Investor Pitch Decks & Memo: Musterhall + NovaLayer
Erick Nolasco
Pitch decks and an investor memo for two startups
Two early-stage companies with very different pitches. Musterhall needed a pre-seed deck for a course marketplace built on verified expertise. NovaLayer needed a seed deck and a long-form memo that could explain crypto restaking to investors. I designed all three documents, built a visual system for each, and turned the hardest ideas into diagrams.
Role: Deck strategy, narrative structure, visual design and diagrams
Deliverables: A 14-slide pre-seed deck, a 15-slide seed deck and a 7-page investor memo
Financial terms, team details and partner names are blurred or left out to keep them confidential.
Musterhall: six of the 14 slides, from the hook to the ask.
Musterhall: one argument, slide by slide
Musterhall is a marketplace for instructional courses from creators whose expertise is verified, launching in martial arts. As product and design lead, I wrote the deck as headlines first. Read on their own, they make the whole pitch: instructional content has a trust crisis, the window is now, the category is large enough to matter, the loop is built end to end, and almost nobody checks expertise.
Then each slide had to prove its headline. Market figures carry their sources, projections are labeled as illustrative, and the product slides show real screens from the app instead of mockups.
The slide kit: highlighted headlines, numbered cards, comparison tables and takeaway callouts.
A small kit instead of 14 one-off slides
Rather than design each slide on its own, I built a kit: a headline style with a lime highlight on the phrase to remember, numbered cards for problems and proof points, a comparison table, and a callout box with chips that closes each argument. The deck is built in HTML/CSS with OKLCH theme tokens, Funnel Display and Geist, then exported to PDF, so it looks like the product it is selling.
The competition slide shows the approach. Six platforms sit in one table, scored on what creators actually care about, and the gap is obvious without a single adjective.
NovaLayer: the cover, problem and solution, competitors, and three diagram slides.
NovaLayer: making restaking easy to picture
NovaLayer is a restaking protocol: assets staked on several chains help secure new services, while custodians reduce smart contract risk. That is a lot to ask an investor to picture. I gave the deck a deep-space visual language, then drew the mechanism: staking pools on four chains feeding one restaking layer, today's model beside the NovaLayer model, and the economics of pooled security shown as a simple sum.
The competitor slide sets EigenLayer, Fragmetric and Karak beside NovaLayer as cards, so the differences read at a glance.
The 7-page memo tells the same story in long form and reuses the deck's diagrams.
The memo, for investors who read first
Some investors read before they take a meeting. The memo covers the market opportunity, features, strategic advantages, tech stack and product flow, go-to-market, and why NovaLayer. It shares the deck's diagrams and visual language, so the two documents work as one package.
How I build a deck, in six steps.
How I build a deck
Words first, then the system, then the pictures. I find the one sentence an investor should repeat, outline the deck as headlines, design a small kit, draw the mechanism, back every number with a source or an illustrative label, and deliver the formats each reader needs.
Results
29 slides across two investor decks
A 7-page long-form investor memo
Two visual systems, each matched to its brand
One deck built in HTML/CSS and exported to PDF
Like this project
Posted Oct 28, 2026
Two investor decks and a long-form memo for a course marketplace and a crypto restaking protocol: story, slide systems and diagrams.
