The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead. Oh, and do this for any presentation you need to give.
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/08/18
I have been doing presentations based on Markdown since, gosh let me look, oh, at least 2014¹!
But I’m glad it is getting traction: [Wayback/Archive] The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.
… the “quality” of the deck is inversely correlated with the quality of the thinking behind it …
The quote hits the nail on the head, but be sure to read the rest of the article as well: it’s inspiring, holds for way more than pitch decks: it holds for any presentation, especially because of this quote²:
William Zinsser argued in On Writing Well that the act of writing forces clarity – because you can’t write a clear sentence about a thing you don’t understand.
Markdown has so many advantages. You write. It is text based. It can be versioned. I could go on.
Let me quote the closing summary too, as it is so well written showing the advantages of writing:
Write the pitch.md first. You might find you don’t need the deck at all, or you might find that when you do build the deck, it’s better, because you finally know what you’re trying to say.
Via:
- [Wayback/Archive] Eloy.: “RE: «> the “quality” of the deck is inversely correlated with the quality of the thinking behind it» lol yeah…” – HSNL Social
- [Wayback/Archive] JA Westenberg: “Stop making slides. Write a pi…” – Mastodon
Stop making slides. Write a pitch .md instead.
Plain markdown. In your repo. Next to your code.
If you can’t explain your idea in writing, you don’t understand it well enough to build it.
--jeroen
¹ my first public presentation based on only markdown was [Wayback/Archive] Conferences/2014/20140606-SDE-event-Unit-Testing/Delphi-Unit-Testing.md at master · jpluimers/Conferences · GitHub after quite a few internal ones.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Leave a comment