From personal experience: a poorly designed slide deck with great growth numbers beats a well-designed slide deck with bad numbers or no numbers.
The numbers you need, in descending order of preference:
1) profit
2) revenue
3) DAU / MAU (or paying customers)
4) traffic (or some metric for "interested future customers")
Obviously, the less strong/preferable your numbers, the better your intangibles need to be. If you're walking into the room with a mediocre traffic growth graph, your story had better be earth-shattering, or otherwise tickle an investor's private parts in some specific way.
Once you get to series A, your job is to show that those numbers are not only sustainable (via business metrics), but also that you're ready to make them go up faster by taking a big pile of money. This is much (probably 10x) harder. That's why the series A decks have more metrics and slides.
The numbers you need, in descending order of preference:
1) profit
2) revenue
3) DAU / MAU (or paying customers)
4) traffic (or some metric for "interested future customers")
Obviously, the less strong/preferable your numbers, the better your intangibles need to be. If you're walking into the room with a mediocre traffic growth graph, your story had better be earth-shattering, or otherwise tickle an investor's private parts in some specific way.
Once you get to series A, your job is to show that those numbers are not only sustainable (via business metrics), but also that you're ready to make them go up faster by taking a big pile of money. This is much (probably 10x) harder. That's why the series A decks have more metrics and slides.