Pitch Deck Readiness Scorer
Is your deck ready to send — or ready to get passed on? This grades your investor or sales deck 0–100 on the slides it needs, its length, and the anti-patterns that quietly sink decks, then tells you what to fix first.
Funded decks look alike: they carry the slides investors expect, sit in the 15–20 slide band, and avoid a handful of tells — a table of contents, walls of text, a buried ask, a market sized top-down. This scorer checks all three dimensions against DocSend and Sequoia-era norms, returns a readiness score and verdict, and hands you a prioritized fix list. It is an educational model — a sharp second opinion, not a guarantee of a term sheet.
Pitch deck readiness inputs and score
How to use this scorer
- Count your main deck. Enter the number of slides in the deck you actually send — not the appendix you open only when asked.
- Tick what you have. Check each required slide your deck includes. Missing a Why Now or a Competition slide is the most common gap, and each one costs you points here for a reason.
- Be honest about the anti-patterns. A table of contents, a wall of text, a buried ask, or a market sized from the top down each pull the score. Investors notice them faster than you’d like.
- Read the fix list, not just the number. The score is a summary; the ranked fixes below it are the work. Start at the top and re-score.
RGM Expert Says
“The score most founders should fear isn’t low — it’s a 78. A deck that’s almost right feels finished, so nobody fixes the two slides costing the round. The tell is almost always the same: a Why Now that isn’t there, and a market sized from the top down. Fix those two and you’ve moved more than any font ever will. Send the deck as a tracked link, watch where people quit, and let the data pick the next fix.”
How the score works
The score starts at 100 and deducts against three dimensions that separate funded decks from passed-over ones. Nothing here is magic — it is the DocSend and Sequoia-era consensus turned into arithmetic you can audit.
- Required slides (up to −60). Each of the ten expected slides — Problem, Solution, Why Now, Market, Product, Business Model, Traction, Competition, Team, and the Ask — is worth six points. A deck missing three of them can’t clear the “ready” bar on slides alone.
- Length band (up to −16). 15–20 slides is the completion sweet spot and loses nothing. 10–14 costs a little (−5); 21–25 more (−8); under 10 (−14) or over 25 (−16) costs the most, because thin decks skip proof and long decks lose the reader before the ask.
- Anti-patterns (up to −28). A table of contents (−6), a 50-plus-word slide (−6), a buried ask (−8), and top-down market sizing (−8). These are the tells that make an investor stop reading.
The final number is clamped to 0–100. Above 80 the deck is ready to send; 60–79 means tighten a few things first; below 60 means restructure before anyone sees it. Treat the bands as a triage, not a verdict on your company.
You get three and a half minutes
The average venture investor spends about three minutes and forty-four seconds on a deck, and fewer than three in five reach the last slide. That is the whole budget. Every anti-pattern this tool penalizes spends part of it on something other than your argument — a contents slide previewing what they could scroll to, a paragraph competing with your voice, a market number they know is fiction. Readiness is really just respect for that budget: say the true thing, in the expected order, in the fewest slides that still prove it.
The most expensive miss is the one that feels finished. A deck at 78 looks done, so the founder ships it — and never fixes the missing Why Now that made the timing feel optional. The scorer exists to make that gap visible before an investor’s silence does.
What funded decks look like
Anchor your score against the norms this tool is built on. These are medians and rules of thumb, not laws — but they are where the burden of proof sits.
| Signal | Benchmark | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Slide count | ~19–20 pages (10–20 range) | DocSend / Kawasaki 10/20/30 |
| Words per slide | ~50 words | DocSend |
| Table of contents | Funded decks omit it | DocSend |
| Viewing time | ~3 min 44 sec total | DocSend / HBS 2015 |
| Completion rate | ~58% reach the end | DocSend 2026 |
| Least-viewed slide | Why Now (~23s) — move it earlier | DocSend 2026 |
What the deck field says
“Ten slides, twenty minutes, and no font smaller than thirty points.”Guy Kawasaki, the 10/20/30 rule
“The audience, not the presenter, is the hero of the story.”Nancy Duarte, Resonate
“Make each slide legible, simple, and obvious — one idea per slide.”Kevin Hale, Y Combinator
Keep going
Common questions
What makes a pitch deck ready to send?
How many slides should a pitch deck have?
Why is a table of contents bad?
Does this work for sales decks?
A worked example
Say you load the scorer with a 17-slide seed deck. You have every expected slide except Why Now and Traction, and you admit two anti-patterns: a table of contents on slide two, and a market you sized top-down from “1% of a $40 billion market.” The math runs like this: you start at 100, lose 12 for the two missing slides, lose nothing on length because 17 sits in the ideal 15–20 band, then lose 6 for the contents slide and 8 for the top-down market. That lands you at 74 — squarely in the “tighten it first” band.
A 74 is the most dangerous score a founder can get, because the deck already feels done. The fix list makes the work concrete and orders it by impact: add the Why Now slide and move it early, rebuild the market slide bottoms-up from real unit economics, add the traction proof, then delete the contents slide. Re-score after each change. Adding the two missing slides and fixing the market claim alone lifts the deck to the high 80s — ready to send. Notice what didn’t move the number: fonts, colors, and animations. Readiness is an argument problem, not an aesthetics problem, and the scorer is built to keep your attention on the argument.
Three mistakes the score catches
Skipping Why Now. It is the single most common gap and the most expensive. Investors spend the least time on it, so founders assume it doesn’t matter — but a deck that never makes the timing urgent leaves the reader with no reason to act now instead of next year. Winning decks move it earlier, not later.
Top-down market sizing. “We only need 1% of a huge market” is the fastest way to signal you haven’t done the work. Build the number from the bottom up — who buys, how many, at what price — and the same market feels earned instead of imagined.
The buried ask. If a reader can’t tell what you want and what it buys within a few seconds of the last slide, the deck hasn’t closed. State the raise, the runway, and the milestone plainly. The scorer treats a vague ask as a real deduction because, in a real room, it is.