Kinsy Brief Examples: What to Type to Get the Deck You Want

By the Kinsy team · Published 25 July 2026

Kinsy builds a deck from a brief: a few plain sentences about what you're presenting, to whom, and why. This post is a working library of those briefs — seven you can copy and adapt, from a seed pitch to a thesis talk — plus the anatomy of a strong one and the mistakes that quietly produce a generic deck.

What makes a good Kinsy brief?

A good Kinsy brief names the topic, the audience, the rough length and the outcome you want, in two to four plain sentences — and attaches the document the deck should be built from, if one exists. That's the whole trick. People arrive searching for Kinsy prompt examples, and the word "prompt" slightly oversells the ceremony: there's no special syntax and no magic phrasing to learn. You write the way you'd commission a capable colleague, and Kinsy follows up with a few clarifying questions to close whatever gaps remain — so an imperfect brief isn't fatal. A considered one just gets you a deck that sounds like you on the first pass.

The anatomy of a strong brief

Every brief in this post is built from the same five parts.

1. The topic — and the point. Not just the subject, but the claim. "Our Q3 results" is a subject; "Q3 beat plan on revenue but churn spiked in July, and here's what we changed" is a presentation.
2. The audience. Who is in the room, how technical they are, and what they already believe. The same material should become a different deck for a board than for a team standup, and the audience line is what makes that happen.
3. The rough length. Either unit works — "about ten slides" or "a twenty-minute talk". Kinsy paces the narrative to the count or the time you give it, so state whichever one your calendar actually constrains.
4. The outcome you want. What should the room do after the last slide — invest, approve, book a meeting? Decks with a stated destination end somewhere; decks without one just stop.
5. Any source material. If the deck should be built from a report, a paper or notes, attach the file — Kinsy accepts PDF, markdown and plain text, uploads are free, and the attachment anchors the fact-check pass. The full document path has its own guide to turning a document into a deck.

Seven worked Kinsy briefs

Copy the one nearest your job, swap in your facts, and adjust the tone line.

1. The founder pitch

"A 12-slide seed pitch for our invoice-reconciliation software for mid-size logistics firms. Audience is generalist VCs who see forty decks a week. Lead with the problem and our traction, keep the market-size slide honest, and end with the ask: £1.5m. Confident, not breathless."

The audience line does the heavy lifting here: "generalist VCs who see forty decks a week" tells Kinsy to plan a narrative that earns attention early rather than saving the good part for slide nine. Market context is where live research helps — when the topic calls for it, figures arrive pinned to numbered, dated citations. And because the export is a native, fully editable .pptx, the inevitable partner-meeting edits happen in PowerPoint without anything fighting back.

2. The consulting readout

"A 15-slide readout for the client's leadership team on our four-week pricing review. Answer first: we recommend moving to three tiers. Then the evidence, the risks, and a 90-day rollout plan. Formal tone, plain language — the CFO hates jargon. Findings are in the attached report (PDF)."

"Answer first" is a structural instruction, and narrative planning takes it literally: recommendation up front, the rest of the deck defending it. The attached report anchors the fact-check pass, so the numbers on the slides are the numbers in your findings — checked, not paraphrased. A client deliverable also gets edited by people who weren't in the room — which is what the fully editable native .pptx export exists for.

3. The sales deck

"An 8-slide sales deck for our warehouse-automation service, aimed at operations directors at mid-size retailers. Problem, cost of doing nothing, how the service works, proof, pricing, next step. The next step is booking a 30-minute site assessment — make that unmissable."

This brief works because it states the outcome in one line, so the deck is planned backwards from the booking, not forwards from a feature list. Speaker notes matter most on sales decks — what to say, not a restatement of the bullets — because the person presenting it next quarter may not be the person who briefed it. A brand kit carries your colours and logo into the design so the deck looks like your company rather than like Kinsy.

4. The university lecture

"A 50-minute undergraduate lecture introducing supply and demand, for first-year economics students with no prior knowledge. Build up from everyday examples, and give me two natural points to stop and ask the room a question. Friendly, plain language."

