Slide by slide
What an investor actually checks on each of your 11 slides
A partner's first read of a deck runs under four minutes. They aren't admiring your design — on each slide they're running one specific check, and looking for the one failure that ends the conversation. Here's the check and the failure, slide by slide.
The 11-slide skeleton and diligence lenses used by the IR Narrative engine · ~8 min read
The 11 canonical slides
Funded decks converge on the same eleven slides: title, problem, why-now, wedge, product, market, traction, model, go-to-market, team, and the ask. Your narrative arc decides the order and which slides carry the argument; this guide is about what a partner checks on each one regardless of where it lands.
Slide · Title
Title / one-line purpose
What do you do, in one sentence a partner can repeat to the IC verbatim?
Checked: whether they can retell it after one read. Partners forward decks; if the forward loses the sentence, the meeting never happens.
Kills it: a clever tagline instead of a sentence. If a stranger can't restate what you do, nothing after slide 1 matters.
Slide · Problem
Problem
Whose pain is this, exactly, and how acute is it in dollars or hours?
Checked: whether the pain is a painkiller (someone budgets to fix it now) or a vitamin. They mentally test "would a buyer pay to remove this today?"
Kills it: a problem so broad it implies no wedge, or a vitamin no one has a line-item for. Broad ≠ big; broad = unfocused.
First read ≈ 38s
Slide · Why now
Why now
What changed recently that makes this possible today, not three years ago?
Checked: whether the inflection is real and current. "Right idea, too early" kills more deals than bad ideas — they price timing risk here.
Kills it: no why-now, or a vague "the market is growing." Investors fund inflection points, not good ideas that could have shipped anytime.
First read ≈ 33s
Slide · Wedge
Wedge / why you win
Why do you win the beachhead, and what durable advantage compounds as you scale?
Checked: whether the advantage is durable or a temporary feature lead an incumbent copies in a quarter. This is the defensibility question every partner returns to.
Kills it: "better UX" as the whole moat, an omitted competitor the partner already knows, or a 2×2 rigged so you're alone top-right.
First read ≈ 22s
Slide · Product
Product
Does it work, and can I understand the core flow without you in the room?
Checked: whether the deck sells the product alone (partners share it internally) and whether the one workflow is real vs. a mockup. They look for a live artifact.
Kills it: a feature inventory instead of the one workflow that matters — screenshots of settings pages, not the money moment.
First read ≈ 21s
Slide · Market
Market size
How big can this get, and do you actually know who pays and how much?
Checked: whether you built it bottom-up from a real buyer count or pasted a "$40B (Gartner)" top-down figure. They rebuild top-down-only numbers and discount you for it. (See bottom-up market sizing.)
Kills it: top-down only. "1% of a huge market" is the tell that you haven't counted actual buyers.
First read ≈ 27s
Slide · Traction
Traction
Is this working, measured by a number I can verify from your systems?
Checked: deck-vs-data-room consistency is machine-checked first here. They cross-reference this number against the model and the data room; a mismatch ends diligence.
Kills it: hand-assembled numbers, vanity metrics, or a chart with no axis. Cumulative-signups curves that hide flat month-over-month.
First read ≈ 49s
Slide · Model
Business model & unit economics
How do you make money, and are the unit economics real at the shown scale?
Checked: whether the economics work at plausible scale and whether you show the formula. They reconstruct your CAC and payback from primitives.
Kills it: a model that only works at implausible scale, or unit economics with no formula — a number with no derivation reads as invented.
First read ≈ 30s
Slide · GTM
Go-to-market
How do you acquire customers repeatably, and does more capital buy more growth?
Checked: whether you have one working channel or a wish-list. They look for evidence the motion is repeatable before the round scales it.
Kills it: "content + sales + partnerships + SEO" — a list of channels signals none of them works yet.
Slide · Team
Team
Why is THIS team the one that wins THIS problem?
Checked: whether there's a drawn line from your background to why you win this specific problem — not generic impressive logos. This is the most-read slide on a first pass.
Kills it: logo soup with no thesis. At pre-seed/seed the team IS the investment; a generic team slide is a generic no.
First read ≈ 62s (the longest)
Slide · Ask
The ask / use of funds
How much, for what, to reach which specific milestone?
Checked: whether the ask is milestone-anchored and sized to reach the NEXT round's bar, not just "more runway." They sanity-check ask vs. traction here. (See the arithmetic on the ask.)
Kills it: an ask with no milestone — "to grow the team" — instead of "to reach $2M ARR / Series A metrics in 24 months."
First read ≈ 52s
Notice where attention concentrates:
team (62s),
the ask (52s), and
traction (49s) take roughly half of a ~3m44s first read. These are the slides worth over-preparing. Per-slide attention figures come from public deck-analytics on where investors spend a first read; they travel with the slide type, not its position.
Load-bearing slides move with your arc
Which slides carry the argument changes by arc. For a category-creation story, why-now, market, and wedge are load-bearing. For a platform story, it's traction, model, and market. Get a load-bearing slide wrong and the arc collapses — which is why the report flags them explicitly for your arc, and gives each slide a stage- and model-specific note on top of the general check above.
Get every slide checked against your arc
The report re-sequences your 11 slides into your winning arc's order and, for each, states the investor check, the failure, and a note tuned to your stage and model.
Request the report — $490
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