The competition slide: how to answer the investor question

When an investor asks who your competitors are, they are not asking for a list. They are asking three questions at once: why has nobody already done this, what happens when the largest incumbent decides to, and what happens to your price when they try. A slide that answers the literal question and not those three is the slide that produces forty minutes of follow-ups. Below is how to build one that answers all three — the comparison table with a row you lose on, the four follow-up questions and the honest form of each answer, and the one piece of arithmetic that does more work than any grid: what it costs a customer to switch, and how quickly your product pays that back. In the worked example it is 2.8 months, and the same sum at a higher price turns it into 10.

The three questions behind the question

The competition slide is misread more often than any other slide in a deck, because the question it appears to ask is trivial and the question it actually asks is not. Who are your competitors is a polite surface over three harder ones, and an answer that satisfies the surface satisfies nobody.

• Why has nobody already done this? If the opportunity is as good as the deck says, and the tools to build it are available to everyone, the default assumption is that somebody tried. An answer of we were first to see it is the weakest available, because it requires the listener to believe that a large number of well-funded people were not paying attention.
• What happens when the largest incumbent decides to? Not whether they could — assume they could. The question is what it would cost them, what it conflicts with internally, and what you still have after they have done it.
• What happens to your price when they try? This is the one almost nobody prepares for. Competitive pressure does not usually arrive as a lost customer; it arrives as a discount you agreed to, repeated, until the price in the model is not the price in the contracts.

Underneath all three is a single question about durability: if this works, does it stay yours long enough to be worth the money? A competition slide is your answer to that, and everything on it should be chosen to serve it.

Which means the slide has a job, and the job is not to demonstrate that you have heard of your competitors. It is to make an argument, in a form that can be checked, about why the position you are describing is defensible. A list cannot do that. A comparison with a claim attached can.

Why the 2x2 with you in the top right fails

The two-by-two grid with your logo alone in the favourable corner is the most common competition slide in existence, and it is almost always read as a non-answer. Not because grids are bad, but because of what everyone in the room knows about how it was made: the axes were chosen after the conclusion. Any company can be placed in the top right by picking the two dimensions on which it happens to lead, and an experienced listener has watched this happen several hundred times.

The tell is that the axes are usually abstractions. Ease of use against power. Modern against enterprise-ready. None of those can be measured, which means the placement cannot be checked, which means the slide carries no information. What it does carry is a signal about you: it suggests either that you have not looked closely, or that you have and would rather not say what you found.

Two things fail in the same way and for the same reason:

• We have no competitors. Every buyer is doing something today. If genuinely nobody sells this, your competitor is the spreadsheet, the agency, the intern or the decision not to bother — and that competitor wins the majority of deals in most early markets. Naming it is a stronger answer than claiming an empty field, because it shows you know what you actually have to displace.
• The feature grid where you have every tick. A table in which you win every row is a table whose rows were selected. Investors read the omissions, not the ticks, and the omissions are conspicuous precisely because the grid is otherwise so tidy.

The replacement is not more honest adjectives. It is a comparison built from things that were published, on dates, by the companies being compared — and which includes at least one row where somebody else wins.

Building a comparison you can defend

Take an invented example. Tolvern sells scheduling software to independent clinics. Its named competitors are Marrick Systems, a large established supplier, and Pellow Software, a closer and smaller direct rival — plus the thing most prospects actually use, which is a spreadsheet and a phone. All of them are invented, and so is every figure below.

Three things make that table defensible, and they are worth stating because each one is usually missing.

It contains a row Tolvern loses. Marrick has forty integrations; Tolvern has six. Leaving it out would not hide it — an investor who does one call will find it — and including it does something a tidy grid cannot: it makes the rows Tolvern wins believable. A comparison with no losses in it is read as marketing, and everything on it is discounted accordingly.

Every cell is a published fact with a date behind it. Prices from the competitors’ own pricing pages, set-up times from their own materials, integration counts from their own directories, all sampled on a recorded date. That is the difference between a slide you can defend in the room and one that collapses the moment somebody opens a browser. Prices move, so re-check the week the deck goes out, and put the sample date on the slide in small type. It reads as rigour, because it is.

It includes the alternative that actually wins most deals. The spreadsheet column is the one that makes the slide true. In early markets, the majority of prospects choose to keep doing what they are doing, and a competition slide that omits that is describing a contest it is not in.

Pick four or five rows, not fifteen. The rows should be the ones a buyer actually decides on — price, time to value, fit, commitment — and each should be a fact rather than a judgement. If a row cannot be sourced to something the competitor published, it does not belong on the slide; it belongs in the answer you give when asked.

