Love it or hate it - in some cases, your fundraising efforts can decide on the success of your startup. And one thing that helps you to convince every investor to love your business is to show your traction.
With your traction slide, you give investors evidence that your business will be successful. Every positive signal will increase their confidence in the idea. In most of the top pitch decks traction slides, you will find some growing sales or user graph (ideally in the form of a hockey stick) supported by additional metrics. All this information proves that your business is going in the right direction and that now is the right time for the investor to jump on board.
The traction slide is an excellent place to show what you are measuring and why. Always ask yourself which numbers have to improve to get your company to the next level. You want to find these critical drivers for growth in the early days of your company. This will prove to investors that you are capable of executing but are also able to save a ton of money and time. For some businesses, this could be the number of leads or the customer acquisition cost; for others, it could be the churn or the customer live time value.
Nevertheless, with your traction slide, you can be creative about what you want to include and what not. We saw a lot of pitch decks that presented the company's SEO rankings, pr coverage, or feedback of lead customers. These are some more ideas from us:
- Net Promoter Score
- App Store Rankings
- Revenue
- CAC
- CLV
- Average Sales Cycle
- Leads / Requests
- Monthly Recurring Revenue / Annual Recurring Revenue
- Average Order
- Conversion Rate
- Total Visitors
If you don't have any traction metrics, yet you can use the slide as an opportunity to show feedback from advisors or test users.
Finally, be aware that you should not overload your slide with too much information. As always, a good pitch deck slide differs from a bad one in only showing what's important.
