Successfully pitching for seed round investment requires making two critical arguments. Even the ones—I would say particularly the ones—where the founders insist it’s a complicated story. The potential investor must come away believing two things:

• This is a great idea: highlighted in the Problem & Solution sections

• This is a great business: Shown in the rest of the deck

Where most templates prescribe a clothesline of 8-12 slides, this two-section structure derives from a narrative approach. Here’s how to use this updated framework to build your pitch:

This Is a Great Idea

The Problem & Solution establish the emotional urgency of the entire pitch. A great problem excites interest in your solution. A great solution inspires them to pay attention to the rest of the pitch. Fail at either step and the rest of the pitch won’t matter: No one will be paying attention.

The problem is “what is.” The solution is “what could be.” The tension between the awful present and the promised future is what establishes the emotional voltage of your pitch. It is similar to Nancy Duarte’s excellent analysis of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, where he kept flipping back and forth between these two states.

It’s important not to just pick any problem, even if it’s big. Climate change, depression, or loneliness are too big, too flabby, and too well known to be captivating pitch deck Problems. If your solution tackles one of these big issues, you must find a fresh angle. Teach me something new. Reframe them in a surprising way. I rebuilt a standard climate change problem statement for one deck into an argument that industrial processes pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is fundamentally a problem of putting useful resources in the wrong place—which set up the company’s value proposition of processing flue-gas carbon into chalk and other commodities.

Conversely, if your problem is narrow, show me how it is bigger or more insidious than you’d think. Your goal: Make it feel like the problem you’re addressing is the common, dark thread connecting all that is wrong with our modern existence. I had one pitch for a first-aid solution to frostbite. At first, the idea of a $250 product to warm hands and feet seems unnecessary. But it turned out that there are systemic issues that prevent ambulances from treating frostbite appropriately. Presented in a new light, this item becomes the tip of the spear for rethinking how first responders treat patients.

Critically, you need to frame the problem in a way that sets up your solution. Don’t introduce concepts or ideas that you won’t be addressing with your solution. The Jaws that is your problem should be perfectly designed to be slain by the speargun of your solution.

This Is a Great Investment

Now you have the audience hooked, and they’re ready to hear the details. You have two overriding goals for the rest of your pitch:

• Your team is the best possible bet to win in this space

• You can sustainably capture the value your solution creates

Yes, you’ll have a Team slide. But don’t forget, every slide is a Team slide. How you present your solution, your go-to-market plan, the traction you’ve had to date, and your strategic roll-out plan: they all reflect the quality, creativity, and overall chutzpah of your team.

Regarding economic benefit: Whether you’re arguing first-mover advantage, protected IP, exclusive data, game-changing partnerships, or some other unfair advantage, you need to build a clear argument how you are building a moat that will protect your margins.

This is particularly important with AI pitches. I’ve heard a lot where it’s clear that AI creates value; the often-unanswered question is, if it’s easy to apply AI to that problem, why will that value will accrue to one company? In the case of AI, the moat is often that the founders have unique access to a data set, and/or the company will quickly build a data moat in early operations.

Bottom Line: Make Investors Excited

If the problem you’re tackling is big and urgent, any sophisticated investor has seen and heard multiple pitches about it. But with a combination of an insightful description of the problem, a powerful solution, and a thoughtful approach to executing and sustainably capturing the economics, you’re well on your way to go from deck to check.

Does this structure work pitching in later rounds? Of course—but traction starts to become the dominant story. As a generalization, Series A will still have a substantial need for the ideas I described, but at Series B and onwards, the details of execution and growth become the key to exciting investors. It also applies to a pre-seed round, although often that pitch revolves more around the experience and previous track record of the founding team rather than carefully-fleshed out launch plans.