A pitch deck is a short startup presentation for investors: 10–15 slides to present in a meeting and up to 20 to send by email.
Its job is not to sell the product but to win a second meeting.
The classic order is problem, solution, why now, market, product, business model, traction, competition, team, financials, and the round and use of funds.
Below: a 12-slide structure with what investors look for on each slide, how long they spend on a deck, how a send-ahead deck differs from a presentation deck, how to build the round slide, and what changes when you raise money in Spain. At the end there is a checklist to run before you hit send.
What a pitch deck is and why you need one
A pitch deck is the presentation an investor uses to decide, in a few minutes, whether your project is worth an hour of conversation.
It is not a business plan and not a product brochure.
A good deck answers three questions: is there a big problem, can this team solve it, and how much will the investor make if it works.
A pitch and a pitch deck are different things. The pitch is the talk itself — live, 3–10 minutes.
The pitch deck is the slides that support the talk, or that the investor reads alone, without you.
Pitch deck structure: 12 slides
The order below follows the way investors think: pain and solution first, then the size of the opportunity, then the evidence, then the people and the money.
Sequoia has long given founders a similar ten-section list in its guidance.
| Slide | What the investor looks for | Typical mistake |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Title and essence | One line: what you do and for whom | A slogan instead of meaning: “Changing the world of finance” |
| 2. Problem | Whose pain, how acute, how it is solved today | A problem the founder invented rather than one customers described |
| 3. Solution | What changes for the customer: time, money, risk | A feature list with no customer outcome |
| 4. Why now | What has changed in technology, regulation, behaviour | No slide — so nobody knows why it was not done before |
| 5. Market | How many customers and how much money, sized bottom-up | “A €100bn market, we only need 1%” |
| 6. Product | How it looks and works: screenshots, demo | Mock-ups presented as a working product |
| 7. Business model | Who pays, how much, how often, unit economics | No price and no margin |
| 8. Traction | Revenue, customers, pilots, month-by-month growth | Cumulative charts that hide a decline |
| 9. Competition | Alternatives and an edge that is hard to copy | “We have no competitors” |
| 10. Team | Why these people will pull it off | Job titles without relevant experience |
| 11. Financials | A 3–5 year forecast and key assumptions | Hockey-stick growth with no explanation |
| 12. The round | How much, for how long, for what, which milestones | An amount with no plan and no next milestone |
You can change the order to suit the project. If traction is your strongest card, put it third. If the team has already sold a company in this sector, move it up.
One rule: your strongest evidence must appear before the investor gets tired of scrolling.
The market slide: bottom-up, not top-down
A top-down estimate — take an industry report and claim a percentage — does not convince investors.
Size it bottom-up: how many customers of your type exist, how much each pays a year, and how many you can realistically reach through your channels.
How to test a niche and size the market: How to find a business niche and test it.
The business model slide: numbers, not description
Price, payment frequency, customer acquisition cost, margin, customer payback period. If you do not have these numbers yet, show your assumptions and how you are testing them. Metrics and formulas: Startup unit economics.
The traction slide: monthly and honest
Show revenue or your key metric month by month, not cumulatively. Pilots and letters of intent count as traction too, if they carry names and amounts. What counts: What is startup traction.
How many slides, and how long investors look at a deck
For a presentation, 10–15 slides. Venture investor Guy Kawasaki’s well-known “10/20/30” rule: ten slides, twenty minutes, no font smaller than 30 points.
A send-ahead deck can be longer, up to 20 slides, because you are not there and the slides must explain themselves.
DocSend’s 2022 study of 320 decks found that investors spent just under three minutes on a deck on average — 24% less time than a year earlier.
Decks that failed to raise were abandoned after 2 minutes 13 seconds. None of the failed decks had financials. The only slide present in all 320 decks was the team slide.
The practical takeaway: the essence of the project, the traction and the round must be readable in the first five or six slides, and each slide must be readable in seconds.
One slide, one idea; the headline is a conclusion, not a topic — not “Market” but a conclusion with a number: how many customers and how much they pay a year.
