{"id":1198413,"date":"2022-09-04T18:02:58","date_gmt":"2022-09-04T18:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/09\/04\/these-are-the-top-3-most-important-slides-in-your-pitch-deck\/"},"modified":"2022-09-04T18:02:58","modified_gmt":"2022-09-04T18:02:58","slug":"these-are-the-top-3-most-important-slides-in-your-pitch-deck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/09\/04\/these-are-the-top-3-most-important-slides-in-your-pitch-deck\/","title":{"rendered":"These are the top 3 most important slides in your pitch deck \u2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\"><span class=\"featured__span-first-words\">It\u2019s a commonly<\/span> accepted wisdom that you need between 10 and 20 slides to tell the story of your startup. A lot of founders don\u2019t seem to realize that not all slides are the same, however. Some slides carry more weight than others \u2014 and three of them are absolutely crucial. Today, I\u2019m taking you through why those three slides are so important.<\/p>\n<p>The way to use this article is to think about which of these attributes you have in your startup to help organize your pitch deck. For example, No. 1 in this list is traction. If you have amazing traction, that should probably be the first slide in your deck. If your traction is flat (i.e., not growing, or even shrinking), poor or non-existent \u2014 maybe <em>don\u2019t highlight that<\/em>\u00a0and think instead about how else you can tell your story.<\/p>\n<h2>1 \u2014 Traction is king<\/h2>\n<p>Up and to the right. Which makes sense. Up and to the left would be time travel, and if you can do that, you have an even more valuable company than you thought.<\/p>\n<p>Your traction slide is, by some considerable margin, your trump card. If you are showing a huge amount of revenue and rapid growth, all other sins are forgiven.<\/p>\n<p>It doesn\u2019t matter if you have an inexperienced team, a terrible product or a dubious market. If you can show that you have money coming in and growing at 9% or more week over week, you will raise money.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a hierarchy in terms of what type of traction helps:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Profit.<\/strong>\u00a0If you are cash-positive and growing rapidly, you probably don\u2019t even need venture capital \u2014 but if raising cash helps you grow even faster, you\u2019re in a great place.<\/li>\n<li><strong>ARR.<\/strong>\u00a0If your annual recurring revenue is growing rapidly, you\u2019re in luck. Recurring revenues and SaaS dynamics mean that you are onto something.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Active users.<\/strong>\u00a0If you\u2019re growing your number of users exponentially, without necessarily knowing how to monetize them, that\u2019s still an impressive feat. If you can show that you can build a huge, sticky audience, you can probably find a way to make money off that down the line.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Sign-ups.<\/strong>\u00a0If you\u2019re seeing huge growth in the number of sign-ups to your product or service, but they aren\u2019t generating revenue or sticking around, there\u2019s still value in that \u2014 although your traction slide should be paired with a solid \u201cHow is this going to make money?\u201d slide.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s a commonly accepted wisdom that you need between 10 and 20 slides to tell the story of your startup. A lot of founders don\u2019t seem to realize that not all slides are the same, however. Some slides carry more weight than others \u2014 and three of them are absolutely crucial. Today, I\u2019m taking you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1198414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1198413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1198413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1198413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1198413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1198413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}