M+ ARR for Series A.
If you have no revenue, use high-quality proxies like paid pilots or strategic LOIs.Explain any dips or flat periods in your growth; don't hide them.Your traction slide should follow your Problem and Solution to prove your solution works.
Your Traction Slide Is Not About Progress
Let's be clear. Traction is not "progress." It's not a list of activities. It’s quantifiable evidence that your startup can turn an investor’s dollar into a hundred dollars. Every other slide in your deck—your brilliant team, your elegant product, your massive market—is just a claim. Your traction slide is the proof.
Without it, you’re selling potential energy. Traction is kinetic energy. It’s the story of your business told through data, and it's the most compelling story you can tell an investor. Its job is to make your success look obvious, even inevitable.
The One-Chart Rule
Your main traction slide should be the simplest in your entire deck. It must convey one message in under three seconds: rapid, accelerating growth. The biggest mistake founders make here is the "kitchen sink" slide—a confusing mess of graphs for user sign-ups, social media followers, and website visits. This signals you don’t know what your core business driver is. It creates confusion, not confidence.
Choose one North Star metric. This is the single number that, if it goes up, means your entire business is succeeding. All other metrics should feed into it.
How to Choose Your North Star Metric
- SaaS: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). This is the gold standard. Anything else is a proxy.
- Marketplace: Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). This shows the total value of transactions flowing through your platform. You should also track your take rate, but GMV is the North Star.
- Consumer & Social: Daily or Weekly Active Users (DAU/WAU). Crucially, this must be paired with retention. A DAU chart without a cohort retention chart right after it is a red flag.
- E-commerce / D2C: Monthly Revenue. Also be prepared to discuss repeat purchase rate, contribution margin, and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
- Fintech: Assets Under Management (AUM) or total transaction volume.
Your slide should be a simple bar or line chart showing this metric over the last 12-18 months. Title it clearly ("Monthly Recurring Revenue"). The x-axis is time (by month or quarter). The y-axis is your metric in dollars or users. The curve should bend up and to the right. That’s it. No clutter.
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