Demo day is in the calendar, the slot is three or five minutes, and the deck already exists. Most founders spend the last week polishing it. Spend it on the pitch instead. Here is a plan for seven days, one short task a day, and the slides come at the end.
Seven days out: write the one sentence
Before anything else, write what you do in one sentence a stranger understands. Not your tagline. Read it to someone outside your industry. If they ask a follow-up question, good. If they ask what it means, write it again.
Six days out: choose your word, your number and your ask
The word is what the room calls you afterwards. The number is the one that proves the problem is real. The ask is what you want from the people in the room, in one sentence. Everything else in the pitch exists to make those three land.
Five days out: say it out loud, standing
Give the whole pitch standing, with a timer, without slides. Record it on your phone and listen to it once. Do not watch it yet, listen. You will hear where you speed up, where the filler words come, and where the sentence you love goes on too long.
Four days out: cut
Cut until you finish ten seconds under your slot. On the day your pace changes, and ten seconds is the margin that keeps you from being cut off before the ask. Cut the sentence you are proudest of if it does not serve the word, the number or the ask.
Three days out: give it to people
Pitch to three people who have not heard it. After each one, ask what they remember. Not what they liked: what they remember. If they say your word, your number and your ask, the pitch works. If not, change the pitch, not the audience.
Two days out: fix the first line and the last line
Learn both word for word. The first line is where nerves are worst, and a fixed line gives you something to stand on. The last line is the one the room carries out. Everything in between can breathe and change a little each time, which is how it stays alive.
The day before: review them if you must use slides, and then stop
Open the deck. Take out every slide that says what you already say, and keep the ones that show what you cannot: the product, the number, the face of a customer. Run it once with the slides, at the real pace. Then stop. Sleep does more for you tonight than another run-through.
On the day
Arrive early and stand where you will stand. Look at the room from there. In the corridor, say your first line once, quietly. Then go on and give the pitch you practiced, not the one you rewrote at breakfast.