By The competition slide is the one founders build last, bury deepest and secretly hate. So they do the thing everyone does, a grid, a dozen rows, green ticks marching all the way down their own column and neat little crosses down everyone else's. Nobody's column is ever all green except yours. And the investor, who has seen this exact grid a thousand times, believes precisely none of it.
That is the quiet joke of the all green slide. It is built to look like strength and it reads as either dishonesty or laziness and both are worse than simply admitting a competitor is good at something. Nobody wins every row. The founder who pretends they do has told the room something about themselves and it is not flattering.
| You | Rival A | Rival B | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Mid market | Enterprise | SMB |
| Onboarding | Hours | Weeks | Days |
| The moat | Proprietary data | Brand | Price |
| Weak spot | Young | Slow, costly | Shallow |
Credibility comes from giving credit
A competition slide that actually works does the opposite of the grid. It hands rivals their due. This one owns enterprise and has a real brand. That one is cheaper and faster than us, genuinely. And then, having shown you understand exactly how strong each of them is, you point at the seam, the one place none of them can defend, the gap you were built to live in. The honesty about their strengths is the only reason your claim about the gap is believable.
The seam nobody else can defend
Turn it into a point of view
Done like this, the competition slide stops being an apology for the fact that other companies exist and becomes maybe the most persuasive page in the deck. You are not saying we are better at everything. You are saying we understand this market more clearly than anyone, here is exactly where each player is strong and here is the one spot they structurally cannot follow us into. That is a point of view. And a founder with a real point of view about their own market is worth ten founders with a wall of ticks.
Apology or point of view
- Ticks down your column only
- Crosses for everyone else
- Reads as dishonest or lazy
- Credit each rival's strength
- Point at the one seam
- Say why they cannot follow
I sometimes tell founders to go further and say the nice thing about the competitor before the investor does. It disarms the whole exchange. They were loading up the but what about so and so question and you have already answered it, generously and moved to why you still win. Now they are not testing you. They are agreeing with you. That is a very different meeting.
There is a practical reason too. The investor is going to find your competitors anyway, in diligence, in a twenty minute search after you leave, in a call with someone who used them. If your slide pretended those competitors were nothing and their diligence says otherwise, you have lost the one thing you cannot easily win back, their trust in the rest of your numbers. Better they hear the honest version from you, framed your way, than the unflattering version from a stranger.