What is a pitch deck?
A pitch deck is a short presentation a founder sends to investors to explain the company and ask for money. An investor usually reads it before any meeting, and it decides whether there is one. It has to make clear, in a few minutes of reading, what problem the company solves, for whom, how, who is building it, what progress it has made and how much money it is raising.
What it contains
A typical deck runs about 14 pages, with about 80 words a page. These are the slides almost every deck has, in the order most decks put them, and how often they appeared in the decks founders sent BADideas in 2025 and 2026 so far:
| Slide | What it says | Share of decks |
|---|---|---|
| Cover | Company name and a one-line description | 99% |
| Problem | The problem, and who has it | 95% |
| Solution | What the company does about it | 96% |
| Product or demo | What it looks like and how it works | 77% |
| Market | How many customers could buy it, and what they spend | 86% |
| Business model | How the company makes money | 74% |
| Competition | Who else solves the problem, and how this differs | 76% |
| Traction | Customers, revenue, usage or pilots so far | 73% |
| Team | Who the founders are and why they can build it | 92% |
| The ask | How much is being raised, and what it will be spent on | 77% |
Less common slides are go-to-market (51%), use of funds (46%), roadmap (36%), financials (31%) and why now (27%).
Which of these slides the decks that reached our investment committee had more often: Pitch deck structure: slides, order, length.
What it is for
A deck does not need to answer every question an investor has. It needs to make the problem, the team and the progress clear enough that the investor wants a call.
To see how a deck reads to an investor before sending it, use the deck review: it scores nine areas the way our investment committee does, in about 40 seconds.
How we measured it
- Updated: 9 November 2026.
BADideas.fund, "What is a pitch deck?", updated 9 November 2026. https://badideas.fund/answers/what-is-a-pitch-deck
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We are a pre-seed and seed fund for founders in Central and Eastern Europe. We have built and sold companies ourselves, and since 2022 we have backed more than 40.
We back founders who see something about their market that others do not see yet. They want to change how a whole industry works, and they start small.
Good founders rarely fail on the idea or the product. They fail on selling it. We give your company hands-on help from go-to-market operators who grew Zendesk, Square and Scale AI.