The pitch that won Product Genesis at CSJMU was delivered to a Vice Chancellor in front of a full hall; the one that lost with STROT was delivered to a panel of three. The difference was not the idea. It was whether the first minute made the judges want the second. This template is what I coach teams toward now.
The seven slides
- The person and the pain — one human, one situation, what goes wrong today. No logo, no team names yet.
- Why now, why us — one line on why this problem is tractable this weekend and what your team knows about it.
- What we built — one sentence, then hand off to the live demo. This slide is a doorway, not a description.
- Live demo — ninety seconds, real input, one path. See the demo that works live.
- How it works — one diagram, three boxes, the one technical decision you are proud of.
- What we cut and why — the honesty slide. Judges score it higher than any feature list.
- What happens Monday — the next step if this continued, and what you would need.
What to cut
- The team introduction slide. Names go in the footer; the judge will meet you in Q&A.
- The market-size slide with a number from a report you did not read.
- The full architecture diagram. Three boxes, not thirteen.
- Any slide that starts with "In today's world".
Delivery
One speaker for the story, one for the demo, then everyone answers questions about their own part. Rehearse with a timer until you finish at 2:40, because the venue will cost you twenty seconds. I covered the two-minute version in how to pitch a startup idea in two minutes.
A pitch deck is a script for the judge's attention. Spend it on the problem and the demo; everything else is footnotes.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
