Ask an AI tool to "make me a pitch deck" and you'll get something that looks right: a problem slide, a solution slide, a market slide, a team slide. It will also be generic, full of confident claims you can't back up, and easy for an investor to see through in the first minute.

The problem isn't the AI. It's the prompt. A vague request gets a vague deck.

That's why we wrote 29 prompts that work differently. They ask the AI to think like an investor before it writes anything. They don't invent metrics: anything missing gets marked as [DATA NEEDED]. They separate facts from assumptions. And they help you research the specific investor you're about to pitch, not investors in general.

Why preparation decides your round

Investors say no far more often than they say yes. In one of the largest academic surveys of venture capitalists, Paul Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev asked nearly 900 VCs how they choose investments. The answer: for every deal a firm closes, it considers about 100 companies.

Only about a quarter of those companies get a meeting. Around eight reach a partner meeting, and about four make it to due diligence. The same study found that the average firm looks at about 200 companies a year and invests in only four.

Your deck is competing for one of those few spots. Every weak claim, missing number or unanswered question is a reason to move on to the next company.

These prompts are built to find those problems before an investor does.

What's inside the prompt library

The library has two parts.

Part 1: 14 prompts for your pitch deck

  • Build a fundraising-ready pitch deck from raw business information

  • Rebuild your existing deck for a specific investor

  • Stress-test your pitch before you send it

  • Turn your data into an investor narrative

  • Find your real TAM, SAM and SOM

  • Build the use of funds slide from your actual business plan

  • Build the deck around the investor's questions

  • Analyze your competition the way an investor would

  • Create an investor Q&A preparation room

  • Decide whether you should raise capital now

  • Build an investor shortlist instead of a generic list

  • Adapt your pitch for an angel, a VC and a strategic investor

  • Build a fundraising data room from your company information

  • Turn an investor meeting into a better pitch deck

Part 2: 15 prompts to research the investor

  • Map the investor's portfolio

  • Find the investment patterns behind the portfolio

  • Find the most relevant comparable companies

  • Reverse-engineer why they invested

  • Analyze the partner you're pitching

  • Detect the fund's actual thesis versus its website thesis

  • Determine what stage of company they like

  • Find what's missing from your deck for this investor

  • Build an investor-specific pitch narrative

  • Find the investor's likely objections

  • Position your startup against their portfolio

  • Research how the investor talks about its investments

  • Compare their successful and unsuccessful investments

  • Identify which portfolio companies to mention in your deck

  • The final prompt: turn all your research into a pitch strategy

Try one now: stress-test your pitch before you send it

Here's one of the 29 prompts, free. Paste it into your AI tool with your deck and any supporting information, and see what an investor would push back on.

Act as a skeptical investor who has received hundreds of startup pitch decks. I will provide you with my current pitch deck and supporting information. Assume that you have only this information and that your job is to determine whether the company deserves a second meeting.

Review the deck with a deliberately critical lens. For every major claim, ask what evidence supports it and what an experienced investor would challenge. Stress-test the following areas: market size, growth assumptions, customer demand, pricing, margins, CAC, retention, unit economics, competition, defensibility, team, scalability, use of funds, valuation and the next financing round.

Then create an "Investor Challenge Report" containing:

  1. The 15 hardest questions I am likely to receive.

  2. Which questions my deck currently answers well.

  3. Which questions it answers weakly.

  4. Which questions it does not answer at all.

  5. The evidence I should prepare before sending the deck.

  6. The three assumptions that represent the greatest investment risk.

Do not make the company sound better than the evidence allows. The purpose is to expose weaknesses before an investor does.

The other 28 prompts cover everything around this one: building the deck, researching each investor, preparing for their questions and learning from every meeting.

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