Pitch decks for early stage startups

I worked with Foundation Studio in 2024 to help several Techstars Atlanta startups improve their pitch decks. Sometimes this meant focusing on visual design to make their stories more engaging, other times it was a more strategic collaboration to help founders sharpen their narratives.

Before designing, I like to understand how founders think about their companies and what excites them most. While reading materials helps, informal chats often reveal opportunities missed in formal decks. A founder might emphasize technical specs when a more meaningful angle is how they're transforming industry relationships, or they might share an anecdote that better captures their passion for solving a problem. These candid moments help identify the most compelling elements to highlight in their pitch.

Making pain points more tangible

Wscripted needed help conveying how their AI-powered platform accelerates script review and discovery for entertainment companies. While their existing deck touched on key points, investors were saying the problem and solution weren't clear enough.

Through conversations with founder Ellie Jamen, we identified that emails and attachments were a visceral pain point everyone in the industry could relate to. So we leaned into this by visually connecting an overflowing stack of email notifications to a mountain of scattered script pages. This change (1) made the idea more visceral that email has been an insufficient modern tool for reviewing script submissions, and (2) gave that point more room to breathe with its own slide before elaborating with specific stats in the next.

I made changes like this throughout the deck to make key points feel more obvious, tangible, and elegantly expressed than in the original deck.

Selected before/after slides

The original opening focused on basic industry statistics without conveying the visceral pain of the problem

Team and advisor information was presented in a way that made it difficult to quickly grasp key expertise

Split the original statistics-heavy slide to lead with this visceral visualization of overwhelming script submissions and notifications

Following the emotional hook, backed up the problem with specific industry metrics about review time and missed opportunities

Highlighted Wscripted's commitment to ethical AI development and data security with a clean circular visual

Used event photography to show the founder's active industry presence rather than relying solely on logos

Redesigned the growth trajectory with expanding circles to better show how their platform grows over time

Made Wscripted's advantage feel more obvious: how the platform replaces a patchwork of single-purpose tools with one industry-specific solution

Improved the team and advisor presentation with clearer hierarchy and more comfortable spacing

Structuring scattered points

Ranked came to me with a prototype that had recently been redesigned and a pitch deck containing valuable but scattered information. The founder had already locked in his copy and narrative, so my work focused on creating better visual structure, polish, and informational flow.

I gave the deck a bolder visual style inspired by new media platforms like Spotify, which aligned it better with the modern influencer marketing landscape. Better visual anchoring and hierarchy made it easier to follow how Ranked's focus on "nano-influencers" addressed specific market opportunities.

They wanted to include a pre-made infographic about the success of their Black Panther: Wakanda Forever social media campaign, which contained valuable information but was too dense for a slide. Restyling it wasn't feasible within our timeline, so I reworked the slide and graphic to harmonize better while pulling out the key points.

Selected before/after slides

The original creator economy slide mixed statistics with interface mockups, making both harder to absorb

Problems were presented with a dense collage of images and text that buried key points

The Black Panther campaign data was presented in a busy, dropped-in infographic that made it difficult to grasp the scale of success

Reorganized market statistics into a cleaner three-part visual that lets each number land with more impact

Simplified the presentation of creator challenges, using an imposing "problem wall" to emphasize key pain points

Integrated the Black Panther campaign more naturally into the deck's visual style while extracting key metrics

Broke out product features into focused, individual slides—here showing just the campaign creation interface to make the entry point crystal clear

Condensed layers of market data using the deck's recurring radial motif for a sense of expanding market opportunity

Distinguishing a new kind of platform

This case study will be updated with slide images once Callo completes their current fundraising round.

Working on Callo's pre-seed pitch deck particularly excited me because of the startup's focus on creative taste—how directors, producers, and other above-the-line entertainment professionals could be matched based on their artistic sensibilities and professional goals rather than just industry connections.

People often mistakenly think of Callo's projects-oriented platform as "LinkedIn for film professionals" or other generalized productivity and networking tools. Their language also needed careful attention to avoid confusing "independent creators" with influencers or below-the-line crew roles. Our challenge was to make these distinctions clearer while showing how Callo could transform an industry that still relies heavily on word-of-mouth connections.

The redesign transformed their deck from standard tech startup slides into something that better reflected Callo's identity: a more artistically-attuned platform supporting indie productions. The deck also needed to work as a standalone pre-read before meetings, so we rethought all of the information pacing to help convey the information density with more clarity. I used interface-suggestive containers, atmospheric photography, and moody gradients to give each idea more room to resonate.

While the deck is currently under NDA during Callo's fundraising round, the slides are available to review upon request.

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