Shoutout to the ex-founder who told me his pitch deck had 47 slides and that was the problem
I ran into a guy at a coffee shop in Austin two weeks ago who shut down his logistics startup after burning $1.8M in seed money. He said his pitch deck had 47 slides and investors kept zoning out by slide 12, but he thought more detail meant more trust. His actual product was solid, but nobody could figure out what it did in the first minute. He told me the deck should have been 10 slides max and the demo should have done the talking. Hearing that from a guy who lived it hit different than reading it in a blog post. Has anyone here ever gone back and counted slides in a deck that failed to raise?
That story hits hard because the guy actually had to learn it the expensive way instead of just reading about it. A 47 slide deck usually means the founder doesn't trust the product to stand on its own, and investors smell that fear fast. I went back and counted mine after a bad pitch once, and cutting it in half was the only thing that got people to actually listen.