are cohesive from the first bite to the last. There's a reason the appetizer comes before the main course. There's a reason dessert is sweet. Each course builds on the last, and by the end, you're not just full — you're satisfied.
A great deck works the same way. Each slide should transition smoothly into the next, building a story that creates momentum. Problem creates hunger. Solution is the first taste. Traction is the main course. The ask is dessert. If you serve dessert first, nobody's hungry for the rest.
I call this the Hunger Arc — and it changed everything about how I build presentations. When I restructured a client's deck around this idea last year, the founder told me it was the first time an investor meeting felt like a conversation instead of a performance.
3. Using generic templates
Templates can be a starting point. I get that. When you're a founder with 47 things on fire and a pitch meeting in three days, grabbing a template feels like the responsible thing to do.
But here's what happens: the template includes 15 slide layouts. You need 8. So you start filling in the extras because they're there — "market landscape," "competitive matrix," "advisor bios" — and suddenly you're presenting 15 slides of content that doesn't serve your story, because a template designer in San Francisco decided those slides should exist.
Worse, the template looks like every other template. Your deck ends up with the same blue gradient, the same sans-serif font, the same stock photo of people shaking hands that your competitor used last Tuesday. Investors see hundreds of decks. When yours looks like everyone else's, you're invisible before you've said a word.
I've learned to customize every design to reflect the unique brand and message of each client. Not because I'm a design snob — because a deck that looks and feels like you is a deck that an investor remembers. The Three Little Pigs deck I mentioned? That worked precisely because it didn't look like anything else in the room. It was weird, it was bold, and it was impossible to forget.
4. Neglecting audience engagement
I once believed that a well-designed deck spoke for itself. Beautiful slides, tight copy, smart data visualization — what more do you need?
Turns out: connection.
When we were building the story arc for Delta's CES keynote, there was a moment in the run-of-show where the energy was going to dip. Thousands of people in the audience had just been on a flight, they were sitting down, and they were about to sit down for another hour. We needed something to break the pattern. To give people a reason to wake up, to make the CEO light up on stage, and to just... have some fun.
I mentioned, "Why don't we give out blankets? You know, the blankets you get on a flight."
That turned into, "Let's put a ticket in a few of the blankets."
The CEO? He loved giving away flights.
That turned into an Oprah moment. A Golden Ticket.
It worked. The room lit up. People were talking about it for the rest of the conference. And it had nothing to do with slide design — it was about understanding that a presentation is a two-way experience between a human on stage and humans in seats.
Now, I try to build engagement into every deck. Not gimmicks — moments. Places where the presenter can pause, ask a question, invite a reaction. Because the best slide in the world can't compete with a room that's already checked out.
5. Playing it safe with colour
This one's subtle, but it matters more than most founders realize.
Colour isn't decoration. It's communication. Blue builds trust — there's a reason financial institutions drown in it. Green signals growth. Red creates urgency. And the wrong palette can undermine your message before anyone reads a word.
I've seen founders pick colours because they "liked the way it looked" without considering what those colours are saying to an investor who reviews 30 decks a month. I've also seen founders default to their brand colours even when those colours actively fight the emotional tone of the pitch.
I use colour intentionally. Every palette choice is a strategic decision about how the audience should feel at each stage of the deck. When we shift from problem (tension, urgency) to solution (clarity, confidence), the colour palette can shift with it. Most people don't notice it consciously. They just feel it.
So what now?
I've spent 20 years making these mistakes so you don't have to. Here's the thing I keep coming back to: every single one of these lessons came from a real project, a real founder, a real room full of people who needed to believe in something.
If you're sitting on a deck right now that you know isn't landing — or you're about to build one from scratch and you don't want to waste three months learning what I figured out the hard way — that's exactly what the One Hour Deck Review is for. One hour. No BS. Just a straight-up breakdown of what's working, what's not, and what to do about it.
Next up in this series: I'm going to tear apart the single most important slide in your deck — the one that most founders treat as a throwaway, and the one that makes investors decide in the first 8 seconds whether they're in or out. It's not the slide you think it is. If you don't want to miss it, get on the list.