Article · Short read, roughly 8 to 10 minutes

5 critical pitch deck slides most founders get wrong

Jose Cayasso · TechCrunch Free Beginner

This piece names the exact trap you are trying to avoid: googling an industry stat and assuming you just need 1 percent of it to build a billion-dollar company. It calls that the wrong approach and walks you to the fix, sizing TAM as annual revenue per customer times the number of customers who actually match your profile and would pay. It is short, practical, and aimed at the pitch slide where founders most often fake a big TAM.

• The 1 percent of a huge market claim reads as fantasy math to investors and quietly costs you credibility on the market slide.
• Size the market from the bottom up: revenue per customer times the count of customers who genuinely fit your target and are willing to pay.
• Doing this forces you to actually know your target persona and buyer, which is the real thing investors are checking for.