Investors like a good story, and a good story has a familiar format. The closest you can get is to structure your deck into a familiar story format. Before you worry about the deck, you’ll need to gather some information together. Once you have it, organize it based on the structure below. Put the story together before you put the slides together. It is better to talk it through with some investor or entrepreneur friends you might know. Then, when you feel that you have the story down, put the deck together in the following structure:

1. Investment Thesis. You will need to understand why you’re doing what you are doing. What is your passion? Why are you the person to make it happen? How long can you work for free if you need to? Will you be willing to stick around?
2. Customer Problem. You’ll need to understand your customer problem, from personal interactions with your potential customers.
3. Solution the Customer is paying you for. You’ll need to understand that the customer, from interviews, appreciates the solution you are proposing and is paying for it (the solution), or is willing to pay for it.
4. Why now? Why is this an opportunity now? Why hasn’t this been done before. If so, why didn’t it work out? What has changed in the market today? Why isn’t this an opportunity in a few years?
5. Market. Understand the total addressable market. Approach your market question from the top and bottom. Ultimately, multiply the number of customers who would actually pay for it if they just gave you the time to sell them on the idea, multiply that number by your price. that is the market you should start with. You should understand the assumptions you are making about this and know why it could be smaller (total serviceable market). Is it growing?
6. What does your competitive landscape look like? More importantly, you need to think about your problem-solution set and along those characteristics, how do you differentiate? Who are the players? Do you have intellectual property?
7. Product. Often, entrepreneurs will demonstrate their product at this point. In practice, this could be a few snapshots, and you can walk through a use case that your customers have already highlighted for you. You do want to make sure this use case represents the market you identified earlier.
8. Business Model. How do you make money? How do you market and sell this? Are you making money in licensing? Are you making widgets at a certain cost? Are you distributing? Are you selling through channels? How do the economics work for everyone in the value chain? Does it scale?
9. Team. Why are you best suited, as a team, to make this happen? How long have you known one another. Who is full time vs. part time. Who are the key team members here? Where do you plan to grow? Do you have a board of directors?
10. Financials. How are your operational assumptions baked into your financial projections. How much have you realized this year? How much is in the pipeline? How can you reach the targets you’ve set for yourself and are you making reasonable assumptions. Why is this the most likely scenario?

In addition, be prepared to discuss the terms of your raise and how you plan to invest the capital to reach your milestones.