Investors read decks quickly, usually alone, and usually on a phone before a meeting is ever scheduled. Your deck has to work without you narrating it.
The conventional sequence exists because it answers questions in the order they arise.
The sequence
- Title. Company, one-line description of what you do, contact. No mystery.
- Problem. Whose problem, how painful, how they cope today. Specific, not abstract.
- Solution. What you built and why it solves that problem. One slide.
- Product. Show it. A screenshot or short demo beats three bullets of description.
- Market. Size with your assumptions visible. Bottom-up beats a headline industry figure.
- Business model. Who pays, how much, how often.
- Traction. The most scrutinised slide. Real numbers with real dates.
- Competition. Including the substitutes and doing-nothing. Claiming none is a red flag.
- Go-to-market. How you reach customers, and what a customer costs to acquire.
- Team. Why specifically you can deliver this.
- Financials. Projections with the assumptions attached.
- The ask. How much, for what runway, spent on what.
The slides that lose the room
- Top-down market sizing. "The market is $50bn and we only need 1%" signals that no bottom-up work was done. Build from customers × price × frequency.
- A hockey-stick with no mechanism. If the projection turns upward in month nine, the slide must say what happens in month nine to cause it.
- "We have no competitors." There is always an alternative, including the spreadsheet the customer uses now.
- Vanity metrics. Page views and sign-ups without activation or retention tell an investor very little.
- A vague ask. "Raising to grow" gets no meeting. "Raising £400k for 18 months runway: two engineers, one salesperson, and a target of £40k MRR" gets one.
Keep an appendix. Detailed unit economics, cohort retention and the full competitive matrix belong there — ready when asked, out of the main flow when not.
Design that helps rather than decorates
- One idea per slide. If it needs two headlines, it is two slides.
- A headline that states the conclusion, not the topic. "Retention doubled after onboarding redesign" beats "Retention".
- Charts with the finding annotated directly on them.
- Readable at phone size — assume that is where it will first be opened.
- Consistent type, colour and spacing. Inconsistency reads as carelessness about detail.
Questions this raises
Ten to fifteen in the main deck, with an appendix behind it. Long decks are skimmed rather than read.
Usually yes. Most investors expect to read it first and use the meeting for questions. Make sure it stands alone.
Still stuck after reading this? That is usually the point at which it is worth asking someone. Describe your project or ask on WhatsApp.
