Unit economics on one slide: the numbers investors actually read
Business model slides fail by drawing a value chain instead of showing the unit. What one customer costs to get, what they pay, and what they leave behind.
The business model slide is usually the most decorated and least informative page in the deck. Founders draw ecosystem diagrams, arrows between icons, and a caption that says "SaaS + marketplace + services." The investor is trying to answer a much simpler question: what does one unit look like.
One unit, three numbers
Every business model slide should reduce to the same three-number frame investors already use to compare deals across their portfolio. Whatever your business is, translate it into these numbers first, then decorate.
- CAC: what does it cost to acquire one paying customer, fully loaded.
- ACV or ARPU: what does that customer pay you in the first year.
- Retention: what fraction is still paying you in year two, and what fraction has expanded.
The derived metrics investors will compute anyway
If you don't put these on the slide, the reader will do the arithmetic in their head, badly, and remember the wrong version. Put them there.
- Gross margin: revenue minus COGS, as a percentage. For SaaS, above 70% is the table stakes; below 40% is a fintech or hardware pattern that needs its own explanation.
- CAC payback: months of gross-margin revenue to earn back CAC. Under 12 months is strong at seed; under 18 is workable at A.
- LTV/CAC: only report when retention is measured, not modeled. Seed decks with "LTV/CAC 8x" from a 90-day cohort read as fiction.
- Net dollar retention: revenue from a cohort today divided by revenue from that same cohort a year ago. Above 110% is a growth engine; below 90% is a leaky bucket.
Weak vs strong: the same business, two slides
What to leave off
- Ecosystem diagrams. If your business needs one to be explained, walk through it verbally on the founder call and put the unit numbers on the slide.
- Waterfall bridges from GMV to net revenue. Investors read them slowly and rarely favorably.
- 5-year revenue projections. Nobody believes them; the model already lives in the data room.
The pre-revenue version of this slide
If you don't have customers yet, replace measured metrics with target metrics and the assumptions under them. Two paying pilots at your target price beat any theoretical LTV. Show what you know, not what you hope.
Pilots at $199/site/month with 3 named customers. Target CAC $1,500 based on outbound conversion in the last 6 weeks: 180 target accounts, 42 first meetings, 6 signed pilots.· Pre-revenue model line
Investors do not read your deck. They skim it in about three minutes. Here is how to design for that reality without dumbing anything down.