The Ultimate Startup Pitch Deck Template

Besides your company’s name, the cover slide needs a concise 5-7 word description of your business: straightforward, clear, and so brief it’s effortless to read. This is not a marketing tagline; it's a succinct explanation of your company's purpose. For example, Slidebean's is, "We help founders pitch investors."

To catch your audience’s attention right away, add a brief Traction slide that validates your company and builds anticipation. Remember, your audience lacks context about your business; they don't yet understand what you do or how you generate revenue. The information here should be universally clear. Use this slide to showcase your most impressive achievements, ones that need no further explanation.

Nailing this slide can create an "aha!" moment—highlighting a problem people face daily, that's right in front of them, but they haven't noticed.

However, this slide can also break your pitch if you make dubious claims that investors can't support. If they disagree with your premise, you might lose them at this stage, which might be catastrophic.

Some companies aren't solving a problem but seizing a business opportunity. These don't address a problem; they capitalize on a discovered market opportunity.Here are some examples:
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Think of the solution slide as a reflection of the problem slide. This is your main plot point, where you challenge the status quo.

Effective solution slides are concise and avoid delving into technology or features. It's not yet time to discuss the product. Present your thesis: instead of doing things the old way, we propose a new approach. Focus on a single powerful statement—the ultimate benefit of your product or service. Emphasize the "what", not the "how".
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For example, Uber's solution is a fast, efficient, on-demand car service that tells you exactly when you'll be picked up, when you'll arrive, and how much it will cost.

This section of your pitch deck should highlight what makes your product or service unique. You have several options for presenting this slide: a brief video demo, a how-it-works diagram, or a series of product screenshots. These slides will likely resemble your marketing landing pages, so you can draw inspiration from those. In this template it’s presented as a step-by-step explanation, but it works best if you adjust it to your unique product.

You’ve listed what your product does and how it does it, now focus on the benefits to the user. For example, a feature of Slidebean is that it's fully responsive. The benefit is that you can edit your presentations anywhere, even on your phone while on the go. Think in terms of the convenience or significant change your product offers to the target audience.

Keep this section concise and impactful. While investors are interested in the product, they are more concerned with the numbers.

This slide is marked as optional because it heavily depends on your specific product. If your product has a strong technological component or the tech infrastructure is a core differentiator, consider including an 'Underlying Magic' slide. This slide should explain, in simple terms, how the technology works to deliver the final benefit to the user.

For physical products, especially when pitching in person, you can leave a blank "demo" slide and demonstrate the product yourself. Videos can be effective, but remember that investors expect to review the entire deck in under 5 minutes, so keep it brief and focused.

A 'Market Validation' slide is essential for products where breaking into an established market (or promoting the adoption of a product in a newer consumer ecosystem) might be challenging. For instance, in their 2009 pitch deck, Airbnb included a market validation slide to support their thesis that people would be willing to stay on strangers' couches.

This slide is often skipped in many pitch decks, particularly for later-stage companies. However, if you're just starting or it's one of your early rounds, including it could be crucial.

The purpose of a Target Audience slide is to demonstrate that you understand who the product is for. Many companies fail to answer this question, which can be a deal-breaker. Great market adoption is more achievable when you start by understanding the end user and work backward.

This slide only makes sense if your product is already live or if you’ve at least held a closed beta. It’s a combination of points you’ve set up during previous slides: the problem you’re solving, the market fit, and the target audience; they all come together in specific cases, proving that your product can succeed in a wider market. If you’re short on time, you might want to skip this slide to avoid reiteration.

This is one of the simplest slides to create, yet many founders get it wrong.

The key question is: how do you make money?

For subscriptions, just state the subscription cost and whether it includes a trial. Avoid details about different plans and combinations; keep it straightforward with something like "$XX subscription, with/without trial".

For products or services, mention the price or average order size and provide an idea of the margin. Is it a 30% or 60% margin product? This applies to e-commerce, too.

Keep it clean. This slide is not about projections or the growth potential of the addressable market. It’s solely about how you make money.

