Pitch Deck Mistakes to Avoid in 2025

Throughout the entire period of WEZOM's existence – 25+ years – we have been constantly monitoring the market and startups, specifically. Many of them could boast of excellent tech teams, advanced solutions that can be applied in real life, and, in general, promising potential. However, these ideas often died, not because of the technology or the market, but because investors could not understand why they should invest in them.

Of course, you can build a product, engage a team of top specialists, and make the most out of the budget you have. But! If your pitch deck looks like a ninth-grader's presentation, there is almost no chance of investing in further development.

A pitch deck is not just a PDF for another email newsletter or demonstration at technical events. With the right approach to its creation, it can become a full-fledged commercial weapon and give you the right to be noticed.

The thing is that investors won’t “dig into it” – they’ll just compare your pitch deck with dozens or even hundreds of others, and if someone can present themselves more professionally than you, your chance will be lost.

At WEZOM, we design and evaluate dozens of pitch deck presentations every month, working with both pre-seed startups and scalable tech companies. That’s why we decided to cover the common pitch deck errors and explain why hiring a pitch deck consultant is so crucial here.

Why Pitch Decks Still Matter in 2025

The average venture investor in 2025 receives dozens of pitch decks daily via email. So, to enter a shortlist, your startup pitch deck must impress and inspire confidence. In particular, as ten years ago, today, it helps to form a first impression of a startup, emphasize the maturity of the team and the sustainability of the business model, as well as visualize the scale and potential of the idea. Ultimately, with the right preparation, a pitch deck will help you convince an investor that the risks of collaborating with you will be much less than the chances that your product will conquer the market.

However, how can you be sure that your pitch deck is composed according to all the canons and does not look like a profanation? In fact, you can’t, since you are a priori an interested party. That’s why you should consider resorting to pitch deck services provided by experts who can evaluate your project objectively and professionally highlight its strengths.

Role of Pitch Deck Agencies and Consultants in Modern Fundraising

In 2025, the requirements for startup presentations have increased significantly: in particular, they need well-developed visuals, logic, analytics, storytelling, and personalization for a specific audience. Actually, this explains the importance of hiring professional pitch deck consultants. Here's what they do:

• Help identify key investment triggers and reflect them in the presentation;
• Turn the founder's "raw" ideas into a structured narrative;
• Suggest how to adapt the presentation to angels, funds, and accelerators;
• Ensure professional design, verified logic, and visual hierarchy;
• Perform a startup presentation expert review, with financial model selection and competitor research for the pitch deck to building a technical roadmap.

As you can see, the best pitch deck needs much more than just one evening for preparation – it requires a much larger scope of work, with narrowly focused expertise that you can get only as part of agency pitch deck services.

If you are looking for specialists who will competently create a pitch deck for your project, call or write to us right now.

Pitch deck agencies can fix outdated visuals and poor design choices 

Even if you already have a draft of your pitch deck ready, it still makes sense to invite external experts who provide pitch deck consulting services. Thus, they will evaluate and correct it (if necessary), because poor visuals can completely kill the effect of the presentation. Here's what analysts pay attention to on a pitch deck for investors:

• Learnability of slides (especially on mobile devices);
• Clear structure and highlighted key points;
• Modern, but not overloaded design;
• Visual style that matches the market and stage of the project.

For instance, we recommend to avoid these pitch deck pitfalls:

• Using a basic PowerPoint investor pitch deck template without branding;
• Small font or too much text on one slide;
• Uninformative graphs and tables without a caption or interpretation;
• Inconsistent style from one slide to another.

Many founders underestimate how differently the creator and investor perceive the presentation. In turn, professional creative agency pitch deck services imply building both the style and the perception of information, from the background color to micrographics. And yes, let’s emphasize that in 2025, visual design is not a tribute to aesthetics, but the most effective way to convey an idea to those who will be responsible for its implementation. Therefore, it is definitely not worth creating such an important document on the off-chance – this way, you will expose yourself to top pitch deck blunders in 2025.

The Role of The Competitors Slide in Your Investor Pitch Deck

Now, let's talk separately about one of the most important slides from a strategy point of view – the one containing an overview of competitors. In particular, with its help, the team proves that it does not live in an information bubble and understands the market environment perfectly, thus knowing its solution’s USP. In turn, from the investor's point of view, the presence of such a slide will indicate that the project is ready for competition and knows how to survive even in crowded niches.

