Pitch Deck — Business Idea Workspace

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Editable .pptx. Every slide carries speaker notes explaining where the content came from and which quote it rests on.

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Same deck, read-only. Faster if you just want to skim it on a phone before Friday.

What it deliberately does not do. It does not name the company — the title slide carries a visible blank, because the shape of the business has not been decided and the name follows from that. It does not assign anyone a title or a role. It does not claim any revenue, any pipeline or any customer. And it ends on a slide listing what it fails to answer, which is the part most likely to be useful on Friday.

The argument

Slide by slide

The spine is Gus's reframe: access is the constraint, so the deck spends its middle third on go-to-market rather than on product.

Slide 1 · Title

A small business AI architect company

Dirk's phrase, used as the positioning line. Subtitle: enterprise-grade operating capability delivered to businesses that could never afford it, priced on the outcome rather than the hour. The company name is a visible blank.

Slide 2 · The problem

They run real businesses on paper and memory

320+ member companies in one buying group; ~80% on QuickBooks or smaller; four weeks typical time to invoice. Then what that costs the owner — cash, visibility, capacity.

Slide 3 · The trap

And why they cannot fix it themselves

No one whose job this is. Software is sold, not delivered. The last attempt failed. Everyone is shouting "AI" at them with no proof — which is why we never lead with it.

Slide 4 · The insight

Access is the bottleneck, not the offering

Gus's quote, given a full slide because everything downstream follows from it. What it rules out: building first. What it rules in: relationship-led entry, and selling the outcome before building it.

Slide 5 · What we are

We are the architect, not the builder

The analogy Dirk built off Gus's first career. We define, design, deliver — through AI, our own hands or a named partner — and stay accountable for the outcome we sold.

Slide 6 · The scope

Five layers, one business

Dirk's framework: infrastructure, back office, front office, sales, operations. Sold as AI as a Service, paid per use — enterprise capability without an enterprise cheque.

Slide 7 · The wedge

The first thing we sell is time to invoice

Albert's gap, shown as before and after. Measurable, felt, provable — which is what makes it payable on outcome. And note what it does not ask: nobody has to replace QuickBooks.

Slide 8 · Go to market

Access is the strategy. Here is the hypothesis.

Start inside an existing relationship. Go in person, because email into these trades has already been tested and failed. Lead with the outcome. Pools as launching pad, not destination. Ends with a falsifiable test.

Slide 9 · The model

We do not want their money until it works

Outcome-based entry, metered thereafter, reuse as the margin — plus an honest note that an outcome deal needs a baseline most of these businesses cannot produce.

Slide 10 · Landscape

Everybody sells software. Nobody sells the outcome.

Field service platforms, Odoo, mid-market ERP, generic AI consultancies — and the one-line statement of where we sit against all four.

Slide 11 · Why us

We have already built the hard version of this

Four backgrounds, no titles and no division of labour, because none has been agreed. The argument is that most early ventures are three people who all do the same thing.

Slide 12 · The plan

What we do next, and what would tell us to stop

Four blocks over ninety days, ending on the reuse ratio — the number that decides whether this is a product business or a consultancy.

Slide 13 · Still open

What this deck does not yet answer

Shape, the Accrete boundary, the precise customer, what each person is in for — and the name. Listed rather than glossed, because that is what the exercise is for.

Slide 14 · Close

"Focus on making shoes"

Dirk's line from 31 July, kept because it is the clearest articulation of the offer anyone has produced — and because it works without ever mentioning AI.

For Gus

The four places this is weakest

Rather than pretend it is finished, here is where it will break first under questioning.

The market-access hypothesis is asserted, not evidenced. Slide 8 reads like a plan. It is four assumptions. The strongest version of this deck would carry one piece of proof — a single conversation that happened because of a route we can repeat.
There is no money in it. No price, no deal size, no cost to serve, no revenue model beyond "outcome then metered". A friendly investor will ask what one client is worth and how many we can carry, and there is currently no answer.
Outcome-based pricing is easier to say than to sell. It needs a baseline both sides trust, and the businesses least able to produce one are exactly our targets. That tension is acknowledged on slide 9 but not resolved.
"We stay accountable" is the whole differentiator and it is unpriced. Every competitor on slide 10 fails at adoption. If accountability is what we sell, it has to show up as a cost line and a contractual commitment, not a sentence.

Suggested use. Take the structure if it is useful and throw away the wording. The two slides worth keeping more or less intact are 4 (the insight) and 13 (what is still open) — the first because it is the actual thesis, the second because a deck that admits what it does not know gets better questions than one that does not.

The pitch deck