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Most of them Pitch Deck’s tears to date (here’s a list of the 30+ we’ve published so far) have raised institutional funding rounds, typically in the millions or tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those are fun to see, but of course I know many of you will be very early in your journey. I’ve been looking for a good example of an angel deck to share with you, and I found that in Laoshi’s angel deck. The company told me it had budgeted $570,000 to $5 million for an elementary language learning app aimed squarely at Chinese teachers and their students.
The deck isn’t fancy, and it’s not perfect, but the company says it was a success, so let’s see what was fixed and what could be improved.
We’re looking for more unique pitches to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own, here’s how to do that.
Slides on this floor
The Laoshi deck has 11 main slides and four accessory slides.
- Cover slide
- Problem slide
- Market slide
- The solution slider
- Competition slide
- Road map slide
- Group slide
- Teacher development slide
- Teacher retention slide
- Summary slide
- “Contact Us” slide
- Appendices cover slide
- Appendix I: Virus Impact Slide
- Appendix II: Business Model Slides
- Appendix III: “The Question” Slide
Three things to love
The deck is small and simple, which is refreshing – a lot of early stage decks don’t seem to have a story woven into them and try to cram in a lot of information (which isn’t really necessary). Slides.
The key thing to remember for the angel floor is that your investors know they are in a high-risk investment. So, make it clear why your company is a good bet, that you have a way to solve a real problem and reach a larger market, and that you have the team to pull it off.
The team slide is A+.
[Slide 7] Team Slides needs to convince investors that you are the right people to build this company. Image Credits: Laoshi
In an early stage company, it is often said that you need a hacker, hustler and hipster (H).3) to build a good founding team. A hacker is someone who has the technical expertise to build early versions of a product. A hustler is someone who handles sales and investment and understands how the market works for this company. And a hipster is someone who can put designs together so the product looks fresh and cool and is easy to use.
100% from H3 Team Building Ethic – It’s important to have the right, deep domain knowledge and drive (often described as “founder-market fit”), but you as well You need a lot of skills to build a good startup. I accept H3 It’s often a good template for quickly testing team skills and determining if there are major gaps in the team.
This team slide does two things: it shows that the team is international and distributed. It is diverse and experienced. And manages – in the box below – to show that the team has experience relevant to the market. Now, I still need a vote to find out:
- How did the group meet?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of each team member?
- What is missing from the team?
- Why can this team deliver in a way that no one else can?
- What is the employment plan for the current fundraiser?
But as a base-level team slide, this one ticks a lot of boxes. What it doesn’t show is past successes in startups, and I want to dig a little deeper into that. It’s actually a much better slide than many of the earlier ones we’ve mentioned in these teardowns — you know, the ones that basically stick the Stanford and Tesla logos under a picture and call it a day.
What you can learn from this slide as a starting point is that your team’s slide should be up there with the most important slides and make it count. Use it to tell your story and convince us your team is part of the reason to bet on you.
Good summary slide
[Slide 10] A good summary slide can be a great way to remind investors why they should be excited. Image Credits: Laoshi
A wrap-up slide is a great way to engage investors, and instead of putting this slide right at the end, you might want to put it somewhere near the beginning of the pitch — it helps gauge the company’s growth and status over time. It shows that yes, this company is small and finding its feet, but it’s making real, measurable progress.
As the numbers are very important which one The company measures the numbers. It shows monthly and daily active users (MAU/DAU), which are critical metrics to see how sticky an app is. It shows the number of teachers And How long they stay on the platform, which again speaks about the stickiness and reach of the company. It talks about active user engagement as it shows that people are actively using the app.
For absolute symbols, I like to see these numbers as graphs rather than just lumped numbers. I would like to see the dollar figures here. Having 200+ paying subscribers is great, and that’s impressive for a pre-funding company. But even though the revenue numbers are so small, it’s important to look at those graphs. If you don’t put it on the slide, the investor will wonder why and ask anyway – you might as well skip that conversation and give them what they need right off the bat.
What you can learn from this slide as a startup is to have a deep understanding of the metrics that will help you build and deliver your business.
The business model is front and center
[Slide 14] It’s always a good idea to show that you understand the levers in your business. Image Credits: Laoshi
I have to say, I don’t like the dark-gray-on-light-gray design, and it’s curious to me that this is in the annex instead of the main deck. As an investor, I think this will be one of the most important slides. I also like to see where the business is now. For example, if the company says the TAC (Tutor Acquisition Cost) is $50, what is it currently seeing as the TAC? Assuming each tutor has five students, how is that going in practice?
Having said that, these numbers are extremely important in your conversations with investors; Basically, you are showing how you think about your business and your market and understand the levers in your business. In other words, what if each tutor had 10 students instead of five? What if each babysitter cost $100 to buy instead of $50? By putting all of these into a model and running tests to increase your confidence in the model, you can go a long way toward building a bigger picture of your business in numbers.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Laoshi could improve or do differently with the company’s entire pitch deck.
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