We look at somewhere between 400 and 500 pitch decks a year. Not all of them get a first meeting. A lot don't make it past the first read. And after doing this for several years, the patterns that cause a deck to land in the "pass" pile before we've even finished reading it are remarkably consistent.
This isn't a post about making prettier slides. You don't need better fonts. What you need is to stop making the mistakes that signal, within the first few minutes, that the founder hasn't thought carefully about their business or their audience. Here are the seven we see most often.
1. A Market Size Slide That Proves Nothing
The classic version: "Our addressable market is $340 billion" with a citation from a Mordor Intelligence report. Nobody believes this. Nobody uses it. What it signals to us is that you haven't done the work to figure out what your actual opportunity looks like.
The market size we care about is the number of customers you could realistically reach in three to five years, multiplied by what you'd charge them. That's it. Start there. If it's $200M, say so and explain why you can capture a meaningful slice of it. That's more useful than a made-up total addressable market that includes every business in North America that touches your general category.
2. No Clear Business Model
We regularly see decks from companies that have clearly thought about product, thought about distribution, and not thought at all about how money flows. "We'll monetize later" was acceptable in 2012. Today it reads as an incomplete thought.
At seed stage you don't need proven unit economics. You do need a hypothesis about how you make money and some early evidence that it holds up. Even a single customer paying for the thing is worth more than a slide that says "SaaS model TBD."
3. The Competition Slide That Lists No Real Competitors
The four-quadrant chart where your company is in the top-right corner and all the competitors are clustered in the bottom-left. We've seen it so many times. What it tells us is that you've either deliberately misrepresented the landscape or you haven't done your homework.
Every interesting market has real competition. Show it honestly. Then explain specifically why your approach is different—not "better on every dimension" but actually different in a way that matters to your target customer. We trust founders who understand their competitive environment far more than founders who pretend it's empty.
4. Financials That Don't Connect to Reality
A three-year model showing $0 revenue today and $42M revenue in year three, with no explanation of how you get there, is not a financial model. It's a wish. The problem isn't the ambition—we like ambitious founders. The problem is that the numbers reveal nothing about how you think about growth.
Show us the assumptions. How many customers do you need? What's your sales cycle? What does your burn look like month to month for the next 18 months with this raise? These are the questions the numbers should answer, not obscure.
5. Team Slides That Don't Explain Why You
Logos of past employers do not explain why this team is the right team to solve this specific problem. We care about founder-market fit. Why do you understand this problem better than anyone else? What have you experienced, built, or seen that makes you the person who should be doing this?
One sentence of genuine explanation is worth three rows of brand logos.
6. Traction That's Presented Without Context
"500 signups in our first week" could mean a lot of things. If those signups came from a founder's personal network and none of them converted to paid users, that's a very different story from 500 cold signups with a 30% weekly activation rate. Raw numbers without context are noise.
Tell us what the number means. What did it take to get there? What happened next? That's the story we're trying to extract from traction slides—don't make us guess.
7. The Ask Slide With No Use of Funds
You're raising $750K. Great. What are you doing with it? "Product and go-to-market" is not an answer. The use of funds tells us whether you've actually thought about the next 18 months or whether you're just trying to get money in the door.
A rough allocation—hiring, infrastructure, customer acquisition—with milestones attached tells us you know what problem this capital is solving. That's what we want to see.
The Honest Bottom Line
None of these mistakes are fatal if the business is genuinely interesting. We've taken first meetings from decks that had several of these issues because the underlying opportunity was compelling. But you're competing for attention, and every one of these mistakes shifts the odds against you.
Fix the deck. Then focus on the conversation. The deck gets you in the room. What you say there is what actually matters.
If you want feedback on where yours stands, pitch us. [email protected]. We'll tell you what we actually think.