The arithmetic that carries the slide

Here is what most competition slides are missing, and it is the single strongest thing you can put on one: the cost to a customer of switching, and how long your product takes to pay it back. It converts an argument about features into an argument about the buyer’s money, which is the argument an investor is actually running in their head.

Start with what the customer’s current answer really costs them, not what they pay for software. Take a clinic on Marrick Systems, in the invented example:

Now the same clinic on Tolvern, which is cheaper and removes seven of those nine hours:

The monthly saving is £574.00 − £242.00 = £332.00. But nobody switches for free, and pretending otherwise is how a pipeline forecast ends up wrong. Count the switching cost honestly:

28 hours of set-up and data migration × £26.00 = £728.00
One month running both systems in parallel = £190.00
Total switching cost = £918.00

Payback months = one-off switching cost ÷ monthly saving = £918.00 ÷ £332.00 = 2.8 months

That is a slide. It is one number, it is derived in public from figures a competitor published, and it answers the durability question in a way a grid cannot: the buyer is better off inside three months, which is short enough that the decision does not need to be escalated, budgeted for or defended.

The same sum, run against you

Now run it at a higher price, because this is the sum that tells you what your pricing is doing to your sales cycle. Price Tolvern at £430 a month instead of £190, and the clinic’s new monthly cost becomes £430 + £52 = £482. The saving falls to £574 − £482 = £92 a month, and:

£918.00 ÷ £92.00 = 10.0 months

A payback of ten months is a different sale entirely. It needs a budget cycle, a sponsor and a business case, and the deals that used to close in a fortnight now take a quarter or do not happen. Nothing about the product changed. The price did, and the price is what decides whether the switching cost is a formality or an obstacle — which is exactly why this sum belongs in the deck rather than in a spreadsheet nobody opens.

Two cautions on using it. The hourly rate is your customer’s number, not yours, and if you have not asked several customers what those hours actually are then the whole calculation is a hypothesis — say so, and say how many you asked. And the saved hours only count as money if the customer can do something else with them; a saving of two hours a week for a salaried person who stays salaried is real convenience and a soft financial claim, and an investor will make that distinction whether or not you do. For the business’s own side of the arithmetic, the break-even calculator takes your monthly cost base and your contribution per customer and returns the number of customers at which the company stops consuming cash.

The four follow-up questions, and how to answer each

Assume the slide is good and the questions still come, because they will. These four arrive in almost every conversation, and each has an honest form that works and a familiar form that does not.

1. What stops the largest incumbent doing this?

Answers that fail: we move faster, they are too big to innovate, they have not noticed. All three ask the listener to believe a well-resourced company is inattentive, which is the least likely explanation available.

Answers that work all have the same shape — a reason it costs them something to do it:

• It is a feature to them and a business to you. The revenue that would justify a team for you would be a rounding error against a line they already have, and internal budget follows materiality.
• It conflicts with a revenue line they already sell. The clearest version of this: doing it well would reduce something they currently charge for. That is a real constraint and it is checkable.
• It requires an input they would have to re-acquire for every customer. Work that does not compress with scale is the most durable barrier there is, because it denies them the advantage they normally rely on.

2. What if they give it away free?

The honest answer is a price floor, not a denial. Say what happens: which part of your value survives a free alternative, what your price becomes, and how many customers at that price the business still works at. An investor who hears they would not do that concludes you have not modelled it. An investor who hears at half our price we still cover costs at 180 customers, and the part they cannot bundle is X concludes you have.

3. Who have you lost to, and why?

Having a specific answer is the signal, more than the answer itself. We lost four of our last twelve to Pellow, three on integration coverage and one on price tells an investor you are genuinely selling, that you debrief losses, and that you know what the market values. We have not really lost any says either that you have not sold enough to lose, or that you are not asking — and both are worse than the loss.

4. What is your win rate against each of them?

Give the denominator. A win rate quoted without one is the fastest way to lose the room, because the first follow-up will be out of how many and the answer is usually small. Say it plainly: nine competitive deals, we won five is a perfectly respectable thing to say at an early stage, and it is enormously more credible than about 60%. Small numbers honestly stated are read as rigour. Percentages derived from small numbers are read as concealment.

Across all four, the pattern is the same: the answer that works names a mechanism or a number, and the answer that fails names an adjective.