Send-ahead deck vs presentation deck
These are two different documents. One mistake is emailing presentation slides: without your voice they make no sense. The opposite mistake is reading a dense text deck from the stage.
| Send-ahead deck | Presentation deck | |
|---|---|---|
| Slides | Up to 20 | 10–15 |
| Text | Full sentences, each slide stands alone | Minimal text, you say the important part |
| Numbers | All the key ones, with sources | Three or four, large |
| Format | PDF or a link with view analytics | Presentation file, PDF as backup |
| Appendix | Financial model on request | Backup slides for questions |
Pitch deck vs business plan vs financial model
| Document | Purpose | Length | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pitch deck | Win a meeting and interest | 10–20 slides | Angels, funds, accelerators |
| Concept | Set out the logic of the project | 2–5 pages | The founder, partners, the first investor |
| Business plan | Show in detail how the project will be delivered | 15–40 pages | Banks, ENISA, large investors, visa assessment |
| Financial model | Calculate the money: revenue, costs, funding need | An Excel file | Investors during due diligence |
The numbers on the financials and round slides must match the financial model to the euro. An investor finds the discrepancy at the first check and stops believing the rest.
One-pager for investors
A one-pager is a description of your project on a single page.
It goes out before the deck: in a first email to an investor, or with an application to an accelerator or a business angel club.
The job is the same as the deck’s, only shorter: spark interest and get asked for the full presentation.
A teaser is a close relative. In business sale deals, a teaser is an anonymous 1–2 page company profile without the company’s name.
In startups, “teaser” and “one-pager” often mean the same thing: a short document that opens the conversation.
| One-pager | Teaser | Pitch deck | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Length | 1 A4 page | 1–2 pages | 10–20 slides |
| When it is sent | First email, accelerator application | First contact, often without the company name | After interest, or before a meeting |
| Purpose | Get a request for the deck | Test interest without disclosing details | Win a meeting and a second meeting |
| Numbers | The 3–5 that matter most | Ranges | All the key ones, with calculations |
What goes on a one-pager: the same blocks as in the deck, one or two lines each.
- Name and essence. One sentence: what you do and for whom.
- Problem. Whose pain it is and what it costs the customer.
- Solution. What changes for the customer: time, money, risk.
- Market. Number of customers and size in euros, sized bottom-up.
- Traction. Revenue, customers, pilots — with dates.
- Business model. Who pays, how much, what margin.
- Team. 2–3 people and the experience that is relevant to the task.
- Round. The amount, what the money is for and which milestone it will reach.
- Contacts. The founder’s name, email and phone.
Keep it to one page, with no small print and no walls of text. Send it as a PDF that reads well on a phone. The figures must match the deck and the financial model.
Common mistakes:
- Two pages instead of one: the investor finishes the first and closes the file.
- No round — it is unclear what you are offering.
- Slogans instead of numbers: “innovative platform” instead of revenue and customers.
- No contacts: people reply to a one-pager straight away and will not hunt for your email.
- The deck’s text, just smaller. A one-pager is a distillation, not a shrunken copy.
The round slide: how much to ask for and how to show it
Investors want three things: the amount, what it will be spent on and what result it will buy.
The right logic starts from the milestone: how much money you need to reach the result that lets you raise the next round at a higher valuation, plus a buffer.
An illustrative example. A startup asks for €600,000 for 18 months. The money goes to development (45%), sales and marketing (35%) and operations (20%).
The milestone is 60 paying customers and €40,000 monthly revenue, enough to go out for a seed round. If the investor buys equity at a €2.4m pre-money valuation, their stake is 20%.
How to calculate the valuation and the investor’s stake: How to value a startup. How this round and the next ones will dilute the founders: Cap table and dilution. How many months the money will really last: Burn rate and runway.
If the instrument is a convertible loan or a SAFE rather than equity, the slide shows the amount, the valuation cap and the discount instead of a valuation.
How these instruments work in a Spanish SL: How to structure startup investment in Spain.
Pitching investors in Spain and the EU
Deck language
English for funds and international angels.
A Spanish version helps with Spanish business angels, family offices and regional programmes: many read English, but decide faster in their own language. Keep the content and numbers identical across versions.
