What happens after you send your pitch deck link?
Six numbers that tell you what to cut, when to follow up, and whether to fix the deck or find better investors.
How long do investors actually read?
Investors either skim your deck in seconds or sit down and read it. There is not much in between.
Sixteen percent of views end inside ten seconds. Another third runs past three minutes. Very little sits in between, because the deck is either dismissed on the cover or read properly.
How to improve your deck
Look at your own views, not the average. Most views under 30 seconds? That usually points at who you are sending to, not at the deck. Most views over 3 minutes but no reply? They are reading it, so the deck is probably doing its part. What happens after the read is worth checking: the ask, the fit, or the timing.
more total reading time on decks from companies that closed a round: 36 minutes against 18 for the typical deck.
Where do investors stop reading?
Your ask is on the last slide. Fewer than half the investors who open the deck ever get there.
How to improve your deck
Put your best fact in the first three slides. The biggest drop is between slide one and slide two, and no amount of work on slide fourteen fixes it. Treat everything past slide twelve as material for investors who are already sold.
more time per page on the back half of the deck for decks that closed a round.
Which deck length keeps investors reading?
Length changes how a deck is read: how far investors get, how often they come back, and whether they ever reach the ask.
Slide by slide, the sweet spot sharpens to a single number: 12 slides. Twelve-page decks collect the most views of any exact length, 34 on average, and the highest share of return visits at 68%, while still walking half their readers to the final slide. Sixteen and eighteen pages match the view count, but their completion falls to about 40%: the extra reads stop earlier.
How to improve your deck
Aim for 9 to 16 pages, where nearly half of all founders land. Anything you cannot cut goes in an appendix behind the ask, not in front of it.
Deck length in numbers
Which slides are worth adding?
The slides investors spend the longest on are the ones founders most often leave out. Compare the two charts and see if yours are missing.
Read straight across the two charts. Financials hold above-median attention yet appear in only four decks in ten. High attention paired with low inclusion is the clearest instruction in the report.
The cover is the exception that proves the rule. Every deck has one, and it holds about 45% more time than the median page, not because it is interesting but because it is where the investor decides whether to continue. It is the highest-leverage slide you own and it is usually the least worked on.
Top slides, by how many decks include them
How to improve your deck
Add financials. Investors hold on that slide longer than most, and six decks in ten leave it out. Move the appendix to the back: it holds under two seconds a page and only pushes your ask further away.
more views for decks that open with traction in the first three slides, and the most total reading time, +9% over the typical deck.
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How do I stop my deck being forwarded?
You cannot stop an investor pasting your link into an email. You can decide what happens when the next person opens it.
- Allow list. Name the addresses or domains that may open the link. Everyone else is stopped at the door.
- Notification on every attempt. When someone outside the list tries, you get an email with the address they used, so a forward tells you who is circulating your deck.
- Verified email. A one-time code, so the name on every view is real rather than typed.
- Watermark and downloads off. If the deck does travel, every page carries the viewer's address.
Allow list
Who is actually interested to invest?
A view count tells you nothing. What matters is what happens next: investors come back, they forward the deck, they download it.
is when silence starts to mean something. A quarter of decks are still unopened at that point, so a reminder sent before then is chasing your own list, not the investor.
are the quietest strong signal in the dataset. Only 18% of founders switch downloading on at all, so it is rare by construction. A downloaded deck is usually one being carried into a partner meeting, which is the outcome the whole exercise is aimed at.
How to improve your follow-up
Follow up when they come back, not when they go quiet. If an investor opens your deck a second time, downloads it, or shares it with someone new, that is the moment to write. Ask about the part they went back to, instead of asking if they had time to look at it.
How long does the raise take?
From the first investor view to the announced round, and to the last view.
The paperwork lands long after the reading stops. The median raised deck sees its round announced 6 months after the first investor opened it, and two thirds announce between three and twelve months in. The deck goes quiet months earlier: reading is the first half of the raise, not the whole of it.
The raise, in three numbers
is how long the average deck keeps being viewed, from first investor open to the last.
A long tail of decks alive for a year pulls the average up. Decks opened once and never again are excluded here, which may bias the window upward.
How to read your own timeline
A deck reopened months later is not stale, it is being read again. Decks that raised stay alive about 36 days, and 28% still collect views after six months. Two quiet weeks after the last view is the signal to move on.
Does a video pitch work?
Founders have started sending a recorded pitch alongside the deck. Watch behaviour is measured second by second, and it splits harder than any reading metric: a third leave almost immediately, and nearly half watch to the very end.
The curve has one cliff and no slope worth fearing after it. 30 points of the audience are gone inside the first tenth of the video, the same cover-slide effect the deck data shows. But whoever survives the opening stays: about half the audience is still watching at the final tenth, far above the 44% of investors who reach the last slide of a PDF deck.
How to use video
Treat the first thirty seconds like your cover slide. Name, what you do, strongest number, before any intro. Then keep it short: whoever stays past the opening usually watches to the end.
Why do investors not reply after viewing your deck?
A bad deck and a bad investor list look the same from the outside. Check these four numbers before you rewrite a single slide.
The average of 26 views per deck is pulled up by a small number of decks with hundreds of views; the typical opened deck sees five. If your deck is somewhere in the middle, you are doing better relative to the field than the headline average suggests.
How to improve your numbers
Check the list before the deck. Few views is a distribution problem: more investors, warmer intros. Short views and shallow reads are a deck problem. Fixing the deck when the list is the issue is the most common wasted week in a raise.
Where are your investors located?
Two thirds of the investors reading decks are outside the United States. That changes when you should follow up, and how much you need to explain.
Where an investor sits changes how they read. Investors in Switzerland, Australia and Germany spend roughly twice as long per view as investors in Singapore, and half of German reads reach the final slide against fewer than a third of Singaporean ones. The United States, for all its share of the views, reads at almost exactly the global median. If your raise leans on Singapore or the Netherlands, the first three slides are carrying nearly the whole deck; a raise built on the DACH region buys you more patience per open.
A third of all views come from the United States, but two thirds do not. The single largest bloc is the long tail: 38% of views come from countries outside the top five, spread across 179 of them. So most of your readers are hours away, which makes a same-day chase look impatient, and most of them do not know your home market.
How to improve your deck
Say which market you are in, in plain words. Put it on the problem slide. It takes one line, and it answers the question most readers abroad are quietly asking.
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Get these numbers on your own raise
Every figure in this report came from decks founders shared as a Papermark link. The same tracking runs on yours from the first send, and the same account holds the data room when diligence starts.
- Share a link, not an attachment. You see who opened it, how long they stayed on each slide, and when they came back. You can swap the file after it is sent.
- One link per firm. 79% of founders send the same link to everyone, which turns 26 views into a number nobody can act on. Separate links give every view a name.
- A notification on every open. 92% of founders keep these on: it is what makes a same-day follow-up possible, and the second open is the one that matters.
- A data room when it gets serious. Move the round into folders with per-group permissions, and keep the page-level analytics on every document.
Who read it
Data room
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