Here's what the competitors slide for pitch deck should contain:

• The main market players. These are both direct and indirect competitors (including international ones), displayed either in a 2x2 matrix format (for example, where the price and product depth are compared), a functionality table, positioning by business models (B2C/B2B, SaaS/marketplace, etc.), and/or clustering by business segments.
• Competitors' traction. Including information on competitors' traction on such a slide is highly desirable to demonstrate that the market is developing, but there is still room for new solutions.
• Your unique positioning. Now, you should help the investor understand how your product differs from competitors in functionality, price, business model, target audience, speed of implementation, partner network, etc. Remember that here, you need to indicate real competitive advantages that can be proven (these can be licenses, team expertise, patents, etc.).
• Your motto or insight next to your position. This should be a phrase that succinctly demonstrates your superiority over existing and potential competitors – for example, it can be "the only free AI analytics for the SMB segment".
• Argumentation of the optimal time for development. Finally, you need to explain why it is profitable to develop your product right now: these can be new trends in user behavior, rapid growth of a certain segment, etc.

In general, such a competitor analysis on a pitch deck is not about "why we are cooler than the others" but about understanding how to position your product correctly and survive without crossing the break-even point.

And yes, it is crucial to be transparent on this slide; therefore, do not hide strong competitors or claim that they do not exist at all. On the contrary, if you can concisely explain the situation on the market and prove why your strategy is effective in this environment, this will work in your favor.

Mistakes That Can Kill Your Presentation

Now, it is time to talk about startup pitch deck red flags – sometimes they are not obvious at all, but ultimately turn potential investors away from further interaction with you.

Lack of investor customization

The same pitch deck for all potential investors ultimately doesn't work for anyone. So, today, investors want to see that you understand their focus, niche, and language. That's why you should:

• Use different versions of the pitch deck (VC-focused, Angel, Strategic Partner);
• Consider regional specifics: KPI in the US is not the same as KPI in the EU or the Middle East and North Africa;
• Take into account the pain points of a specific investor and disclose them in your pitch deck.

Data overload

One of the most common mistakes that pitch deck consulting experts can find is overcrowding slides with text and numbers. Such pitch decks quickly tire investors, preventing them from grasping the idea in a few seconds. Here are the main insights that will help you simplify overly sophisticated concepts:

• Demonstrate only one idea on one slide;
• Favor graphs instead of tables and bulleted lists instead of paragraphs;
• Remove all the “water” – you need to get to the point right away;
• Make transitions between slides logical and justified.

Would you like to find a trusted agency to fix pitch decks? Feel free to write or call us to schedule a free, 30-minute consultation!

Unclear product roadmap

Tech startups often face a problem in their pitch decks: it is impossible to understand where the product is, where the MVP is, what is ready, and what is still only in the plans. To be more precise, bad pitch deck examples include:

• Too abstract a timeline;
• Ignoring technological limitations;
• Inconsistency with the business model and finances.

That is why it makes sense to seek help from pitch deck design agencies that work at the intersection of software development and creating pitch decks – their pitch deck design service will help you build a realistic and coordinated roadmap that will be understandable to the investor.

Lack of justification for “why right now”

Investors always ask themselves the same question: “Why is this product relevant in 2025?” Actually, this leads to the fact that your pitch deck should have a clear and transparent answer to it. Here are several pitch deck presentation tips:

• Emphasize the market trend or regulatory window;
• Provide a "before/after" comparison;
• Visualize the growth in demand or lower entry barriers;
• Compare the risks of losing investments with potential profits to create a sense of FOMO.

Unrealistic budget estimates

An incorrectly or opaquely estimated budget, as well as revenues, will most likely become a red flag for an investor. Here are common presentation slide mistakes to avoid:

• Too optimistic revenue without marketing costs;
• No unit economics;
• No connection between the roadmap and expenses.

Conversely, a green-flag pitch deck contains a clear and reasoned monetization model built by an experienced pitch deck consultant – it can be further clarified at the next stages of communication with an investor.

