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.

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.

Jan Kejr

Founder of Bizznote

Ask AI about this article: ChatGPT·Perplexity·Claude·Grok

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