Investors do not read a pitch deck slide by slide out of curiosity. They read it to answer five questions. If a slide does not answer one of them, it is taking up space an investor would rather spend deciding.
The examples below are illustrative, based on a fictional logistics software company.
1. Is the problem real? Someone specific has to be hurting
Strong answer: “Dispatchers at mid-size fleets rebuild tomorrow’s routes by hand, every night.” Supported by two facts: 3 hours a night, one person, one spreadsheet; and 30 shifts the founders sat in on before building anything.
Common miss: describing a market (“logistics is broken”) instead of a person with a recurring cost. (More on this in Your Problem Slide Should Describe a Moment.)
2. Why you? What do you know that others don’t?
Strong answer: “We ran a 40-truck depot for six years before we built software for one.”
Investors do not back ideas as much as they back the people most likely to be right about them. An unfair insight beats a long list of job titles.
Common miss: a team slide of logos and headshots that says where people worked, not why they will win this.
3. Is it big enough? Show the market you can actually reach
Strong answer: “4,000 mid-size depots we can sell to first.” 4,000 depots with 20–100 trucks × $30K average annual contract = a $120M first reachable market.
Common miss: a top-down “$47B market” figure that no investor believes you will ever touch. (See How to Build a Bottom-Up Market Slide.)
4. Is it working? Proof it is already moving
Strong answer: “Q4 revenue grew 68% while churn fell by half”, with a simple bar chart where only the Q4 bar is highlighted.
Common miss: seven metrics at equal weight, leaving the investor to work out which one matters.
5. What does this money do? The round has a job
Strong answer: “$2M · 18 months”, tied to three outcomes: $150K MRR (from $42K today), 3 enterprise logos signed, and CAC payback under 9 months.
Common miss: a pie chart of spending percentages that says where money goes, not what it buys. (See Your Use-of-Funds Pie Chart Answers the Wrong Question.)
Try this on your deck: label every slide with the question it answers
| Slide | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Customer quotes | Is the problem real? |
| Founding story | Why you? |
| Product screenshots ×4 | None, so cut to one |
| Revenue chart | Is it working? |
| Company values | None, so cut |
| Use of funds | What does this money do? |
Any slide you cannot label goes in the appendix or goes away. Most decks get shorter and stronger in the same move.
Raising soon? Send us your deck. We will tell you which of the five questions it is not answering yet, and the three slides we would fix first. Free, with no pitch unless you ask for one. Request a free deck review.