Two weeks ago a pitch deck wasn't on my agenda. Then an investor evening opened up – and the price of admission was a deck. So Christina and I decided to raise a small pre-seed for Bridesmaid, our agentic wedding planner, and I built the whole thing the way I now do most of my work: one Claude Code conversation on the left, the deck rendering live on the right.

Research, investor targeting, the slides, original imagery, a full cohort-based 12-month financial model in Google Sheets, and a print-clean PDF – all in one unbroken session. Work that used to mean a designer, an analyst, a couple of tools and several days.

Here's the part I want you to take away, because it's the opposite of most "AI makes your deck" advice: the agent will happily one-shot you a beautiful, generic, wildly over-optimistic deck – and that deck loses you the meeting. The value isn't the generation. It's the steering. In this video I walk through the real Bridesmaid deck, the strategic fights I had with the agent, and where a founder's judgment does the work the model can't.

This is the actual deck we're sending to investors. Real numbers, real targets, nothing staged.

IN THIS EPISODE

00:00:00 – Intro: the real deck we're using to raise for Bridesmaid
00:02:21 – Start in the repo, not a slide tool (and why HTML)
00:04:34 – The key move: make it interview you
00:05:54 – What Bridesmaid is + the €250k / €1.5M pre-money ask
00:07:54 – B2C or B2B? Reframing the model with the agent
00:09:32 – Choosing the investors: NRW.Bank, neoteq, TS Ventures
00:14:49 – Framing the deck for specific investors: the 10 questions
00:21:10 – Make it attack the deck from the investor's side, cut the bullshit
00:22:44 – The money slides: building the model in Google Sheets
00:29:53 – Educated fantasy land: don't trust the AI's first numbers
00:36:44 – Walking the final deck, top to bottom

DEEP DIVE LINKS

📖 Full Article: https://pirateskills.com/insights/ai-pitch-deck

💍 Bridesmaid – the working prototype (7-day free trial): https://bridesmaid.love

🧪 Pirate Lab — Wed July 8: this week it's all about the pitch deck. Free live session where we put this insight into practice – bring your build and turn your own strategy into an investor-ready deck with the crew: https://pirateskills.com/pirate/lab/2026-07-08

🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN

🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487

💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/