What Spanish angels will ask
Besides the usual questions — how the company is set up and whether they can claim the tax relief.
An individual investor in Spain can reduce their income tax (IRPF) by 50% of the amount invested in a new company’s capital, on up to €100,000 a year, if the conditions of article 68.1 of the IRPF Act are met: an SL or SA, a real business activity, equity of no more than €400,000, shares acquired on incorporation or a capital increase, and held for 3 to 12 years.
If your project qualifies, say so on the round slide. More in Startup and small business support programmes in Spain.
ENISA and the startup visa: a deck does not replace a business plan
An ENISA loan and the project assessment for the startup visa require a business plan with a financial model, not a presentation.
The deck can give you the structure, but the sections and numbers have to be developed in detail.
What ENISA checks: Business plan and financial model for Spain’s startup visa.
Pitch session: what it is and how to prepare
A pitch session is a series of startups presenting to investors back to back, to a fixed format.
Accelerator demo days, startup competitions at conferences and business angel club meetings all work this way.
Each project gets a fixed slot for the pitch and a few minutes for questions.
The format depends on the organiser.
As a guide: 3 minutes at competitions and demo days with many participants, 5 minutes at angel club meetings, 10 minutes at fund or accelerator selection.
Q&A usually takes as long again, or twice as long. Always confirm the exact timing with the organiser in advance.
Where you will pitch: accelerator demo days, business angel clubs, startup competitions at conferences.
How angel clubs work and how to get onto their sessions: Business angels: who they are and how to find them.
How to cut the deck to fit the time
Allow about one minute per slide, less in short formats. A 3-minute pitch is 5–6 slides, not 12 shown quickly. The other slides go into an appendix for questions.
| Time slot | Slides | What to keep |
|---|---|---|
| 3 minutes | 5–6 | Essence, problem, solution, traction, team, round |
| 5 minutes | 7–8 | Plus market and business model |
| 10 minutes | 10–12 | The full structure, plus a product demo if it fits in under a minute |
Spend the first 30 seconds on what you do and for whom, in plain words. Y Combinator advises that a company’s essence should fit into one or two sentences without jargon.
Your last slide is the round and contacts: it stays on screen during the questions.
Rehearse out loud with a timer at least five times. At pitch sessions the microphone is often cut exactly on time, and the round slide simply never gets shown.
Questions investors ask
- How much do you earn now, and how has revenue grown month by month?
- What does it cost to acquire a customer, and how much do they bring in over their lifetime?
- Who are your competitors, and why will customers choose you?
- Why is this team the one to do it, and who works on it full time?
- How much are you raising, for what, and how many months will the money last?
- Who has already invested, and on what terms?
Keep the numbers for your answers in backup slides: unit economics, monthly revenue, the use of funds.
If you do not know an answer, say you will send it after the session — and send it.
How to prepare for the next step, a one-to-one meeting: Founder preparation for an investor meeting.
What to send after the session
Within 24 hours, send a short email to every investor who asked questions or came up after your pitch.
Include a thank-you, one sentence about the project, answers to any open questions, the send-ahead deck and the one-pager. Propose a concrete next step: a 20–30 minute call with time options.
Send the send-ahead deck, not the presentation slides: without your talk they make no sense. A link with view analytics shows who opened the deck and which slides they read.
10 mistakes that stop investors reading
- More than one idea per slide. The investor cannot tell what matters and moves on.
- Headline is a topic, not a conclusion. “Market” instead of “The market doubled in three years”.
- No slide about money. Neither the round nor the financials — nothing to discuss.
- Top-down market sizing. “1% of a huge market” signals that nobody sized the market.
- “No competitors”. Either nobody looked, or there is no market.
- A team with no link to the task. Titles instead of experience that proves you can do it.
- Forecast without assumptions. 300% annual growth with no explanation of where customers come from.
- Deck and model disagree. After that, the investor believes nothing.
- Presentation deck sent by email. Without you, the slides make no sense.
- A 40 MB file or “request access” link. Investors will not wait.
Pitch deck template in PowerPoint
A free template — 12 slides in the same order as above, filled with an illustrative example: a startup for private clinics.