Lack of storytelling

Without storytelling, your pitch deck will look like a set of slides and nothing more. In turn, investors who want to invest not only in the product but also in the team may treat this with distrust. So, let’s check how to fix these investor pitch mistakes:

• Form a logical chain: problem -> solution -> evidence -> potential;
• Add human context (this almost always works): “We started this because we were inspired by the idea…”;
• Connect the narrative with the design – therefore, you need to meticulously approach the choice of color scheme and transitions in your presentation.

AI ignoring

In 2025, only AI agnostics don’t use AI for everyday needs, so why not get the most out of it when compiling your pitch deck? In particular, here’s where this technology (or rather assistants like Chat GPT) can be useful:

• Generating a basic presentation structure;
• Analyzing competitors and the market as well;
• Visualizing slides;
• Optimizing text for different audiences.

At the same time, in the hands of a professional pitch deck designer, AI can be even more useful – experts who deal with AI every day to perform their work tasks will quickly be able to perform a business pitch deck evaluation and turn raw AI pitch deck sketches into a win-win presentation. 

Looking for a trusted pitch deck design company? Don’t wait a minute – schedule a free consultation with us!

Lack of expert verification

Even if the presentation seems ideal to you, you will still need an independent check. Thus, an experienced specialist will be able to:

• Detect gaps in the logic of the narrative;
• Check the consistency of finances, design, and timelines;
• Remove the blind spots of the founder.

For example, at WEZOM, before each investor meeting, our clients undergo 2-3 reviews with presentation consultants and pitch deck designers.

Best Pitch Deck Examples with Clean Structure

The best examples of presentations that have received investments from top funds combine the next three principles:

• Clear logic of transitions between slides;
• Each subsequent slide answers a logical question that arises. For example, the chain may look like this: “What do you do? -> How does the product work? -> How big is the market? -> Why now? -> What is your uniqueness? -> How will you make money?” etc. – usually this takes about 10-15 slides;
• The structure should not be overloaded – thus, the classic scheme includes the problem statement, its solution, product visualization, description of the market and competitors, USP and advantages, business model, go-to-market strategy, financial forecasts, team composition, as well as the status of the project and investment ask.

To provide you with more inspiration, our pitch deck optimization agency would like to share the best pitch deck examples from the global market:

• Airbnb, with its concise 10-slide structure, each logically connected to the previous one;
• Notion, where instead of long comparisons, there are simple slides showing the evolution of interfaces from Google Docs and Trello to a hybrid “all-in-one” model;
• Figma, where the difference with Adobe XD is highlighted through collaboration and cloud infrastructure.

If you would like to create a pitch deck as effective as the examples above, most likely, now is the best time to start working with a pitch deck design agency like WEZOM.

How Creative Agency Pitch Decks Frame Urgency Effectively

Now that you know investor presentation do’s and don’ts, you can see how challenging it can be to work on a pitch deck, especially when you have a bunch of other tasks. That's why it makes sense to start collaborating with the best pitch deck design company, WEZOM. We don't just design slides. Instead, our pitch deck services for startups imply the following:

• Help in the formulation of a pitch strategy;
• Building a connection between the product, metrics, and narrative;
• Making sure that your deck stands up to the test of real investment negotiations.

In short, if you're ready to build your pitch deck so that it works at every stage of fundraising, from pre-seed to Series A, feel free to contact the best pitch deck design company.

The Importance of Second Opinions from Pitch Deck Experts

It doesn’t matter whether you create a presentation yourself or with a pitch deck agency, be sure to consider this pitch deck review checklist:

• Information architecture: it is important to understand in advance which blocks of information are most important, how they are related to each other, and in what sequence they should be presented;
• Visual hierarchy: in particular, you have to understand whether the main title, subtitle, and infographics are designed correctly – they should all work for the benefit of the reader’s perception;
• Editing: be sure to remove “water” from slides without unnecessary regrets – moreover, if the presence of the entire slide raises doubts, it is not needed.

At the same time, choosing the right pitch deck design agency is your ace in the hole. While some of your competitors will build on their own and will most likely make some of the above-mentioned mistakes, you will be able to get an eye-catching presentation implemented according to the best pitch deck design practices.

If you are interested in pitch deck improvement services, book a free consultation with our experts, and we will help you transform your business concept into the perfect business pitch deck.