This article is part of the Startup Coach series, by Early Game Ventures dedicated entirely to the pitch deck — the most important document you will write as a founder looking to raise VC funding. The series walks through, step by step, the structure of a compelling deck: from how you shape the story to what each individual slide should contain.

There is one slide in almost every deck that looks the same: a table. Columns list the competitors. Rows list features. Each competing company has some boxes checked and some left blank. The presenting startup has all the boxes checked. The implicit conclusion: we are better because we do more things.

This table does not convince any serious VC investor. Not because it’s factually wrong — but because it answers the wrong question.

The Slide Title Is Misleading

“Competition” sounds like a list. Who else is in the market, what they do, how we compare. And that is exactly the trap most founders fall into: they treat the slide as a market inventory, not as a strategic argument.

But the investor doesn’t want to know who you’re fighting. They want to know why you will win — and why your win will be durable.

The competition slide is, in reality, a differentiation and defensibility slide. Two concepts completely different from “we have more features than the others.”

Why the Feature Table Is a Weak Argument

Think about the logic of the table: “we have feature X that competitor A doesn’t.” The immediate question from any experienced investor: what’s stopping competitor A from building it next month?

If the answer is “nothing” — your table has just proven its own irrelevance. Feature-based advantages are among the most fragile competitive advantages that exist. They can be copied, bought, or replaced by anyone with more money and more engineers than you. And in competition with a large, established player, they almost always have more money and more engineers.

There is another problem with the feature mindset: it assumes markets are won through technical specifications. That if product A does 12 things and product B does 10, product A wins. The history of technology strongly contradicts this belief. Products win through distribution, network effects, timing, deep understanding of a user segment, better business models — not through longer feature lists.

What Investors Want to See on This Slide

Three things, in the following order of importance:

How are you structurally differentiated? Not by which extra feature you have, but by the fundamentally different approach you take to solving the problem. Maybe you have access to data no one else has. Maybe your business model creates a dynamic that competitors cannot replicate without cannibalizing their existing revenue. Maybe you’re building on a new technology that competitors cannot adopt quickly because of their legacy architecture. These are structural differentiations. They cannot be copied in 90 days.

Why your position strengthens over time. The best investors look for companies that become harder to attack as they grow — not easier. Network effects, accumulated data, customer lock-in, switching costs, branding within a specific niche — these are defense mechanisms that compound over time. Your competition slide should show at least one of these working in your favor.

Understanding of the broader landscape. Not just direct and obvious competitors, but indirect alternatives — including “do nothing” or “solve it with Excel and email.” A founder who truly understands the market knows that the biggest competitor is not always a similar startup, but inertia and the improvised alternative customers use today.

What a Good Competition Slide Looks Like

There is no universal format, and that’s precisely the problem with the table — it’s a format copied out of convention, not chosen strategically.

The best competition slide I’ve seen recently in a pitch deck belonged to a cybersecurity company. There was no table. It was a visual representation that made it immediately clear, in a single frame, why their approach was structurally different from everything else on the market — and why that difference was extremely hard to replicate. No one had to read an explanation. The logic was obvious from the image.

That’s the standard you should aim for: an investor who knows nothing about your industry looks at the slide and understands within 15 seconds why you win and why the competition cannot stop you.

If you need three minutes of verbal explanation to justify your competitive advantage, you lack clarity. And without clarity, you lack conviction.

The Question You Should Ask Yourself When Building This Slide

Not “who else is doing this and how do we compare?” — but “if tomorrow a competitor with unlimited resources decides to copy us, what will stop them?”

If you don’t have a solid answer to that question, your competition slide will be weak no matter how you format it. If you do have a solid answer, your job is to communicate it visually and clearly on a single page.

That’s all the competition slide needs to do. Nothing more — but absolutely nothing less.

If you want to find out what a pitch deck should look like overall, read the article here.

Are you building something ambitious and ready to raise a round? Early Game Ventures is a venture capital fund in the top 10% of European funds, investing between €500K and €2M as a first ticket in European startups — often from the idea stage, before things are “obvious.” We invest in tech companies at the Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A stages, with a focus on CEE and Europe, as lead investor. If you have a bold thesis and a pitch with substance, write to us at office@earlygame.vc or send us your deck directly at earlygame.vc.