There is competition, and there will always be.
Unless you haven’t researched your market well enough or your solution doesn’t address any serious problem, thus lacking demand.
No matter how unique your business model or product is to your market, it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Even if there’s no such solution yet, there are alternative methods your potential customers use to solve the problem you’re trying to solve. Investors know that, and it’s a big red flag for them when they either hear that startups don’t have competition at all or realize founders don’t clearly understand who their competitors are.
What’s a green flag, then? To build a killer competition slide in your pitch deck.
Your competition slide is a testament to how well you’ve done competitor research for the pitch deck, why and how you can outrun your potential competitors, and how clearly and simply you can show this to investors.
If you don’t know how to take advantage of competition and how to put competitive analysis in your pitch deck, check out our guide below. We’ve listed the major do’s and don’ts for a killer competition slide in a pitch deck and added a lot of examples to prove the claims in practice.
Why is the pitch deck competition slide so important?
A competition slide in your pitch deck shows how well you know your niche and how you’re going to lead it.
By reviewing competitors’ slides, investors can determine whether you’ve done your homework on market research, how well you’ve done it, and how effectively you can use the findings to showcase your position in the market.
Investors need to feel confident that the money they’re giving to you today has the potential to bring them more money in the future. While your competition slide isn’t the only part of your pitch deck that demonstrates this, it can help investors assess your competitive edge, growth potential, and scalability.
However, you have to make sure your competition slide is realistic, without over-optimistic positioning or irrelevant comparisons. Investors know perfectly well that a competitor analysis slide can be manipulated, that’s why they value honesty and thorough research that much.
Some investors claim that the status quo is the real competitor of all businesses. People don’t tend to change their behavioral patterns so easily; they need a really good reason to quit their current solution and turn to a new one. Your task, as a business owner, is to find this reason, leverage it effectively, and show how you’re going to solve it better than others in your competition slide pitch deck.
Put simply, crafting a killer competition slide in a pitch deck boils down to two activities: researching your competitors and showing how you can do better than them. As a result, investors get a competitive advantage, market opportunities, and business defensibility in just one slide.
To recollect, a good competitive advantage slide must demonstrate:
Your startup’s market positioning and unique value proposition, compared to others. This helps validate the need for your product/solution in the market and arrive at the product-market fit.
Your understanding of the market dynamics and your strategy for outperforming competitors. It must illustrate how well you did competitor research for your pitch deck and how you’re leveraging your strengths against your competitors’ weaknesses.
Gaps in the market your solution targets to fill. In this way, investors can see whether your startup has potential for growth and scalability.
The bottom line: Your competition slide pitch deck tells more about your startup and its value than the competition itself. It allows investors to assess how smart you’re going to play. A strong competitive analysis slide will add a hundred points to building trust and ultimately raising an investment round.
Here’s how to build it.
What to include in a competition slide for your pitch deck?
Time to get from theory to practice and discuss what exactly you should include in your pitch deck competition slide. In this section, we’ll break down some major tips on which elements to present, how to do it in terms of content and design, and which questions to ask yourself to make sure you’re on the right track.
Major elements of a competitive landscape slide:
- Clear segmentation of your competitors: Categorize your direct and indirect competitors based on your target market, product features, market reach, etc.
Why it matters for your competition slide pitch deck: It demonstrates your thorough understanding of the market landscape.
- Unique selling propositions: Focus on features, benefits, or value propositions that are exclusive to your startup. Note that you need to present your core advantages compared to competitors.
Why it matters for your competition slide pitch deck: It highlights what sets your product/service apart from competitors.
- Competitive moat: Explain to investors why your startup is better positioned to solve the problem of your targeted audience. Consider technology, business model, partnerships, or market approach.
Why it matters for your competition slide pitch deck: It distinguishes your business from the red ocean of competition.
- Visual mapping: Use matrices, graphs, or other visual tools to plot competitors against key variables like price, quality, customer value and experience, technology advancement and feature set.
Why it matters for your competition slide pitch deck: It helps investors grasp your market positioning at a glance.
You must show investors that you know your competitive landscape and, more importantly, how to differentiate yourself.
For instance, if you decide to use a 2×2 matrix, choose two axes representing your core benefits (like technology or customer focus, etc.) that you win. In this way, investors will understand that you’ve done your homework on research and you know how to put competitive analysis in your pitch deck.
Of course, it’s important what you show in your competition slide pitch deck, but it’s also important how you show it. We’ve prepared for you some content and design tips on how to make your competitors slide more impactful and appealing to investors.
A quick spoiler: As investors are always busy and they see tons of pitch decks daily, make yours stand out in every way—strategically, visually, and with a clear, compelling narrative. In this article, we’re talking about the competition slide in a pitch deck, but if you want to learn more about other slides, check out our guides on:
Content tips
Follow a smart brevity concept—say less, but make it impactful.
Make it a part of a big story—make a competition slide fit your overall pitch deck narrative.
