What happens when feed a few thousand pitch decks to an AI, analyze them all, and figure out what the most common problems are for founders trying to raise early-stage funding? Well, I decided to find out.
Some time ago, I made a tool which would automatically analyze a pitch deck and give you feedback. A few months and a few thousand analyzed decks later, I’ve built up a large library of information about what most founders get right—and wrong—in their pitch decks.
Of course, this is a tool aimed at founders who aren’t sure if their deck is any good. The sad truth is, however, that their hunch is usually correct. About 54% of decks have a “low” probability of raising funding. In this context, this means that the founders made fundamental mistakes in putting their decks together (e.g. they forgot a team slide or didn’t explain what they were going to do with the money).
Overall, only 6% of the decks analyzed by the AI tool include all the information the AI bot is looking for. Not great, honestly.
5 Things Most Founders Get Right
Red means: “Fundraising would be very difficult without this being resolved.” Yellow means: “There is a problem, which can probably be fixed with a better story or by adding/modifying the available information.” Green means go. And gray means “this is missing from the deck” The exception is the exit strategy: Green means it’s absent (because that’s good) and “total fundraising probability” is an overall calculation that uses a weighted score from the other categories. Image Credits: Haje Jan Kamps / TechCrunch
- About 90% of founders do not include an exit strategy in their slide deck. That’s a good thing, because it’s not often that an exit slide helps you raise money.
- 82% of founders have a good “solution” slide, which roughly describes how the startup wants to address the problem it has identified.
- 62% of decks have a solid problem slide, where the team describes what the problem is and why it’s worth solving.
- 60% of the decks analyzed had a decent value proposition, explaining how and why the product provides value to its customers.
- 59% of decks explain what the market opportunity is. In other words: How does the company see that the market can be large enough to sustain venture capital-scale returns.
Of course, not everything is amazing, and founders more often than not mess up and miss a bunch of important information. Here are the five most common problems:
