Banish cumulative graphs from your pitch deck

You know what’s really awesome? Watching founders pitch on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage as part of Startup Battlefield 200. The pitches are world class, and the founders do such a good job, even as they are being grilled by the investors onstage. I’ve pitched onstage; it’s absolutely nerve-wracking. But throughout the week, I noticed several startups making the same mistake: using cumulative graphs in their presentations.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, but it’s best avoided. Investors hate them because they’re misleading at best, dishonest at worst, and they don’t give investors the information they need in order to make an investment decision.

Here’s why.

You can use cumulative numbers, of course. “We have made $1.5 million worth of sales to date,” or “More than 9,000 customers have used our product to date” — both give an impression of how big your company is. The problem is that investors will want to see accelerating growth, and that is much harder to read on a cumulative graph.

Investors are in the game to maximize their returns. A company or asset showing strong growth, even if starting from a smaller base, implies that it is finding product/market fit. Even if you have impressive absolute numbers, if its growth is stagnant, the potential for future returns is limited. In the graph at the top of this story, you can see several slows in growth — and at the far right of the graph, you see another slowdown. That isn’t good, and presenting this as a cumulative graph makes it look as though you’re trying to hide bad news.

Continuous, accelerating growth shows that a startup has a value proposition and is on its way toward product/market fit. This is related to seeing whether a company’s growth engine is working effectively. Investors understand that you don’t always have it all figured out, and that’s fine.

We tweaked Supliful’s pitch deck to turn it into a “perfect pitch deck.” In the example below, you’ll see how we explained the company’s dip in revenue:

It would have been so easy to use a cumulative graph here and hope that the investor doesn’t notice. But that isn’t the kind of relationship you want to build with your potential investors; you’ll want to be honest and upfront about the good, the bad and the ugly. Instead of burying the information, we noted why there was a dip in revenue and what was done about it.

Be brave. Share real data in a way that is easy to read. But cumulative graphs? Just say no.