We are a good 47 pitch decks into our Pitch Deck Teardown series, and one piece of feedback we’ve gotten frequently is that it’s easy to be a critic: What would we have done?
Well, we’re not ones to turn away from a challenge here at TechCrunch+. So for this week’s pitch deck teardown, we’re going to try something different.
About six months ago, we went through a pitch deck by a company called Supliful. We celebrated the pitch deck for being very good, but we may have poked a little bit of fun at it for being riddled with spelling mistakes and other silliness. At its heart, though, the deck was good.
So for this week’s teardown, I buddied up with the team at Trulytell (with an assist from their designer, Jake Muller) to improve Supliful’s deck until it became the perfect pitch deck.
Okay, we didn’t quite get it 100% perfect. There are still some issues, and in this post, we will take them apart to learn what could be improved and how we’d do that.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
Cover slide
Traction slide
Summary slide
Problem slide
What makes a great CPG brand slide
Solution slide
Product slide
Case study slide
Business model slide
Market slide
Predicate businesses slide
Competitor slide
Testimonial slide
Team slide
Ask slide
Operating plan slide
Closing slide
The first five slides
We’re going to do things differently this week: I’m going to break down every single slide in detail and explain why they work and what works about them. I’m also going to explain what could be improved upon or where investors may bring up hard questions.
So we will cover the first five slides here and we’ll stick the remaining 15 behind the paywall. Yes, you should absolutely subscribe to TechCrunch+: did I mention that we have nearly 50 sample pitch decks, complete with commentary, and an additional 30 to 40 articles breaking down every imaginable aspect of pitching and pitch decks?
If you’re a founder raising money, this is the most bang for your buck you’ll get. Go on, subscribe. It makes sense to.
With that out of the way, let’s do this!
Slide 1: Cover Slide
[Slide 1] H’okay, that’s a sweet earth you might say. Let’s go! Image Credit: Supliful / TechCrunch / Trulytell
The opening slide does a lot of heavy lifting to help investors identify if your startup is in-thesis. This one lays out a bunch of the core pieces of the business:
It shows a summary of what the business is about (“the most advanced platform to help creators launch and run CPG brands”);
It shows how much they’re raising ($1 million);
It shows the goals of the fundraise (“grow to $13 million ARR at $2.4 million monthly GMV”);
The photo illustrates what the company actually does: “Your design here,” along with an influencer; and
Between the lines, you realize this is a B2B2C company, assuming that influencers and content creators are businesses.
What works about this slide: It clearly sets the pace for what’s to come. It imparts a lot of information that would enable an investor to get to a quick ‘no’ in case the round size, industry or overall business idea is unappealing to them.
What could be improved: This company is based in Riga, Latvia, which is in north-eastern Europe. That might “disqualify” it for a lot of investors who have location as part of their investment thesis. We decided not to include that on this slide and made sure to use slide 2 (traction) to show off what the company is currently doing. It’s a little sneaky, perhaps, but we figured we didn’t want to prejudice investors unduly — let’s get them excited about the company and its potential!
We could also have specified that this is a B2B2C company, but we figured an astute investor might figure that out given the info here.
We hope the graphic on this slide tells an important part of the story, but there may be better ways to illustrate Supliful’s core business model.
Finally, I spent some time considering if we should spell out what CPG (consumer packaged goods) stands for. But I figured if an investor needed to google CPG, there’s no way they would invest in this space, so I left it as the slightly obscure TLA it is.
Slide 2: Traction slide
[Slide 2] Up and to the right. Image Credit: Supliful / TechCrunch / Trulytell
What do you do when you have a company that has a few challenges with fundraising but a ton of promising traction?
My take is always: If you have revenue, it means you’ve proven you can pull off the hardest part of building a startup. It almost doesn’t matter what else is wrong in the business, if you are making sales, you’re on to something. Once you have traction, the question becomes how much it costs to acquire new customers, what those customers are worth, and how big the market is.
Opening with a traction slide requires you to explain what the traction represents. This slide looks pretty si