Pitch deck checklist: 25 checks before you hit send

Most decks do not fail on strategy. They fail on things a checklist would have caught: a raise amount that differs between two slides, a market number with no source, a team slide with titles instead of reasons. This is the pre send checklist used when screening real inbound decks, grouped the way an investor reads. Every item is a yes or no; be honest, the reader will be.

The one liner and the problem

1. A stranger can repeat your one liner after reading it once.
2. The problem names who it hurts, how much, in a number.
3. The problem slide says how people cope today.
4. Nothing on the first three slides could belong to any company.

The product and the market

5. There is a screenshot or photo of the actual product.
6. The solution states why you, not just what it does.
7. Market sizing is bottom up, with a source on every number.
8. There is a "why now" a skeptic would accept.
9. You never claim to have no competitors.
10. The competition slide says why customers switch, not why rivals are bad.

The numbers

11. Who pays, how much, how often is stated plainly.
12. CAC, LTV, payback or margin appear, even as labeled estimates.
13. Every traction number has its period and count attached ("over 3 months, across 40 customers").
14. If there is no traction, the deck says so and shows momentum instead.
15. There is a financial slide: 18 months of revenue, costs and burn.
16. The sales cycle in the plan matches the market you sell to.

The team

17. Each founder's line answers why this person for this market.
18. Key gaps are named, with a plan, not hidden.
19. If one person is irreplaceable, the deck addresses it.

The ask

20. One amount, one currency, identical everywhere in the deck.
21. The ask states what it buys: milestones and months of runway.
22. The ask is consistent with the financial plan.
23. The check size fits the investors you are sending it to.

The mechanics

24. The deck is one PDF, opens fast, readable on a phone.
25. Everything an investor would find when they google you agrees with the deck.

A worked example: 19 of 25

Take a deck from this summer's screening, details changed so nothing points at a real company. B2B software for logistics, three founders, raising a seed round. Good story, real product, two paying customers. On a first read it looked like a deck that clears the bar. Run against the list, it scored 19 of 25, and the six misses were the ones that decide outcomes.

• 2, the problem in a number. The problem slide said dispatchers "waste hours every day" on manual routing. Hours is not a number. One line from their own pilot data, "an average of 2.4 hours per dispatcher per day, measured across 11 dispatchers", turns the same slide into evidence.
• 7, market sizing bottom up. The market slide quoted a 40 billion global figure from a research report. Nobody in the room believed they could serve it. The bottom up version they had in a spreadsheet, 6,200 mid sized carriers in three countries at their actual price, was smaller and far more credible.
• 12, unit economics. Two paying customers meant they had a real acquisition cost and a real contract value. Neither was in the deck. Labeled estimates would have passed; absence did not.
• 15, a financial slide. There was none. The eighteen month plan existed in a document they used internally. Leaving it out cost more than any weakness it would have shown.
• 20, one ask everywhere. The title slide said 1.2 million. The ask slide said 1.5 million. The difference was an updated plan and a forgotten slide. To the reader it was the fastest way to stop trusting every other number.
• 25, the deck agrees with the web. Their website still described a pre seed round closed the previous year and a product name they had since changed. An investor who googles before replying would have read that as either neglect or two different companies.

None of the six required new work. Every fix was a number they already had, a slide they already used internally, or a website edit. The whole set took one afternoon, and the second version cleared the bar.

How to use the checklist

Run it the day before the deck goes out, not the hour before. Do one group at a time and read the slides in the order an investor does, front to back, without skipping to the slides you are proud of. Then hand the list to someone who has not seen the deck and let them score it; the misses you cannot see are the ones a stranger finds in seconds. Anything you answer "mostly" to is a no. Investors do not score partial credit inside their first two minutes.

Scoring yourself

Count the yeses. Screening real decks, the ones that clear the bar are not the ones with a perfect story; they are the ones with nothing on this list left undone, because each miss costs credibility on every other slide. The most common failures are 12, 15 and 20, the same red flags that make investors pass inside their first two minutes.

If you are starting from zero, the free pitch deck template bakes this list into ten slides with placeholders. And when every box is ticked, run the deck through a free scored review; it checks the same things, the way an investor would say them.