Design tips
Show competitors, not name—use companies’ logos instead of names.
Effectively visualize your data—leverage diagrams, checklists, two-by-two matrix, etc.
Make design work for you—choose readable fonts and relevant colors (let visuals help the content walk the talk).
Questions for self-check
After you’ve completed your pitch deck competition slide, take one more look at it. Make sure all the aspects are mentioned and presented well. You may ask yourself the following questions:
- Did I mention all the competitors?
Make sure you’ve conducted a thorough competitor analysis for your pitch deck. If investors discover even a single competitor you’ve overlooked, they may doubt your understanding of the niche.
- What makes me stand out from the crowd?
If there is no direct answer, adjust your slide. If you don’t see your market positioning clearly, investors won’t see it either. They usually spend around 12 seconds per slide, so be sure to make your market positioning and competitive moat succinct and obvious.
- What are my value propositions? How distinct are they?
Advice is the same: no clear answer—rewrite. If the unique benefits your product/service offers aren’t obvious, keep tweaking your slide until they shine bright. Remember, you just have a brief window to capture investors’ attention. Use it wisely.
A winning competition slide pitch deck isn’t about listing all the possible competitors. It’s about telling a story of your startup’s unique place in the market. You must show that you will not only survive but thrive and outperform the competition.
Teardown of poor and killer competition slide in a pitch deck
In this part, we’re going to break down the effective and ineffective pitch deck competition slides with examples, common mistakes, and approaches on how to create a killer slide.
A poor competitors slide check
First, let’s speak about the problems most founders make in their competitor analysis slides.
1. Too many ticks and crosses: Overloading the slide with too many features and comparing them with those of your competitors’ isn’t the best approach. It doesn’t communicate any core value or unique proposition of your solutions. You just focus on superficial aspects that can be easily added or modified. Not only could everyone do this, but everyone could simply copy them. In such a way, your competition slide pitch deck loses its impact and fails to differentiate your solution.
2. No competitive moat: If you don’t show how your business is protected against competitors, you miss the bread and butter of your pitch deck competition slide. The competitive moat is a signal of your defendable position in the market against market volatility and other potential risks.
3. No competition slide at all: This is a number-one red flag for investors. Every business has competitors. If you don’t see them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It means you just haven’t conducted market competitors analysis for your pitch deck well.
Some additional mistakes may include:
- Poor visuals: Take Unito’s pitch deck, for instance (a platform that manages SaaS apps) While their competitive analysis slide did a great job on demonstrating the size of opportunity, it failed to effectively represent their comparison visually and treated competitors less seriously than they deserved.
- Lack of competitor research for a pitch deck: Let’s have a look at the RAW Dating App’s presentation. The slide doesn’t show a clear and deep understanding of either competitors or the market. There’s no data on competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, pricing, or features. It doesn’t give investors any information on how this startup will differentiate and, more importantly, defend itself in the competitive arena.
A killer competitors slide check
Now, let’s see which approaches to leverage if you want to create a killer competition slide in your pitch deck.
1. Focus on use cases: Instead of a feature-by-feature comparison, emphasize how different offerings excel in specific use cases.
You shouldn’t list your product’s basic features (like scheduling, course builder, and blogs for a health and wellness platform). Such comparisons don’t add value to your pitch deck competition slide because your competitors can easily copy and integrate these features into their offerings. This raises a logical question for investors: “What makes your product defensible if your competitors add the same features?”
That’s where showcasing unique features with an emphasis on benefits rather than functionality can help. Instead of simply stating what your product can do, show how it does this—what value it brings to customers and how it stands out from competitors. When you focus on elements that aren’t easily replicable or substituted, you demonstrate a strong competitive moat.
2. Two-by-two axes model: This is a classic way to visualize competition, with the X and Y axes representing different dimensions. However, it’s important to choose axes that represent the core advantages of your product/service. At Waveup, we typically use parameters such as lower price against high price, proprietary tech, scalability, specific client focus (SMB vs. enterprise), great against bad UX/design, etc.
Check out our editable competition slide pitch deck templates and more on our Waveup Copilot—a platform that helps you view fundraising from a new perspective.
This approach helps position competitors within the market landscape, showing how they vary in their offerings and where your product fits. Remember, you must choose axes that differentiate competitors meaningfully and reflect your product’s strengths. Your task is to show in which niche you play and prove why it should attract investors.
Show the landmines your competitors are stepping on—and how you’re flying overhead
At the end of the day, a competition slide in a pitch deck is not just about survival; it’s about domination—what differentiates your product/service from others and how you plan to defend your position in the market.
A market competitors analysis in your pitch deck aims to illustrate how your startup leads its category or has the potential to do so.
Don’t just compare features—define how you will dominate your market segment based on unique use cases, customer needs, and defendable advantages. If you fuse this information with eye-catching design and investor-speak, that’s how you can get a winning deck.
Want to know more about creating pitch decks that raise? Explore our pitch deck hub for field-tested pitch deck tips.