Why timing matters so much to investors
Timing is the part of a pitch you control least, which is exactly why investors want proof you've thought about it. Bill Gross of Idealab looked at 100 Idealab companies and 100 outside companies across five factors (idea, team, business model, funding and timing) and found that timing accounted for 42% of the difference between the successes and the failures. No other factor ranked higher.
DocSend's numbers point the same way. In its 2020 Startup Index, a why now section turned up in nearly 54% of successful decks against 38% of unsuccessful ones, and investors spent 36% more time on it in the decks that went on to raise. That's one data set from one year, so I wouldn't treat it as a law. It does match what you'd expect, though: a reader who believes the timing reads everything after it more generously.
So this isn't a filler page. It's the slide that turns a good idea into a good idea that has to happen now.
What a why now slide has to prove
Strip away the layout and the slide makes one argument in two halves. Something changed. And that change has opened a window you're positioned to get through before it closes.
The changes that hold up under questioning tend to be one of these:
- A cost curve that crossed a line, so something too expensive to sell before is now cheap enough to build a business on.
- A new rule, or an old one removed, that forces buyers to change how they work.
- A shift in customer behaviour with real numbers behind it, not a hunch.
- A new platform or piece of infrastructure your product sits on and couldn't exist without.
The timing test: would this slide have worked five years ago?
DocSend's warning is the most useful line written about this slide: a lot of why now slides end up as "why" slides. They restate the problem, maybe with a bigger number, and never get to the timing at all.
The fix is a simple test from the same piece. Read your slide and ask whether it would also have been true five years ago. Then ask whether it'll still be true in five years. If either answer is yes, you've written a description of the market, not a timing argument. Ellty frames the same check from the investor's side: why couldn't this be done three years ago, and why will it be too late in three years?
I run this on every draft. "Small businesses struggle with bookkeeping" fails it instantly; that sentence was true in 1995. A dated change that made a new kind of product possible passes, because it couldn't have been written before that change happened.
One more thing worth checking: the change should be outside your company. Your own launch, your hire or your product finally working isn't a why now. Those belong on the traction and team slides.
Where the why now slide goes in a pitch deck
Sequoia lists it fourth, after company purpose, problem and solution and before market size. DocSend suggests a slightly different spot, between the problem and the solution, so the reader feels the urgency before you show the answer.
Either works. I usually follow Sequoia's order from my pitch deck structure guide, because a reader who has just seen the solution can judge whether the shift really enables it. I'd move it ahead of the solution when the change itself is the surprise, such as a rule most investors haven't heard about yet.
What I wouldn't do is merge it with the market slide. Market size says how big the prize is; timing says why the prize is reachable now. Put them on one page and both get weaker. If the market slide needs work too, I've written separately about designing a market size slide.
How I design a why now slide
Content guides go quiet once you reach layout, and that's where most of these slides lose people. The shift has to be visible at a glance, not buried in a sentence.
SlideModel suggests the slide should be absorbable in ten seconds. I'd aim for less. Here's how I build it:
- Write the headline as the claim, with a date in it if you can. "Since the new reporting rule took effect, every mid-sized lender needs X" beats a headline that just says "Why now".
- Show one change, big. Two at most. A slide with five trends reads as five weak reasons rather than one strong one.
- Use a before-and-after layout or a short timeline. A timeline with the change marked in your accent colour is the clearest way to show something happened at a specific moment.
- If you use a chart, label the inflection point directly on the line instead of relying on a legend, the same rule I use on the traction slide.
- Put a source and year under every number in small type. A timing claim without a date undermines itself.
- End with one line on the cost of waiting: what a later entrant would face that you don't.
Mistakes that weaken the timing argument
The first is unsourced numbers. Plenty of guides, including some that rank well for this topic, fill their example slides with illustrative figures. That's fine for showing a layout, but those numbers can't go anywhere near a real deck. An investor will ask where a figure came from, and "a template" isn't an answer.
The second is generic trends. "AI is changing everything" applies to every company in the room, so it says nothing about yours. Name the specific capability, when it became available, and what it lets you do that was impossible before.
The third is stale context. DocSend's advice was written during COVID, when the obvious why now was remote work. Several years on, a timing argument built on that shift has had plenty of time to attract competitors. If your change is old news, say what's new about it, or find a fresher one.
And the last is the one the timing test catches: a problem slide wearing a different title. If your why now slide could swap places with your problem slide and nobody would notice, rewrite it.
If the timing argument is clear in your head but won't sit on one page, that's the kind of narrative work I do on investor pitch deck projects.