What's Your Problem?

Building a deck to raise money? Let’s get your Problem slide right. Movies always start with the obstacle, and with few exceptions you should too. An audience only appreciates a spear gun after they’ve seen Jaws.

Here are some examples of first-slide headlines I’ve seen: “Education is boring.” “Job applications are broken.” “Health data is siloed.” “Humanity has no scalable solution to climate change.” “70M Americans in Sleep Health Crisis.”

Are those statements accurate? Sure. The right way to start a pitch deck? Nope.

Here are 4 steps to fix your Problem. (Why 4? Things are supposed to be in groups of 3! Believe me, I tried. Couldn’t make it work.)

1. Is it direct and actionable? Are you describing a problem that is clearly felt by a specific group of people in a way that makes them plausibly ready to address it?
2. Is it monetizable? Is the impacted group ready, willing, and able to pay? If not, is there an adjacent group sufficiently motivated to do so?
3. Is it focused? Are you framing the problem in a way that keeps the audience centered on the solution you’re selling?
4. Is it epic? Can you describe the problem in a way that makes it feel bigger and more universal? Can you describe it so I look at the world in a new way?

Is it direct and actionable?

The first item is both easy and hard. I see a lot of entrepreneurs nobly fighting the big problems of our day. But when you open with a statement like “84% of employees report feeling stressed, sad, and lonely, causing $1T in lost productivity,” you’ve just dumped a big messy blob of a problem into my lap, with no guidance who should do what to fix it. Leaving aside the infinite number of causes of stress, sadness, and loneliness, are you looking to employees to help themselves, or the business owners who are losing a big T in revenue?

Is it monetizable?

The second item addresses situations where the impacted group isn’t the actual paying customer. Teens may be suffering from a mental health epidemic but it’s likely parents, schools, or the healthcare system that will have to step up. Engineers might be frustrated by managing their data, but their employers will be the ones who must write the check. Why will they?

The situation is most common in healthcare. “4M Americans suffer from incurable kidney disease” is obviously awful, and there’s a clearly defined set of victims. But there needs to be a clear explanation whether, how, and when the company expects patients, hospitals, or insurance companies to pick up the tab. (In the case of healthcare, this can happen later in the deck.)

Is it focused?

The third is part of a larger discussion of storytelling. A good murder mystery depends on red herrings and misdirects, but you’re not writing a thriller. That example earlier how 84% of employees struggle—that was in a pitch about helping college students improve their mental health. Keep it tight, focused, and relevant. This is also an important point if you’re using an analogy to describe your business. If you’re comparing yourself to Starbucks because they’re a ubiquitous chain that’s not a franchise, know that people may get distracted by their opinions of the quality of their coffee or their real estate strategy.

Is it epic?

The final one requires the most effort. Let me illustrate with a company I’ve been working with that uses technology to consistently pollinate crops and predict harvest date & crop volume. The problem of pollination inefficiency and lack of data can be described to meet #1-3, but is any of this a top-of-mind problem for farmers?

I dug deeper. It turns out there’s something odd about the agriculture value chain—a lot of it is quite reliably profitable. Agriculture input companies (seeds, fertilizers) have consistent businesses. Downstream, the food shipping, storage, and retail companies have also worked hard to eliminate risk. But farming! Super unreliable, particularly for smaller specialty growers. Degree of pollination success is hard to quantify, and without knowing how every tomato is responding to its environment, farmers can’t confidently negotiate with buyers in advance about the precise date, volume, and characteristics of their crop.

While our mechanized economy is a story of precision and predictability, farmers still struggle under an existential, since-dawn-of-times, vagaries-of-life uncertainty that crushes their profits. It’s like running a warehouse when you only vaguely know what’s in it, and when it will be there. Imagine if technology could solve that? Epic.

Take another look at your deck. Is your Problem a problem?