One pager vs pitch deck: when to send which

What goes on a one pager

A startup one pager is closely related to what investors call an executive summary. Geoff Ralston's guide to seed fundraising for Y Combinator says an executive summary should be one or two pages, with one being better, and should include vision, product, team with location and contact information, traction, market size and minimum financials: revenue if any and money raised before and now. That list is a good template for a one pager. The discipline is that every line has to earn its place, since the whole page is read in the time it takes to decide whether to open an attachment. A strong one pager usually opens with one sentence on what the company sells to whom, then three or four short labelled blocks, and ends with the raise and a named contact.

Where the pitch deck takes over

The deck exists for the reader who has decided to look closer. It can spend a slide making the problem felt, a slide explaining how the product works, a chart showing growth over time and a slide naming the competition honestly. Sequoia Capital's guide lists the parts such a deck covers, from company purpose through why now, market, competition, business model, team and financials. None of that fits on a page without becoming unreadable, which is why the one pager states conclusions and the deck shows the reasoning behind them.

Which to send, and when

Use the one pager where attention is scarce and volume is high: a cold introduction, an investor database profile, a demo day handout, an accelerator application that asks for a summary. Send the deck when someone replies with interest, when a warm introducer asks for something to forward to a partner, or before a scheduled meeting. Many founders send both at different moments. If an investor's website or form asks for one format, send that one, because matching the request signals the founder reads carefully.

Common mistakes

The most common one pager mistake is shrinking a deck onto one page in small type, so nobody can scan it. The second is leaving out numbers, turning the page into a mission statement. The most common deck mistake in this comparison is sending twenty slides to someone who asked for a summary. Both documents fail in the same way when their numbers disagree, for instance revenue as at March in one and June in the other. Date the figures on both, and update them together. A subtler mistake is writing the one pager for the founder rather than the reader, opening with the company's history or its values instead of what it sells and to whom. The reader of a one pager is usually comparing it against dozens of others that week, so the first line has to make the company distinguishable from its neighbours in the pile.

Keeping the two in step

The simplest way to avoid contradictions is to write the deck first, then derive the one pager from it: the deck's cover line becomes the one pager's first sentence, its traction slide supplies the three numbers, and its ask becomes the closing line. When the deck changes, update the page the same day. A one pager is also a useful test of the deck itself. If the business cannot be summarised in a page, the deck probably lacks a clear argument, and adding slides will not supply one.

Where it shows up in the product

A one pager as a single printed page is a document rather than a deck; the document builder is the natural home for that. Inside the presentation builder, the startup one pager example on this site takes a different route: eight slides whose second slide states the whole business in one paragraph with three numbers underneath, followed by traction, an honest position slide, a roadmap and the raise. Both the summary slide and the full deck can come from one brief, and the length slider runs from 3 to 20 slides, so a short version and a full version can be generated separately and checked against each other.

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