Nail Your YC Demo Day Pitch in 5 Slides
Roundfunded’s guide to YC Demo Day says each company gets a live pitch of about one minute. That is their description, and the length can change by batch. Five slides is not a stylistic choice at that length. It is what fits in a minute.
I think the decks that work say less. That is my opinion, not a study.
Slide 1: the problem, in one sentence
Not three bullets. One sentence, stated as a fact, not a question. “Restaurants lose 8% of revenue to no-shows and have no way to predict which booking will flake.”
If you need the audience to already agree with your premise before the sentence lands, the sentence is wrong. Cut it until it is just true.
Slide 2: the solution, shown, not described
Show the product. A screenshot, a fifteen-second clip, a live moment if you can pull it off without it turning into a demo of your Wi-Fi. A founder reciting a memorized script over a static logo slide reads as someone who has not used their own product enough to talk about it naturally.
One sentence of caption under the image. Not a feature list. What does the product do, in the words you would use talking to a friend.
Slide 3: traction, and the one number
This is the slide people actually remember, so it can only have one number on it. MRR, growth rate, retention, whatever is your strongest true thing. Pick one. If you put five metrics on the slide, the room remembers zero of them.
If your one number is revenue, I would expect the next question to be what it costs you to get it. A slide that shows growth without a hint of efficiency invites that question before you have finished talking.
Slide 4: market and the founder edge
Market size deserves a short slide. State the number, name the source, move on. What actually earns attention here is why you, specifically, are the team that wins this market. Domain scars, a distribution channel nobody else has, a technical approach that is hard to copy. Say the true thing, not the impressive-sounding thing.
Slide 5: the ask
Round size, what it buys you, and what “yes” looks like as a next step. Not a thank-you slide. I would not end on a plain thank-you with no next action. End with something like “let’s talk this week.” Say what you want the reader to do the moment they finish looking at the deck.
What to leave out
Team bios beyond one line each. A roadmap slide with dates eighteen months out that nobody will hold you to and everybody will silently discount. A competitive matrix with four columns of checkmarks - if the room needs a grid to understand why you win, you have not explained it yet. Speculative revenue projections drawn as a hockey stick with no real customer behavior under them. In my opinion, investors distrust that shape on sight.
Anticipate the question you are dreading and have one honest sentence ready for it. “What happens when a well-funded competitor builds this” and “why hasn’t this been built already” are not gotchas, they are the two questions every partner in the room is already asking themselves. Answer them before anyone has to ask.
Building the actual deck
I build Slaide, and a five-slide text deck suits it. My argument: a plain-text file is faster than a design tool at this size. Write the sentence, render, look at it, cut a word. No dragging text boxes.
---
master: ./theme.slaide.yaml
title: Demo Day
---
layout: title-content
---
## Restaurants lose 8% of revenue to no-shows
- No way to predict which booking will flake
That is slide one. The file renders to a web deck, a PDF, and an editable .pptx. The core is open source under Apache-2.0, and the install is npm install -g @aivorynet/slaide. You do not need it to give a good pitch. You need the five sentences right first. The tool just gets out of the way once you have them.