Thanks so much please speak more on pitch decks and finding investors for us newbies

There's a lot of content out there about what to include in a pitch deck and how to use them but here's the exact template that works for me. I'll preface this by saying I have had so many iterations of my pitch deck over the last year and it's definitely a document that I save as a PDF but keep the live version open pretty much all the time, especially when I was in fundraising mode. Also probably wanna have two versions of your pitch deck. One should have minimal text on the screen because it's something you'll use as you're presenting to an investor, probably on a Zoom call or maybe in person. And then you want another version with a little bit more text on the screen, something that could read on its own if you were sending this pitch deck in an email before your meeting. This is the more common situation for me. Most of the investors I've spoken to like to glance at the pitch deck before or after and they'd rather keep your actual conversation conversational. But anyway, I just went through my current pitch deck and here are the slides that I have in there, starting with the obvious one, the problem that you're trying to solve. That one's fairly self-explanatory. I'd say it is required for any pitch deck. Bonus points if you've experienced the problem firsthand or witnessed it firsthand. Um if you could put some hard numbers in there to show that this is a very real problem. Next one I have is why now. This one's maybe a little less common, but I think it's important if you can immediately get them thinking of the new technology, the the new law, the new consumer behavior that makes this problem particularly relevant and or solvable right now. Which leads you into solution, based on the problem and the current situation going on in the world, what's the solution that you came up with? This is kind of the mic drop on your solution and your product. For me, this is kind of like a solution part two, but I have a slide titled product where I have a little animation and get more in depth about what my product actually does and how it's solving the problem. Some cases if you're presenting this pitch deck on a Zoom call, you might switch screens and do a full product demo at this point. Next one I have is traction. This is a big one in a pre-seed or seed round. If you can show some tangible attraction, whether it's revenue or users or social media engagement in views, uh you definitely wanna show that you're already onto something. Defensibility. I think more people need to put this in their pitch deck, especially if you're talking about AI. Um I in my pitch deck actually have a combined defensibility and efficacy slide where I show a bunch of stats that kind of correlate with what we're doing well and what we're doing differently that wouldn't be easy to replicate. Future. This is another one that's sometimes at the end of people's pitch deck. It's not always there in my case. It kind of just makes sense in the story I'm telling to put it at this point. Um what is the kind of long-term vision for your product? How's it gonna grow? And how is what you're building now a wedge or gateway into that future. And I put my business model slide here because it kind of uh builds on our future vision. Uh the business model that we chose is gonna allow us to get there. So in this case you'll explain are you selling directly to consumers, are you selling to businesses, you sell to consumers, all that jazz. Market, here's where you talk about the market size, the TAM and SAM, how much money could you make if you reach every single person who needed this product. I think people actually overemphasize this one. It should be obvious that there is a big enough market here, but that's easy information to find and actually not that interesting. But a market is more interesting. How are you going to reach that market? How are you already starting to tap into that market? Do you have any specific advantage when it comes to a community you're part of or foot in the door somewhere or success on social media? That shows you have a way to actually break into this market, no matter how big it is. And finally, I have a little thank you slide. I think originally I had contact information on this slide and a link to a product demo if investors wanted to click and learn more. Now I just have a little thank you and a bunch of our investor logos so that potential investors could see the kind of company they would be in. One thing that's not on that list, but probably should be because it's so important to most investors is team. When I was raising my first round, I'm a solo founder and I didn't have a team yet, so it wasn't super relevant. But I definitely both my personal story and background and qualifications throughout this whole story. For most people if you have a small team or you have a founding team, I would definitely dedicate time to explain why this team is the right mix in order to build this business. How did you talk more about how a pitch deck should read? I have a lot of theories about how you should title them and how it should read like a cohesive story if you were flipping through really quickly, even things like design to make you stand out. So let me know what would be helpful to talk about next.