pitch-deck

Build presentation decks with Canvora — pitch decks, sales decks, training and webinar slides, or a whole PDF/DOCX report turned into slides. Use when the user wants a presentation, deck, slide set, investor pitch, sales enablement slides, or asks to turn a document into slides.

Decks and presentations

Deck formats run through Canvora's structured slide pipeline: one planning pass builds the narrative arc and a shared design system, then every slide is rendered against it. That is why a deck holds together where N separate images would not. Your job is the narrative input and the format choice — the pipeline does the rest. Setup and credits: see the canvora skill.

Pick the format by audience, not by shape

Format	Size	Use for
pitch_deck	16:9	investors, fundraising, "the story of the company"
sales_deck	16:9	prospects, product value, objection handling
presentation_slide	16:9 1920×1080	the general default — talks, internal, conference
training_slide	16:9	teaching, onboarding, step-by-step instruction
webinar_slide	16:9	live sessions, screen-share readability
presentation_4x3	4:3 1024×768	only when the user's projector/template demands it

All six are carousel formats: 15 credits per slide. A 10-slide deck = 150. State the cost in the same message as the run — announce it, don't ask permission. When you chose the slide count (the defaults below) rather than the user, confirm that number with them; when they said "10 slides", just run it.

Every deck is 3+ outputs, so fire-and-poll instead of --wait: most harnesses kill a shell command at 120s while the deck carries on rendering server-side. Never re-run generate after a timeout — that starts a second, separate job. Poll status. See the canvora skill's "Long runs" section.

Intake — three questions, maximum

1. What's the source? A document (--file-url), a link (--url), written content (--input), or just the pitch in their head (--idea)?
2. How many slides? If they don't know, use the audience: pitch 10, sales 8, training as many as there are steps, general 8. Cap is 10 per call.
3. Whose brand? canvora brands --json → --brand (+ --logo — decks are the one place a logo on every slide is expected).

If they gave you a document, do NOT read it and paraphrase it into --idea. Pass the file directly — extraction is part of the pipeline and keeps the numbers, names and structure intact.

The canonical runs

bash

# Document → deck (the highest-value flow: report, memo, whitepaper, spec)
ID=$(canvora generate --file-url https://example.com/q3-report.pdf \
  --format presentation_slide --slides presentation_slide=8 \
  --brand $BRAND --logo | head -1)
canvora status "$ID" --json    # repeat every ~30s until completed

# Investor pitch from a description
ID=$(canvora generate --idea "Seed pitch for a B2B logistics SaaS: problem, market size, product, traction, team, ask" \
  --format pitch_deck --slides pitch_deck=10 \
  --brand $BRAND --logo --style corporate --cta | head -1)
canvora status "$ID" --json

# Sales deck from the product page
ID=$(canvora generate --url https://example.com/product \
  --format sales_deck --slides sales_deck=8 --brand $BRAND --logo --cta | head -1)
canvora status "$ID" --json

# Training slides from content the user wrote
ID=$(canvora generate --input "$COURSE_OUTLINE" \
  --format training_slide --slides training_slide=10 | head -1)
canvora status "$ID" --json

Narrative shaping (this is where a deck is won)

• Name the arc in the brief when it's a pitch. "problem, market, product, traction, team, ask" beats "a pitch deck for my startup" — the planner maps each beat to a slide.
• One claim per slide. If the source has 20 points and they asked for 8 slides, say which 8 matter; otherwise the planner compresses for you.
• --cta for anything persuasive. Pitch and sales decks should close on an ask. Training decks usually shouldn't.
• --style: investors/enterprise → corporate or minimal; product launches → bold; premium/brand-led → elegant. Omitting pins modern.
• Don't art-direct slide by slide. But if the user has a stated look or an existing template aesthetic, pass it as one line.

Delivering a deck

1. Sort by sortOrder. A deck out of order is worthless.
2. Export to PPTX or PDF — this is the step users actually want, and it is an MCP-only capability today: export_visuals(generation_id, format: "pptx" | "pdf"). On the CLI, canvora download <id> --dir ./deck gets the images and the user exports from the Canvora dashboard. Tell them that plainly instead of pretending the CLI can do it.
3. Fix a single slide with edit (3 credits, design preserved) — never regenerate the deck because slide 4 has a typo.

Quality checklist

• Source passed directly (file/URL), not paraphrased
• Slide count matches the narrative beats
• Brand kit + --logo applied when a kit exists
• --cta on pitch/sales, off on training
• Cost stated up front (15 × slides)
• Outputs sorted by sortOrder; export path explained