The deck that raised — and the slides I'd cut now

In December 2021 I signed the term sheet that brought RMB and ZX Ventures together as co-investors in The Duchess. The first time the two of them had ever co-invested in anything. By that point we were at 8 million bottles shipped, in 7 countries, with 50%+ of revenue coming from export. The deck that got us there is the same deck I’m now teaching founders to build.

This is a walk through it. Slide by slide. With the three slides I’d cut if I were rebuilding it today.

The job of the deck

Most pitch decks die in the first three slides. The ones that raise money have one job — to keep the investor reading. Everything after slide three is downstream of that.

The deck I used for The Duchess was 14 slides. Inside the room it became a working document — we’d flip back to slides 4 and 11 a lot, skip 7 and 8 entirely, and spend half the meeting on whichever slide the investor’s analyst had circled in the margin. So the deck has to survive being read in any order.

Slide 1 — the line they remember

The opening line is the only line most early-stage investors read carefully. For The Duchess in 2018 it was a version of:

“We’ve sold a million bottles of a non-alcoholic G&T in our first 12 months in South Africa — without spending a cent on advertising.”

Specific. Surprising. Defensible. Three things every opening line needs.

Specific because it includes a number and a market. Surprising because it contradicts the assumption you start with about beverage launches (that you spend half your raise on ads). Defensible because it was true and we had the receipts.

The version most founders write reads more like “We’re disrupting the $X billion non-alcoholic beverage category with a premium offering for mindful consumers.” That sentence puts the investor to sleep. Do not write that sentence.

Slide 2 — the gap, in one sentence

Skip the TAM/SAM/SOM diagram. Skip the slide of competitors arranged in a 2×2. State the gap as a sentence a non-operator could repeat to their colleague over coffee.

Ours was: “53% of Americans want to drink less, but alcohol-free drinks are 0.5% of the alcohol market. The category exists. The product doesn’t.”

That sentence does the work of the next 4 slides most founders include. Investors don’t need a market study — they need to be told there is a real, specific gap, and that you understand it.

Slide 3 — the wedge

Why this product, this team, this moment. If you can’t make this slide a sentence, you don’t have a wedge yet — you have a hypothesis.

Mine was: “We’re a non-alcoholic spirits brand built like a luxury fashion house — and we already shifted a million bottles in 12 months without ads.”

The point of the wedge slide isn’t novelty. It’s defensibility. What can you do here that would take a competitor 18 months to copy?

Slide 4 — traction

Numbers. Lots of them. Tabular. No graphs unless the graph tells a story a number can’t.

In late 2021 the slide had: 8M+ bottles shipped to date. 7 countries on shelf. 50%+ export revenue. 74% of customers women aged 18–34 (yes, I knew this — I had Shopify analytics open every Monday). Year-on-year growth multiples.

Investors didn’t need the chart. They needed the four numbers above, in tabular form, on one slide.

Slide 5 — the team

Skip the row of stock-photo headshots with three lines of bio each. Nobody reads it.

What works on this slide is one line per founder explaining why this venture, specifically. Mine: “Built and exited Brannas Draught (SA brandy brand, sold to KWV partnership in 2015) — that’s where I learned how brand-led FMCG actually works.” Inus’s: “15 years as a creative director — built every visual asset of The Duchess from the napkin up.”

The point isn’t to show the team is impressive. The point is to show that of all the people on earth, this team is the right one to win this market.

Slides 6–9 — the operating slides

These are the ones investors will spend the most time on, and they need the least theatrics. Pricing. Margins. Channels. Roadmap. Use of funds.

The discipline here is not to write the deck for the partner — write it for the analyst. The partner skim-reads slides 1–5 and then hands the deck to a 26-year-old whose job is to find the holes in your model. Your operating slides need to survive that 26-year-old.

For The Duchess the use-of-funds slide was three lines: 60% inventory and listing fees in target markets, 30% team hires (specifically named), 10% working capital. No vague “marketing” bucket. No “general corporate purposes.” Specific is fundable. Vague is not.

Slides 10–14 — the close

Brand. Roadmap. Vision. Risk. The ask.

The brand slide is the one slide where you let the design do the talking. For The Duchess it was a single hero image and the wordmark. No copy. The bottle is the pitch.

The risk slide — show you’ve thought about what could break. We listed three: regulatory shifts in alcohol-free taxation, retailer concentration (50% of SA beverage retail goes through two chains), and exchange-rate exposure on import packaging. Investors don’t expect you to have solved every risk. They expect you to know what they are.

The ask slide is one line. R-amount, in exchange for X% equity, on a Y-month runway. Don’t bury this. Don’t decorate it.

What I’d cut now

If I were rebuilding this deck today, three slides come out.

The team slide where everyone has a stock-photo headshot and three lines of bio. Replace with two short sentences per founder, each tied to why this venture. Headshots optional.

The competitive 2×2 with logos in each quadrant. Investors will draw their own. They don’t need yours.

The five-year forecast. They know it’s wrong. You know it’s wrong. The year-one and year-two forecast is the one that matters — anything beyond that is a fairy tale and they will read it as one.

What I’d add

A “what we’d do with the money” slide that’s specific enough that the investor can argue with it. “Hire two people: a US distribution lead at $140k base and a brand manager at R65k/month. Place initial inventory orders for two new markets: Netherlands and Australia. Run a Q3 retail trial with [named retailer].”

Vague is comfortable. Specific is fundable.

The thing nobody tells you

The deck doesn’t raise the money. The conversation does. The deck’s only job is to get you to the conversation. Once you’re in the room, it’s about whether the investor believes you, not whether the deck looked nice on Figma.

That’s why the operator-grade pitch deck is structurally simpler than the consultant-grade one. Operators want investors to lean in and ask questions. Consultants want investors to nod and look impressed. Different job, different deck.

If you want me to walk through your deck the way I just walked through mine, the Pitch Deck Sprint is built for that. Three sessions. We rebuild the deck from narrative up. You walk out with one you can defend in a room.