The Traction Sandwich: A Recipe for Pitch Deck Success

Written by: Suhas Ghante

Every week, investors receive countless pitch decks. They agree to listen to a fraction of these companies pitch to them. In a sea of pitches, how do you stand out?

It seems everyone is an entrepreneur these days with new business registrations up 53% from four years earlier (WSJ).

With so many entrepreneurs (& wannabepreneurs) vying for the (very) limited time of investors, clear and concise communications has become crucial to successfully raising funds.

I’ve been promoting a framework called the “Traction Sandwich” (courtesy of 500 Global) to several startups over the years as a way to quickly capture the investor’s attention from the earliest moment.

Note how there is a ‘valley of attention death’ between the two peaks of Traction. Imagine if you didn’t have the Traction mountains and simply pitched a ‘valley of attention death’ - this is what most founders do, unfortunately.

Rather than relying on the overused Problem → Solution → Market → Competition → etc. template that usually makes your pitch seem like just another deck, this framework focuses on capturing attention.

Pitch decks are marketing devices not academic papers in which you need to detail the technical magnificence of your product (do that in the appendix). How do marketers gauge success? Through captured attention. Think like a marketer with the following Google Slides template to create your Traction Sandwich deck:

There are obviously loads of exceptions to any pitch deck template but this should provide a good starting point. Pay close attention to the GTM / Business Model slide, arguably the most important slide (it will be discussed in its own post later).

Traction doesn’t need to be revenue or the number of users or the number of downloads or anything at all related specifically to how much money your company is making. Traction is simply a proxy for investability.

Here are examples of “Traction”:

• Revenue metrics (ARR, MRR, GMV, AOV)

• Growth rates (WoW, MoM, QoQ — the earlier the stage, the shorter the time-frame)

• Scalability KPIs (LTV, CAC, LTV:CAC ratio, % of demos converted to paid plans, # on waitlist, referral rates)

• Team bios (especially if the team has rare skills, or a highly qualified team, like PhDs, people from big tech companies, or folks who’ve scaled/sold a company before)

• Marquee customers/partners (if you have LOIs or signed contracts with Fortune 500s/large enterprises)

• User engagement metrics (DAU, MAU, DAU:MAU ratio, session length, retention rates, cohort analytics)

• Customer satisfaction (NPS, Trustpilot/G2 ratings, testimonials)

• Innovation metrics (patents filed/granted, open source contributions)

• …many more

Pick two from this list and use them as bookends in your deck. Looking for more help? We recently launched BADdecks.com to provide bespoke pitch deck design and storyline creation services. Take a look!