Slide your titles into the trash

I can tell within 5 seconds whether a pitch deck is going to be garbage.

Am I psychic? No. But I’ve seen enough pitch decks to know the tells.

The biggest one?

Slide titles that say nothing.

You might be familiar with the genre. I’m talking about slide titles that are one big word at the top:

Problem
Solution
Market
Why us

Ugh.

This structure has become the default and it’s quietly killing pitches before they even get going. The founders who use it don’t get funded.

But every pitch starts with “the problem,” right?

Many do, yes. But I’m not talking about the slide order.
I’m talking about what you write at the top of the problem slide.

Because your job on the slide headline is to tell the investor why this is a problem they should care about, not just that one exists.

When a slide just says “Problem,” you’re doing two things wrong at once.

You’re telling the investor nothing.
You’re asking an investor to analyze your data and create an actionable problem statement on their own. That’s your job, not theirs.

Do this in your pitch deck and you’ll lose the attention of an investor and likely never regain it.

Here’s the fix, and it applies to every slide in your deck, not just the problem slide.

Slide titles should be takeaways, not titles.

Think about it. Does the headline of the newspaper just say “Headline?” Of course not.

Here are two from this week:

“Spain Are Worthy World Cup Winners. It’s a Triumph for Method Over Madness.” – The Athletic
“UK’s New Leader Bets Big Government Can Save the Country.” – WSJ

Both give you the gist of the story–and make you want to read on.

It’s the same with a pitch deck.

Yet most founders waste the most prized real estate on their slides, the top, by saying nothing.

If an investor only reads the headlines of your slides and nothing else, they should still get the pitch. Ideally they’d be interested, excited, or curious too, but let’s start with the basics.

Every slide is a mini story. Every story needs a headline, not a label.

Compare:

“Problem” vs. “Restaurants lose 20% of margin to no-shows.”

The second one tells you what’s actually going on before you’ve read a single bullet. Savvy investors will quickly infer what market you’re in, whether the problem feels worth solving, and how excited about the space they are. That one headline does a lot.

Finding the perfect headline for a slide is hard though and a lot of people overthink it, ending up with jargony nonsense. I prefer the tone to be conversational and grounded, like you’re telling a friend about your business.

Here’s one way to find it: the bar test.

Record yourself explaining your business out loud, the way you’d tell a buddy over beers, not the way you’d try to impress an investor.

Play it back.

The moment you stop performing and start speaking naturally, that’s your headline. Write down what you said in that moment, trim it to a sentence, and put it at the top of the slide.

Stop labelling your slides. Start saying something.

Until next time,
-Carl