What you cannot know, and what to say instead

Some of what you will be asked is genuinely unknowable from outside, and the strongest available answer is to say so precisely rather than to improvise. Four in particular:

• A competitor’s roadmap. You can see what they have shipped and what they are hiring for. You cannot see what they have decided. Presenting a hiring pattern as a plan is the most common way a competition slide becomes wrong in public.
• A competitor’s real economics. Their margins, their cost of acquiring a customer, their churn. Published prices tell you what customers pay and nothing about what the seller keeps. For a UK company, filed accounts on the public register are the only audited figures you will ever see, and they are abbreviated, lagged, and — as Companies House itself states — not checked for accuracy by the registrar.
• What their private pricing actually is. The published price is a ceiling. The discount they give the deals you compete for is not public, and it is frequently the whole story.
• Whether their strategy is working. A competitor executing well and a competitor executing badly produce identical public evidence for a surprisingly long time.

The form of words that works is the same one that works everywhere else in research: here is what we established, here is the date we established it, here is what we went looking for and could not find. An investor is assessing judgement as much as information, and a founder who can say we could not establish that, and here is what would change our view is demonstrating exactly the thing being assessed. A founder who fills the gap with a confident guess is demonstrating the opposite, and the guess is usually checkable within a day.

One last thing worth saying out loud. The competition slide is not where a fundraise is won, and no arrangement of boxes will rescue a weak position. What it can do is stop a strong position being mistaken for a naive one — which happens constantly, and almost always because the slide claimed more than it could support.

Arithmetic and general information only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. Your own figures, and your own accountant, decide what any of this means for you.

Frequently asked questions

What goes on the competition slide in a pitch deck?

A comparison of four or five rows a buyer actually decides on: published price, time to value, who the product is built for, integration or coverage, and minimum commitment. Every cell should be a fact the competitor published, sampled on a recorded date. Include the alternative that wins most early deals, which is usually the customer keeping the spreadsheet or the manual process. Include at least one row you lose. And if you can, include the switching-cost payback: what it costs a customer to move, divided by what they save each month.

Why do investors ask about competitors?

Because the literal question is a surface over three harder ones. Why has nobody already done this, given the opportunity is as good as the deck says. What happens when the largest incumbent decides to, meaning what it would cost them and what you still have afterwards. And what happens to your price when they try, since competitive pressure usually arrives as repeated discounting rather than as a lost customer. Underneath all three is one question about durability: if this works, does it stay yours long enough to be worth the money.

Should you say you have no competitors?

No. Every buyer is doing something today, so if nobody sells this, your competitor is the spreadsheet, the agency, the intern or the decision not to bother, and that competitor wins the majority of deals in most early markets. Naming it is a stronger answer than claiming an empty field, because it shows you know what you actually have to displace. Claiming no competition is generally read as either not having looked or not wanting to say what you found.

Why does the two-by-two grid with you in the top right not work?

Because everybody in the room knows the axes were chosen after the conclusion. Any company can be placed in the favourable corner by picking the two dimensions it happens to lead on, and the axes are usually abstractions like ease of use or enterprise-readiness, which cannot be measured. If the placement cannot be checked, the slide carries no information. What it does carry is a signal that you either have not looked closely or would rather not say what you found.

How do you work out a customer switching cost?

Total the one-off cost of moving, then divide it by the monthly saving. On the worked example, a clinic pays 340 pounds a month for the incumbent plus 9 hours of manual work at 26 pounds an hour, so its current answer costs 574 pounds a month. The alternative costs 190 pounds plus 2 remaining hours, so 242 pounds, a saving of 332 pounds a month. Switching costs 28 hours of set-up at 26 pounds plus one month running both systems, which is 918 pounds. That is a payback of 2.8 months. Price the same product at 430 pounds a month and the payback becomes 10 months, which is a different sale entirely.

What should you say when a competitor is much bigger than you?

Name a mechanism rather than an adjective. Answers that work say why it costs the incumbent something: it is a feature to them and a business to you, so the revenue that justifies a team for you is immaterial to them; or doing it well would reduce something they already charge for; or it needs an input they would have to re-acquire for every customer, which is work that does not compress with scale. Answers that fail are that you move faster, that they are too big to innovate, or that they have not noticed.

Sources

• Companies House: Search the register (find and update company information) — filed accounts for UK competitors, with the registrar stating it does not check the accuracy of what is filed — checked 2026-09-25
• Instilus: how to do a competitor analysis, for collecting and grading the published facts a comparison table is built from — checked 2026-09-25
• Instilus: how to enter a new market, for the payback arithmetic behind a market-size claim — checked 2026-09-25

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