What's the worst pitch-deck advice you've ever gotten?
I spend a lot of time on the investor side of the table, and the thing that surprises me most isn't bad decks. It's good founders following bad advice with total confidence. Someone they trust told them to do it, so they don't question it. Then they watch a raise stall and never connect it back to the "tip."
A few I run into constantly, and what I think actually works instead:
"Put your team slide second, lead with credentials." Before I understand the problem, a team slide is just names and logos I can't weigh. Set up the problem and solution first, and the same slide suddenly means "here's why we're the ones to solve it."
"Round your ARR up, everyone pads the numbers." We always diligence ARR. The moment I catch padding, every other number in the deck is suspect. Under-claim and let the growth rate do the talking.
"List every GTM channel so it looks like you've got options." A go-to-market that could belong to any company tells me you haven't found your real channel yet. One channel you've proven beats five you're guessing at.
"Skip the deck, just send a one-pager, it's faster." A dense page of text and I read none of it. A deck gives an investor a clean, focused way to follow your story, one idea at a time.
"Don't mention competitors, it makes you look weak." A blank competition slide reads as naive, not dominant. Showing you understand the landscape is what makes the "here's our edge" line land.
I've watched each of these cost founders real momentum in the room. Curious what's on your list. What's the worst deck advice you were handed, and did you realize it was wrong before or after it bit you?
Replies
"More features = more impressive." I realized pretty quickly that listing every feature just diluted the core value proposition and doesn't help you get a call.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@ethan_cheng Agreed. Listing too much is simply overwhelming, and an overwhelmed reader stops absorbing anything at all. Simplify the slide down to the core value and you communicate far more effectively. You can go into as much detail as you want in the conversation or an appendix, but the slide itself should never be the thing carrying all of it.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
Worst advice I see founders take: "puff up the resume, investors won't verify." They will. Watched someone claim "Y Combinator" who'd actually just taken the free online course anyone can enroll in. Real credential or not, the moment I caught the stretch, every other claim on the deck lost the benefit of the doubt.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@ben_kahan The YC version of this comes up more than it should, and it's a bad trade in both directions. Getting caught costs you the entire deck. Anything on a slide that a five minute search can contradict should either be exact or not be there at all.
Leaving investors guessing so they ask questions got to be one of the worst fundraising advice I've ever heard. If I have to connect the dots myself, you've made the pitch harder than it needed to be.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@reda_roqai_chaoui The deck's job is to make the obvious questions unnecessary so the meeting can spend its time on the interesting ones.
My favorite is when I get contradicting advice from various pitch reviews:
"Get into the weeds about your regulatory path" and alternatively "Regulatory path is for a follow up meeting."
"Limit your deck to these 10 slides" and "Need more slides for details on these three topics"
And don't even get me started on the various grades that a deck can get from different AI driven reviews.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@steve_newdaythera Don't feel like you have to implement everything you hear. Nobody's the gospel, including me. But when you start hearing the same note from a lot of different investors, that's when it's worth listening. Take it all with a grain of salt.
@steve_newdaythera @lucasjpols Lucas is there a 'magic' numer or upper limit on how many slides in a desk? I note your great advice about not reading text heavy one-pagers...is there an overwhelm number on slides?
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@steve_newdaythera @beetler No magic number, but 10 to 12 is where most decks should land, with an appendix behind it for anything that needs depth. The more useful limit is ideas per slide rather than slide count. Fifteen clean slides that each make one point read faster than eight dense ones. When a deck starts to feel long it is almost always because slides are doing two jobs at once, not because there are too many of them. Regulatory detail, the full model, and the deep product explanation all belong in the appendix so the main deck can stay one idea per slide.
@steve_newdaythera @lucasjpols Absolutely terrific advice...thank you Lucas
At UC Santa Barbara, I was in an entrepreneurship class where we had a 2 week-long subject discussion about pitch decks. Etched into my mind, the worst advice my professor shared with me, and noted it as such, had to do with putting the valuation at the front of a pitch deck, to "not waste anyone's time." It can stop the conversation within its flow, and can invite a fast "pass." Like any salesman, it is important as a founder to lure in the potential investor, and make them believe in your valuation.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@thomas_digaetano Valuation brings up a lot of issues, especially early on. Inexperienced founders sometimes overclaim what the company is worth, and then cannot get investment afterward because the number is out of step with the business. Once that expectation is set, every round after it has to clear the same bar.
Great list, @lucasjpols . Another one I hear often is, “The market is huge—we only need to capture 1%.” The math sounds impressive, but it says nothing about how the company will win its first customers. A focused initial market, an urgent problem, and a credible path to expansion tell a much stronger story.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@mayukh_bit The 1% line is the fastest way to tell an investor you are working top down. A bottom up number is far more convincing.
@lucasjpols That makes sense—the 1% line hides the assumptions that actually matter. In our case, we can define a finite set of medical-device manufacturers, a specific buyer, and an expected ACV. At an early stage, what evidence makes that bottom-up number credible to you: customer interviews, pilot pricing, or only signed contracts?
Worst advice I've heard is "don't mention competitors." A blank slide reads as naive, and the moment an investor asks who else is in the space, you want to have that answer ready.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@mshen316 Agreed, and the follow up matters as much as the slide itself. Being able to say why the obvious alternative loses for your specific customer is the part that lands.
@lucasjpols The advice that hurt the most was, “Lead with the technology.” Investors engaged much more once I started leading with the clinical problem, the cost of delayed escalation, and the customer pain. The technology made sense only after the problem was clear.
1752vc Pitch Deck Analyzer
@ishanthedoctor Agreed. The investor has to understand the problem early on in the pitch, because if you can't state it plainly in the first minute, the technology has nothing to attach to.