Startup pitch deck structure: the slides investors expect, and what to show before revenue

What should a startup pitch deck include?

The most widely used outline comes from Sequoia Capital's Writing a Business Plan. It runs in this order, and the order is the story:

1. Company purpose. One declarative sentence about what the company is for.
2. Problem. The customer's pain, how they cope today and where current options fall short.
3. Solution. Your insight, and why it is hard to copy.
4. Why now. What changed that makes this possible today and not five years ago.
5. Market potential. Who the customers are and how big the market can get.
6. Competition and alternatives. Direct rivals, indirect ones, and how you win.
7. Business model. How the company makes money.
8. Team. The founders and key people, and why they fit this problem.
9. Financials. If you have any.
10. Vision. What you will have built in five years if it works.

Which questions must the deck answer?

Y Combinator's Michael Seibel boils a pitch down to seven questions in How to Pitch Your Company: what do you do, how big is the market, what is your progress, what is your unique insight, what is your business model, who is on your team, and what do you want. Use them as a final test. If one of them has no slide, the deck has a hole.

We combine both lists into one working checklist. For each slide it pairs the question an investor is silently asking with the evidence you can show while you are still pre-revenue.

How many slides should a pitch deck have?

As many as it takes to make one point per slide, and no more. Neither Sequoia nor Y Combinator sets a number. Our rule of thumb: one slide per topic plus a cover and the ask lands you at about a dozen. Technical detail, the financial model and long market analysis belong in an appendix or a separate document.

How do you show traction before revenue?

Show progress over time. Seibel writes that investors weigh what you have achieved against the time it took, and that product and customers count for more than announced partnerships. Pre-seed numbers can be small: weekly active users, a waiting list that grows, a paid pilot, the share of users who come back.

Geoff Ralston's guide to Demo Day presentations adds two warnings: skip cumulative graphs, which can make a flat line look like growth, and if traction is thin, lean on your story and team rather than inflating numbers. Which metrics to pick is covered in our guide to SaaS metrics that matter.

What goes on the ask slide?

How much you are raising, how long it lasts and what it gets you. Seibel's advice is blunt: there is no need to dance around the ask. YC's Guide to Seed Fundraising (2016) suggests raising enough to reach the next fundable milestone and notes that many founders aim for 12 to 18 months of runway.

Three lines are enough: the amount, the use of funds in a few buckets (product, growth, hiring) and the two or three results you will prove by the end. How much equity to sell and with which instrument is a decision to make before you write the slide; see our guide to the seed round, explained.

Design rules for slides people actually read

Kevin Hale, a former YC partner, reduces slide design to three tests in How to Design a Better Pitch Deck: legibility (someone at the back of the room can read it), simplicity (one idea per slide) and obviousness (a stranger gets the point at a glance). On chart slides he writes the conclusion as the headline, so nobody has to study the graph to find it. Ralston's Demo Day guide turns the same idea into a practical list:

• One main point per slide.
• Relevant pictures instead of words, and roughly seven words of text or fewer.
• Large fonts, key text near the top, high-contrast colours.
• No complex charts, no cumulative graphs, no embedded videos.
• Three or four ideas that carry the whole pitch, because listeners remember few details.
• A concrete, bottom-up market estimate instead of a percentage of a huge market.

Ralston's summary is worth keeping: your slides support the story, they do not compete with it. If the deck has to be read without you, write a send-ahead version with full sentences rather than cramming the slides you present.

Raising in Italy: what changes in the deck?

The structure stays the same; a few details change. If your Italian company is registered as an innovative startup, say so: it is a status with checkable requirements, explained in our guide to Italian innovative startup requirements. Do not promise investor tax breaks in the deck: check their current status on the Ministry of Enterprise's page and with an accountant first.

Among institutional investors, CDP Venture Capital describes itself as Italy's main venture capital fund manager, runs a fund dedicated to accelerators and pre-seed and seed investment, and takes startup applications through an online portal. The deck you send there should be the same one: clear, short and backed by numbers that survive a check.