Write your board meeting deck narrative
AI creates complete board deck text from your metrics, progress, and plans ready to design.
Write your board meeting deck narrative
River's Board Meeting Deck Writer creates complete text-heavy board presentations that keep your board informed and engaged. You provide quarterly metrics, wins, challenges, and asks, and the AI writes a full deck with executive summary up front, KPI dashboard with trends, detailed progress on priorities, honest discussion of challenges and mitigations, financial snapshot and runway, next quarter goals and resource needs, and clear asks for board help. Whether you're post-seed or Series A, these decks structure productive board meetings that get you the help you need.
Unlike rambling updates, we create focused board decks that respect everyone's time. The AI front-loads the most important information (exec summary), uses metrics throughout (not vague descriptions), balances wins with authentic challenges (builds trust), makes specific asks for help (not vague 'any thoughts'), and maintains the clear, strategic tone board members expect. You get decks that make your board meeting efficient, productive, and actually useful for getting advice and introductions you need.
This tool is perfect for post-seed CEOs running first board meetings, first-time CEOs learning board management, busy founders who dread making board decks quarterly, or anyone whose board complains meetings are disorganized. If you know what to share but don't know how to structure a board deck that makes meetings productive, this tool helps. Use it a few days before your quarterly board meeting when you have metrics but need to organize them into a clear narrative.
What Makes Board Meetings Productive
Productive board meetings have three elements: clear information, honest discussion, and specific asks. The best board meetings start with pre-read materials (deck sent 48 hours early), focus meeting time on challenges and decisions (not status updates), engage board members with specific questions, use their networks and expertise strategically, and end with clear action items and next steps. Weak board meetings waste time on status updates that could be read async, hide problems until they're crises, make vague asks that board can't help with, or fail to leverage board members' specific superpowers. Your deck enables the meeting. Structure it to maximize productive discussion time.
Effective board deck structure follows a proven framework. Slide 1: Executive summary (entire meeting on one page). Slides 2-4: KPIs and trends (metrics dashboard). Slides 5-7: Progress on priorities (what got done). Slides 8-10: Challenges and mitigation (what you're worried about). Slides 11-12: Financial snapshot (cash, burn, runway). Slides 13-15: Next quarter priorities (what's ahead). Slide 16: Board asks (specific help needed). This structure lets board pre-read metrics and progress, then spend meeting time on challenges and strategy. Send deck 48 hours before meeting. Use meeting for discussion, not reading slides.
What You Get
Complete board deck narrative ready to design (15-20 slides)
Executive summary up front for quick scanning
Metrics-heavy with clear trends and context
Honest challenges with mitigation plans that build trust
Specific board asks that drive helpful responses
How It Works
- 1Provide quarter's dataShare KPIs, wins, challenges, goals, what you need help with (150-600 words)
- 2AI writes full deckOur AI creates complete board deck narrative in 4-5 minutes
- 3Review and formatVerify numbers, adjust emphasis, design slides
- 4Send and meetSend 48 hours before meeting, use meeting for discussion
Frequently Asked Questions
How detailed should the deck be vs what I cover verbally?
Deck should be comprehensive enough to read standalone. Board members should be able to read the deck and understand everything without you presenting. Why? Because you'll send it 48 hours early as pre-read. Meeting time is for discussion and decisions, not reading slides. Include all key metrics, progress updates, and context in the deck. Use meeting to dive deep on 2-3 challenges where you need board input. Deck communicates information. Meeting generates discussion. Don't make board members sit through slides they could read faster themselves. Give them slides early, use meeting wisely.
How honest should I be about challenges?
Very honest, but with mitigation plans. Board's job is to help with hard problems. If you hide challenges, they can't help until it's a crisis. Format: Problem + impact + what you're doing + where board can help. Example: 'Customer churn increased to 8% (up from 5%). Identified root cause (onboarding UX), rebuilt flow (shipping next week), but I'd love intros to 2-3 customer success leaders who've solved this.' Honesty with action and asks is professional. Hiding problems is immature. Dumping problems without plans is also bad. Show challenges as problems you're actively solving where board input accelerates solution.
What metrics should I include?
Include your north star metrics plus the 5-10 KPIs that best show business health. For SaaS: MRR, growth rate, churn, customer count, pipeline, CAC, LTV. For marketplaces: GMV, take rate, supply/demand metrics, retention on both sides. For consumer: DAU/MAU, retention, growth, engagement. Always show trends (QoQ or MoM), not just point-in-time numbers. '$50K MRR' is less useful than '$50K MRR (up 25% QoQ).' Include 1-2 slides of detailed metrics, then reference key numbers throughout deck. Board cares about growth rate, unit economics, and cash. Make those crystal clear.
How do I make effective asks of my board?
Be extremely specific with context and criteria. Bad ask: 'Anyone know good sales leaders?' Good ask: 'We're hiring VP Sales with 5+ years selling B2B SaaS to mid-market, $120K-$150K + equity. Ideal background: HubSpot, Salesforce, similar. If you know someone matching this profile, please intro me directly. Urgent: want to hire in next 6 weeks.' Specific asks get results. Vague asks get ignored. Frame: what you need + why + criteria + timeline + how they help. Make it easy for board to forward your ask to their network with clear context. Track asks meeting-to-meeting (shows follow-through).
How long should board meetings be and how often?
Quarterly meetings, 2 hours is standard for early stage. Less frequent than quarterly loses engagement. More frequent than quarterly is usually overkill (monthly updates better as emails). 2 hours is enough for meaningful discussion without exhausting everyone. Structure: 15 min recap and questions on deck (should be pre-read), 60 min discussion on top 2-3 challenges or strategic decisions, 30 min next quarter priorities and resource allocation, 15 min board asks and action items. If meetings consistently run over, you're not sending pre-reads early enough or spending too much time on status updates vs discussion.
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