Presenting the wrong number of problems - Your problem slide should either have a single big problem or a big problem with three subproblems. For 99% of founders, there is no third option. The data is clear that when you go with more than 3 problems, there is a significant negative impact on your chances of raising. People just don’t believe (i) that there can be so many important problems, (ii) that you could solve 4+ problems at once. So never present more than three problems.

No relation to the problem - Many startups solve specific issues for specific markets. If you want investors to care, you need to be able to tie the problem back to something that investors can understand and grasp onto. If you just say that you are making insurance offices 10% more efficient, most investors won’t care. But if you say, Have you ever had to wait hours to get a report back from a co-worker? With our new system, you can generate those reports instantly. We can summarize insurance reports in under 60 seconds… Even if they don’t work in insurance, they will understand the core problem.