If your company uses a mix of business models, there's no need to detail everything here. Limit it to 2 or 3 revenue sources, and avoid diving into the specifics. The goal is to present a clear and simple overview, prompting follow-up questions in the meeting that this pitch deck will secure.

The Roadmap slide outlines key milestones in your product evolution and company history, then describes what you plan for the product in the coming months.

For hardware or medical companies, where revenue generation is delayed by an extensive R&D process, this roadmap slide is crucial.

Remember, this slide is about product vision, not financial projections. Focus on the product's future development and avoid mixing in revenue projections. This is about where the product is headed, we’re not crunching numbers yet.

This, finally, is a slide about numbers. Think of a number as a photo, and think of a chart as a story, a movie. Saying you’ve made $1M in total revenue sounds impressive, but what we really want to know is the journey to that number.

How much of that revenue came in the last month? How did that month compare to the previous one and the one before that? What breakthroughs did you achieve that significantly changed the trend of that chart?

There’s no faking a Traction slide; it is what it is, and that’s why it’s so important.

Discuss Traction in the context of which sales, marketing, or growth campaigns are truly driving results as proof that you know how to identify an opportunity and take advantage of it.

This slide serves not only as a contextual baseline to understand specific numbers important to your business (and the metrics you’ll brag about), but as further proof that you have a solid grasp of the most important indicators of your company's health, growth, and success.

A great Go-To-Market slide focuses on 2 or 3 specific channels you are already using to grow your customer base and plan to continue using.
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This slide shouldn't be indispensable if you’ve done a good job so far. The potential outcomes you’ll outline here put into words what investors should be thinking at this point: if there’s potential in your product and the team you’ve built, then the most realistic scenario is that your business will scale and grow successfully before the next funding round comes around, all while taking advantage of the projected market size.

The question this slide answers is, "How big can this startup get?"

This concept is known as TAM, or Total Addressable Market. In other words, it's the potential revenue the company could generate if it captured all of its target customers.

Two previous slides are key here: first, the business model. You need to understand how much revenue you will generate from each customer. Second, the target audience slide. If you're unsure about who your customer is, your TAM estimate can become unrealistically high, which is problematic.

You need to be clear about your pricing and who your customer is. This video from our channel is a great guide on how to estimate your TAM:

It’s a given that most companies will have competitors. Claiming you have NO competitors during your pitch immediately raises a red flag - many founders mistakenly believe that no one else is doing what they do.

If you claim to have no competitors and an investor knows of a competing company, you risk losing that lead. Nothing is worse than a lack of research.

You can present this slide as a simple business grid chart, a table comparing features, or a summary of your core competitors.

It’s important to be honest and realistic: if there’s a single function or feature that your competitor does better than you, it’s totally fine to include, as long as your product is still the obvious choice for your target market.

This slide is more commonly called Competitive Advantages. Here is where you highlight what makes you unique—be it patents, unique technological factors, distinctive players in your supply chain, or anything else that sets you apart. Use this opportunity to stamp out any doubts or skepticism that investors might be holding onto.

When discussing competitors, it's not just about comparing features or pricing. It's about demonstrating your unique market insight—something you understand that others don’t, and the very reason why your company is a smart investment.

This slide is straightforward: it showcases the buzz around your product and the positive feedback from users. These endorsements validate your product-market fit, and could help investors feel more confident about your potential growth.

The founding team of a startup needs to have the skills to achieve $1M in revenue.

For an app, reaching $1M in revenue requires expertise in marketing, development, UX, and business/operations. If you're building a B2B SaaS platform targeting enterprises, you need engineers, business development, and sales expertise.

There’s no recipe for an effective Team slide, as every founding team is unique; but aim to highlight why each member is the best for their role. Do they have extensive tenure in an established industry leader? Is their experience focused on the specific field your product will compete in?

The Financials slide must have at least 3-5 years of financial projections for your company based on your KPIs and unit economics.

If you've been operating, show data from the last financial year.

Founders typically use a simple table with their SG&A, COGS, CAPEX, and revenue, along with the final profit margin and percentage. This requires some financial modeling. If you need a budgeting template to run your financials, our financial modeling template is an excellent tool to get started.