3 Slides You Absolutely Need In Your Pitch Deck

Team, Product, Traction

When seeking investment from angel investors and VCs it’s imperative that your pitch deck satisfies at least one of three categories:

Team

Product

Traction

A pitch deck is a brief presentation, often created using PowerPoint (highly recommended) to provide your audience with a quick overview of your business. I’ve screened thousands of decks with many pushing and sometimes exceeding 20 slides. In a perfect world you should be able to deliver a commanding presentation in around 10 slides, but still, most entrepreneurs fail to communicate a clear message about Team, Product, and Traction. If you can’t cohesively string all three together, then you should satisfy at least one of them.

Below are my thoughts and advice on what you should consider to include when pitching an early stage investor:

Team

• Tell me what you do up front
• Show evidence of credibility in the first few slides
• Background information about the team — previous startups you’ve launched, where you went to school, who are your advisors and why should we care

If you don’t believe your founder story is appealing enough because you are young and don’t have deep domain expertise or you’ve failed more times than you’ve succeeded, then push this information to the end of the deck. But always make sure to include founder story somewhere in the deck.

Product

• Immediately need to know what you are doing
• What is it innovating
• Is their potential for large market growth — product/market fit
• Who are you targeting
• Market size — show the ability to capture a high threshold of it
• Do you have patents or proprietary rights

If your product or service relies on partnerships, be cautious. Partnerships are hard to value because most fail. Although it is some level of credibility you have to get your product right before you solidify partnerships.

Traction

• Display traction and competitive advantage
• Evidence that business model is working — can it scale
• High levels of execution
• Make sure we know where data is coming from such as CAC (customer acquisition cost)
• Show MRR (monthly recurring revenue), customer happiness metrics (like a Yelp review) and MoM (month over month) growth
• What’s ROI (return on influence) for customer

Early-stage investors will be looking for pattern recognition, competitive landscape and other indicators of success or failure. It helps to display the ecosystem in which your startup not only survives but thrives.

It’s rare for early-stage startups to nail all three categories. Be sure to leave a positive impression about either your Team, Product or Traction. In most cases, after all, this is your first introduction to your potential investor. Click here to view the other slides you should include in your pitch deck.