Headlines are written as conclusions, and the notes on each slide say what investors look for and the typical mistake.
It opens in PowerPoint, Google Slides and Keynote; replace the text and numbers with your own.
Download the pitch deck template (PowerPoint)
Check your deck before sending
Tick each item. Any “no” is something to fix before you send.
| Item | Yes | No |
|---|---|---|
| The essence of the project is clear from the first slide in 5 seconds | ||
| The problem is described in customers’ words and confirmed by talking to them | ||
| The market is sized bottom-up: customers × price × reachable share | ||
| Traction is shown month by month, not cumulatively | ||
| There is a competition slide showing your edge | ||
| The team is presented through experience relevant to the task | ||
| The numbers match the financial model | ||
| The round slide shows amount, period, use of funds and the milestone | ||
| Every slide headline is a conclusion, not a topic | ||
| The file is a PDF under 10 MB named with the company and date |
For a private investor, a fund or a buyer of a stake, the pitch deck is usually backed by a fuller document — the investment memorandum: what it contains and how to put it together.
Frequently asked questions
What is a pitch deck?
A short startup presentation for investors, usually 10–15 slides. Investors use it to decide whether to meet the team: is there a big problem, can the team solve it and how much can be made.
How many slides should a pitch deck have?
For a presentation, 10–15 slides; Guy Kawasaki’s rule says ten. For a deck sent by email, up to 20, because the slides must make sense without your talk.
What should be included in a pitch deck?
Title, problem, solution, why now, market, product, business model, traction, competition, team, financials and the round. Move your strongest evidence up so the investor sees it in the first minutes.
What is the difference between a pitch deck and a business plan?
A deck is 10–20 slides designed to win a meeting. A business plan is 15–40 pages on how the project will be delivered; banks, ENISA and large investors ask for it. Both must match the financial model.
What is a one-pager?
A single-page description of a startup: essence, problem, solution, market, traction, business model, team and round. It goes out in a first email to an investor or with an accelerator application, to get asked for the full deck.
What is the difference between a one-pager and a pitch deck?
A one-pager is one page with the 3–5 key numbers, and its job is to spark interest. A pitch deck is 10–20 slides with calculations, which the investor uses to decide whether to meet the team. The figures in both must match.
How does a pitch session work?
Startups present to investors one after another to a fixed format: usually 3–10 minutes for the pitch and as long or longer for questions. Within 24 hours afterwards, email the investors who showed interest and send the send-ahead deck.
What is the 10/20/30 rule?
Guy Kawasaki’s rule for presentations: ten slides, no more than twenty minutes, and no font smaller than thirty points.
How long do investors look at a pitch deck?
In DocSend’s 2022 study of 320 decks, just under three minutes on average. Decks that failed to raise were closed after 2 minutes 13 seconds.
Which language should a deck for Spanish investors be in?
English for funds and international investors. A Spanish version helps with Spanish business angels and regional programmes. Content and numbers must be the same in both.
Do you need a pitch deck for the Spanish startup visa?
The project assessment needs a business plan with a financial model, not a presentation. A deck can help with the structure, but the sections and calculations must be developed in detail.
Key points about pitch decks
- The deck’s job is a second meeting, not the deal.
- Twelve slides: problem, solution, why now, market, product, model, traction, competition, team, financials, round.
- Investors spend minutes on a deck, so put the essentials up front and make headlines conclusions.
- A send-ahead deck and a presentation deck are different documents.
- Deck numbers match the financial model, and the round slide is tied to a milestone.
- A one-pager opens the conversation; at a pitch session, cut the deck to the time slot: 3 minutes means 5–6 slides.
- In Spain, think about deck language and the tax relief for angels.
Sources
- Sequoia Capital — Writing a business plan — ten sections of an investor presentation.
- Guy Kawasaki — The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.
- TechCrunch — DocSend’s 2022 study of 320 decks.
- Y Combinator — How to pitch your company — describing the company in one or two sentences.
- Spanish Personal Income Tax Act (Ley 35/2006) — art. 68.1, relief for investment in new companies.
