What a pitch deck problem slide has to prove
Sequoia's pitch guidance boils it down to two sentences: describe the pain of your customer, and how it's addressed today, with the shortcomings of current solutions. That's the brief. A customer, a pain, and a reason the existing fixes don't work.
Notice what's missing from that list. Market size isn't there. Neither is your product, your timing or your vision. Those all have their own slides, and the problem slide gets weaker every time it borrows from one of them.
So before you open PowerPoint, write three short answers. Who has the problem? What does it cost them? What do they do about it today? If any answer runs past a sentence, the slide will too.
Name one problem for one customer
The best problem statements are almost rude in how simple they are. DocSend points to the used-car startup Shift, which reduced a messy, multi-step buying process to "Buying used cars sucks." Every investor has an opinion on that sentence within a second of reading it.
Airbnb's early deck, as transcribed by Business Insider, had three bullets: price is an important concern for customers booking travel online, hotels leave you disconnected from the city and its culture, and no easy way exists to book a room with a local or become a host. Three points, but all from one person's point of view: a traveller trying to book a room. That's what holds it together.
Where founders go wrong is breadth. "SMEs struggle with operations" covers millions of companies and describes none of them. I'd rather see the slide name the person (the finance lead at a mid-sized logistics firm, say) and the moment the problem hits them. A narrow problem sounds smaller. It's also far more believable, and believable is what you need this early in the deck.
Put a cost on the problem, and source it
Investors are asking themselves one thing on this slide. The Pitch's guide phrases it as "is this actually a big deal?" The quickest answer is a cost: money lost, hours wasted, risk carried. Their worked example is a car insurance comparison startup whose good version of the slide shows vehicle owners overpaying by about $100 a year, against a bad version that stays vague.
Here's the catch. A lot of the guides ranking for this topic fill their example slides with illustrative statistics. SlideModel's article, for instance, uses figures like "90% of small retailers in Latin America still rely on pen-and-paper inventory" as sample headlines, with no source attached. That's fine for showing a layout. Copy that habit into a real deck and the first question in the meeting will be "where's that from?"
So use a number you can defend. Your own customer interviews count. So does usage data, a published industry report, or a public filing. If you can't find a credible number, use a short customer quote instead; The Pitch suggests the same fallback. A real quote beats an invented percentage every time.
Show what people do about it today
This is the half of Sequoia's brief most problem slides skip. If customers already have a decent workaround, the problem isn't painful enough. If they're stuck with a bad one, you've just shown the gap your product fills.
The workaround doesn't have to be a competitor. In The Pitch's insurance example, the alternative is simply buying from the first broker who calls. Spreadsheets, email chains, hiring an extra person, ignoring the problem and eating the cost: these are all workarounds, and they're often more persuasive than a competitor logo because the investor recognises them.
Keep it to a line or a small strip at the bottom of the slide. The detailed comparison belongs later; I cover how to build that in my guide to the pitch deck competition slide.
How I design a pitch deck problem slide
SaaStr's write-up of Michael Seibel's YC talk on seed pitching puts it plainly: "You don't have to have a complicated problem/solution slide." The same piece argues for boring, basic slides, so investors focus on the founder rather than the visuals. I agree with the first point completely. On the second, I'd say plain rather than boring: the layout should disappear so the pain is the only thing left.
This is the layout I start from:
- The headline is the problem, written as a full sentence. "Freight brokers still chase shipping paperwork by email" beats a headline that just says "Problem". If someone reads only the headline, they should still get it.
- One number, set large, with its source in small type underneath. One. A second statistic halves the attention each gets.
- The workaround in a single line or a simple before-state visual, such as the tangle of tools the customer uses today. A plain diagram usually works better than a stock photo of someone frowning at a laptop.
- Lots of empty space. If the slide needs body copy to make sense, the headline isn't doing its job yet, so I rewrite the headline before I add anything.
Problem slide mistakes I cut most often
The first is the circular problem. The Pitch calls it "a solution searching for a problem": a statement like "there is no online platform for vehicle owners to compare car insurance policies". That only says your product doesn't exist yet. It never says why anyone needs it.
The second is turning the problem slide into a market slide. A big TAM figure tells investors how large the prize is, not how much it hurts to go without you. Keep the money-sized number for the market size slide.
The third is answering the timing question too early. Why the problem can be solved now is a separate argument, and it gets its own page; I've written about that in the why now slide guide.
And the last is length. DocSend found that the average successful deck spends only one or two slides on the problem. If yours runs to four, some of those pages are doing another slide's job.
If you've got the problem clear in your head but it won't fit on one page, that narrative restructure is the first thing I do on investor pitch deck projects, before any design work starts.