The Problem Slide: Where Most Pitch Decks Quietly Fall Apart

Founders often forget how investors consume pitch decks. It's often late at night on their phones, or in the middle of a busy day sifting through hundreds of emails. 

The problem slide should capture them right away, and should lead your pitch deck.

It's effectively 1-2 sentences that answer a simple question: what customer pain does this company exist to solve?

Founders struggle. Jay Dickieson, Founder and Managing Director of PitchBuilder, has built and reviewed pitch decks for 500+ UK founders across more than £700m in funding rounds. In this article, we explain how to avoid common problems with your problem slide. 

What a failing pitch deck problem slide actually looks like

There are two versions of a failing problem slide, and they come from different places.

1. A thinking failure:
   The founder has not yet done the work of understanding why they exist. They built a product — often a technically impressive one — without fully interrogating the customer pain that product is meant to solve. When you ask them what specific problem they are solving, they give you a category answer.

• • "Inefficiency in the SME market."
  • "Fragmentation in supply chain logistics."
  • "Lack of visibility across the procurement process."

These are real market conditions. They are not problems. A problem belongs to a customer. It has a shape, a daily friction, a cost — financial or emotional or both.

1. A communication failure:
   The founder understands the problem deeply. They have lived it, researched it, they know their customer's pain intimately. But when it comes to putting it on a slide, they lose the thread. They write five sentences where one would do. They bury the customer in abstraction. They lead with the market size instead of the pain.

Both look identical to an investor reading the pitch deck and set the rest of your deck up to fail because you haven't articulated a compelling enough reason for your business to exist. 

The question that cuts through

The most useful question to ask yourself before writing the problem slide is not "what problem does my product solve?" It is more specific than that.

What are my customers doing right now, even before my product exists for them, and why is it painful?

Nothing exists in a vacuum. Every product enters a world where customers are already doing something. They are using a spreadsheet, making phone calls, paying someone expensive, suffering with a manual process, tolerating something they have learned to accept. Your product exists because that current reality is inadequate in some way. The problem slide should make that inadequacy vivid.

When you anchor the problem in what customers are doing now, two things happen. The investor can see the customer. And the investor can see why your product is better than the alternative.

What a great problem slide looks like: Airbnb

The Airbnb pitch deck from 2008 — the one that raised $600,000 in seed funding — contains one of the most studied problem slides in startup history. 

Three bullets. Each one a clear, undeniable customer pain:

• Price — $160 per night average hotel room
• Isolation — hotels feel disconnected from the city and its culture
• No easy way to book a room with a local

That is it. No market context. No industry background. No percentage of the global travel market. Three things real customers were experiencing, stated plainly, in a format any investor could read in five seconds.

The problem slide had one job: make an investor feel the customer pain. In this example, the founders knew their customer. They had lived the experience - and it showed. 

The market size mistake

The single most common version of a bad problem slide is one that leads with market size.

• "The global enterprise software market is worth £120bn."
• "The UK property market processes £300bn in transactions annually."
• "There are 5.5 million SMEs in the UK."

These numbers are not problems.

They tell an investor nothing about what pain exists within that market, which customers feel it most acutely, or why this founder is positioned to solve it.

Market size matters. It belongs in your pitch deck. But it belongs after the problem, as the mathematical consequence of the pain existing at scale.

First convince the investor the problem is real and specific.

Then show them how many people have it.

This is also why we love the Sequoia pitch deck template - it reminds you exactly what need to be in your deck and how to sequence things together. 

One sentence. Maybe two.

The test is this: can you state the customer pain point in one sentence? Two at most?

If you cannot do that, the problem slide is not ready.

And if the problem slide is not ready, the pitch deck is not ready.

Because everything that follows — the solution, the market size, the go-to-market, the financials — is built on the foundation of the problem you are solving. If that foundation is vague, the rest of the deck inherits that vagueness. Investors feel it even when they cannot name it.

This is harder than it sounds. Founders who are deep in their business, who have been living and breathing the problem for months or years, often find compression the most difficult part. At PitchBuilder, it is one of the things we work through with founders directly, both in a pitch deck review and when we are building the deck from scratch. Finding the sentence that actually does the job is often where the most important work happens.

Why thinking about the problem is worth the time

Most of what makes a pitch deck persuasive does not happen on the slides. It happens in the thinking that precedes them. The problem slide is where that shows most clearly.

A founder who built a product before fully understanding the customer pain is almost always revealed by the problem slide. The language gets vague at exactly the point where it should get specific. The market description expands to fill the space where the customer pain should be.

Get this slide right and everything that follows lands with more weight. Get it wrong and you are spending the rest of the pitch deck trying to recover ground you already lost.

Frequently asked questions

How long should the problem slide be in a pitch deck?
One slide, with 1-2 sentences. The content should be tight enough that a stranger reading it cold understands the specific customer pain within seconds. If it takes more than two sentences to state the problem, it is not clear enough yet.

What is the difference between a problem and a market opportunity?
A market opportunity is a number. A problem belongs to a customer. "The UK SME lending market is worth £60bn" is an opportunity. "Small business owners spend an average of three days preparing a loan application, with a 40% rejection rate at the end of it" is a problem. One is a market observation; the other makes an investor feel something. Start with the problem. The market size follows.

Can I lead with market size on the problem slide?
Rarely, and carefully. In practice, leading with market size almost always signals that the problem thinking has not been fully done. Investors see hundreds of pitch decks, this is generally a red flag. 

What if my product solves multiple problems?
Pick the primary one. The problem slide should have a single, clear customer pain at its centre. Secondary problems can be referenced, but if you are trying to solve three things at once for three different customers, the slide will be vague. Focus is persuasive. Breadth at this stage reads as unfocused.

How do I know if my problem slide is working?
Show it to someone who knows nothing about your business. Do not explain it. Do not set context. Just ask: "Who has this problem, and what are they dealing with?" If they can answer accurately, the slide works. If they look confused or give a vague answer, the slide is not doing its job.

What if my problem is complex and needs more explanation?
Complexity is not an excuse for a long slide, it is a reason to work harder on compression. If the problem genuinely requires more than two sentences, consider whether you are conflating the problem with the context. Background belongs in the market slide. The problem slide should hold the pain, clean and specific, with everything else stripped away.