Note there's no slide count — "a 50-minute lecture" is a length Kinsy can pace a narrative to. The speaker notes become the skeleton of the lecture itself: the worked explanation lives in the notes, while the slides stay uncluttered enough for a first-year to copy down.

5. The quarterly business review

"A 10-slide Q2 business review for our exec team. Revenue against plan, pipeline health, the two deals we lost and why, and priorities for Q3. Candid — the misses go up front, not in an appendix. Figures must match the attached Q2 report (PDF)."

"Candid — the misses go up front" is tone and structure in six words, and it's the difference between a QBR the room trusts and one it politely endures. The attachment is doing real work: the fact-check pass verifies every checkable figure on the slides against the report, so nothing drifts between the source and the screen.

6. The thesis-style talk

"A 20-minute talk presenting my master's thesis on urban heat islands to an examination panel of three faculty members. Method, findings, limitations, contribution — in that order. Precise and careful: nothing goes on a slide I can't defend. Thesis attached (PDF)."

A thesis argues in the order examiners require; a talk argues in the order a room can follow — and the plan comes from your stated order here, not a page-by-page walk of the document. The fact-check pass matters more in this room than any other: a slide that misquotes your own thesis is the worst kind of slide.

7. The conference talk

"A 25-minute conference talk on what we learned migrating 400 services to a new billing system, for a room of senior engineers. Be honest about what went wrong, one idea per slide, end with three takeaways they can use on Monday."

"One idea per slide" and a hard time limit give Kinsy a clear pacing problem to solve, and the three-takeaways ending gives the narrative somewhere to land. The war stories — the detail that makes a talk worth attending — belong in the speaker notes, where they prompt you instead of crowding the slides.

What every brief gets, whatever you type

No brief unlocks special features. Every deck is planned as a narrative first, researched with numbered citations when the topic calls for it, fact-checked before you see it, designed on one of five curated themes chosen to fit the content, and finished with speaker notes on every slide. The brief decides what those things are aimed at — full plan details are on the pricing page.

Common brief mistakes

No audience. "Make a deck about our Q3 results" is the classic weak brief — it names a subject and nothing else, so the deck can only be generic. Say who's in the room and the same subject becomes a presentation.

Outlining every slide. The opposite failure. A brief that dictates ten slide titles has already done the narrative planning — badly, usually — and left Kinsy nothing to do but fill in boxes. State the destination, not the route; you don't outline anything, you state the job.

Two decks in one brief. "For the board, but also something the sales team can use" is two commissions. The same material genuinely should become two different decks for those two rooms — brief them separately.

Pasting the document into the brief. If the deck is built from a report or a paper, attach the file instead. The attachment feeds the content and anchors the fact-check pass against what your source actually says; a pasted fragment does neither job well.

Rushing the clarifying questions. After the brief, Kinsy asks the questions a good analyst would — what the room should do at the end, which number you must not get wrong, what's off-limits. One-word answers get you a generic deck; two thoughtful sentences get you one that sounds like you wrote it. It's the highest-leverage minute in the whole process.

Refining after the first draft

A brief gets you a strong first draft, not a final one — and that's the intended division of labour. Refinement is conversational: "make slide 4 punchier", "swap the order of the pricing and roadmap slides", "make the whole thing less formal". A single-slide edit costs 5 credits, a deck-wide pass costs 2 credits per slide, and a full polish pass costs 20 — and every change creates a version you can restore, so an edit that made things worse is an undo, not a loss.

There is no pixel-level manual editor: you can't drag a text box three millimetres left inside Kinsy. When a deck needs that, export it — the native .pptx opens with every text element as a real, editable object and the designed fonts embedded, so finishing by hand in PowerPoint is safe by design. Don't chase perfection in the brief. Get the audience and the outcome right, let the clarifying questions do their work, and spend your refinement credits on the two slides that carry the meeting.

Keep reading

• The full walkthrough of how to use Kinsy, brief to .pptx
• Editing a Kinsy deck: conversational refinement and version history
• How Kinsy's research and numbered citations work