The Venture Capitalist Pitch Deck: Your Traction

Your pitch deck needs to describe your traction to your potential investors. Traction broadly describes how far your company has come. It encompasses product development, sales, strategic partner relationships, marketing, and intellectual property. Each company measures traction differently, based on the challenges that company has faced and will face in the future.

Your company is likely to be stronger in one or two of these areas. As you design your message to investors around traction, focus on your company’s areas of strength.

You can show traction in your market without having made a single sale. By plotting user adoption of a free version of your product, as the slide in the figure does, you can show that people are connecting with your product more and more over time. The bars represent downloads per month, and the line graph indicates data points collected per month.

A bar graph and a line graph together show traction with users over a one-year period. Notice that some traction was gained prior to the public version of the software being rolled out. A small batch of test users was providing data points and downloading the software.

Credit: Illustration by Wiley, Composition Services Graphics

Be creative about the data you use to show traction, but remember that the point is to clearly communicate that people are interested in your company or your product.