These are the top 3 most important slides in your pitch deck

Between 10 and 20 slides are needed to tell the story of your startup. Many founders don't realize that some slides are different. Three of the slides are crucial. I'm going to explain why those three slides are so important.

Think about which attributes you have in your startup in order to organize your pitch deck. traction is the number one in this list. That should be the first slide in your deck if you have good traction. Think about how else you can tell your story if your traction is flat, poor or non-existent.

What’s the right order for the slides in your pitch deck?

1 — Traction is king

To the right, up and to the left. Which is understandable. If you can go back in time, you have a more valuable company than you thought.

It is your trump card. All other sins are forgiven if you show a lot of revenue and growth.

If you have an inexperienced team, a bad product or a questionable market, it doesn't matter. You will raise money if you can show that you have money coming in and growing over the course of a week.

In terms of traction, there is a hierarchy.

• Profit. If you are cash-positive and growing rapidly, you probably don’t even need venture capital — but if raising cash helps you grow even faster, you’re in a great place.
• ARR. If your annual recurring revenue is growing rapidly, you’re in luck. Recurring revenues and SaaS dynamics mean that you are onto something.
• Active users. If you’re growing your number of users exponentially, without necessarily knowing how to monetize them, that’s still an impressive feat. If you can show that you can build a huge, sticky audience, you can probably find a way to make money off that down the line.
• Sign-ups. If you’re seeing huge growth in the number of sign-ups to your product or service, but they aren’t generating revenue or sticking around, there’s still value in that — although your traction slide should be paired with a solid “How is this going to make money?” slide.