Pitch Deck Teardown: The Complete Pitch Deck

We are good We’re 47 into the Pitch Deck Teardown series, and one piece of feedback we’ve gotten over and over is that it’s easy to be critical: what could have been. We did you

Well, we’re not one to back down from a challenge here at TechCrunch+. So for this week’s Pitch Duck Breakdown, we’re going to try something different.

Six months ago we went through a pitch deck by a company called Supliful. We praised Peach Dick for being so good, but we probably had a little fun with it because it was full of spelling mistakes and other stupid things. At heart, however, the ship was good.

So for this week’s teardown, we caught up with the team at Trulytell (with help from their designer, Jake Mueller) to refine the Suppliful deck into the perfect pitch deck.

Okay, we didn’t get it 100% perfect. There are still some issues, and in this post, we’ll break them down to find out what can be improved and how.

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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.

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Slides on this floor

1. Cover slide
2. Drag slide
3. Summary slide
4. Problem slide
5. What makes a great CPG brand slide
6. The solution slider
7. Product slide
8. Case study slide
9. Business model slide
10. Market slide
11. Businesses are predicted to slide
12. Competitive slider
13. Evidence slide
14. Group slide
15. Ask for a slide
16. Operation plan slide
17. Closing the slide

The first five slides

This week we’re going to do things a little differently: I’ll break down each slide in detail and explain why they work and what works about them. I’ll also explain what could be improved or where investors might raise serious questions.

So we’ll cover the first five slides here and attach the remaining 15 behind the paywall. Yes, you must be fully registered for TechCrunch+: I am pointed out Nearly 50 sample pitch decks, full of commentary, and an additional 30 to 40 articles breaking down every imaginable aspect of pitch and pitch decks?

If you’re a founder raising money, this is the most money you’ll ever get. Go ahead, subscribe. It makes sense.

That out of the way, let’s do this!

Slide 1: Cover slide

The opening slide does a lot of the heavy lifting to help your investors identify if your startup is in research. This sets out the main components 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 you collect ($1 million);
• It shows the fundraising goals (“Grow $2.4 million in monthly GMV to $13 million ARR”);
• The photo shows exactly what the company does: “Your design here,” with an influencer; And
• Between the lines, influencers and content creators realize that this is a B2B2C company, assuming they are businesses.

It works on this slide It clearly sets the pace for what’s to come. It provides a lot of information that allows an investor to quickly say ‘no’ if the size, industry or overall business idea doesn’t appeal to them.

What can be improved? This company is located in Riga, Latvia, in North-Eastern Europe. This may “make it worthwhile” for many investors who have the position as part of their investment research. We decided not to include that on this slide and made sure to use slide 2 (Traction) to show what the company is currently doing. It’s probably a bit cheesy, but we figured we wouldn’t want to alienate investors – let’s get them excited about the company and its potential!

We could have also stated that this is a B2B2C company, but we figured a savvy investor would understand if the information was provided here.

Hopefully 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 wondering if we should define what CPG (consumer packaged goods) means. But if an investor wants to google CPG, there’s no way they’re going to invest in this space, so I leave it as a slightly vague TLA.

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Slide 2: Drag Slide

What do you do when you have a company with a few challenges in terms of fundraising, but a lot of promise?

My takeaway is always: If you have income, you’ve proven you can afford the hardest part of building a startup. Like almost anything else in business, if you’re making sales, you’re on to something. Once you get traction, the question becomes how much it costs to acquire new customers, what the customers are worth, and how big the market is.

Opening with a traction slide asks you to explain what traction represents. This slide looks very simple, but it conveys a a lot Data Volume: High growth, some aggregate figures and some encouraging signs of the company’s steep growth trajectory.

It works on this slide There was a drop in revenue, but it turns out the company had a big reason for that: it had to throw the merchant off the site for being unfaithful. The dip in revenue is bad, but highlighting the arrow and the explanation goes a long way toward improving concerns. Revenue increased last month, which was not disclosed, but the graph shows explosive growth in the six months since.

Also, I like how this graph shows revenues and not gross merchandise value (GMV). It would be easy to ‘fluff’ the numbers by citing GMV here, but founders (and sophisticated investors) know that metric means little.

What can be improved? It can be argued that some of these parameters are useless parameters. Accumulated gross revenue is tricky: Yes, it’s important, but the growth curve is so steep that it paints a distorted picture that doesn’t benefit the company.

The “33% of orders from registered customers” figure may take some explaining, but you have the opportunity to talk about how registered customers lead to recurring revenue.

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Slide 3: Summary slide

I like to start with a summary slide early in the deck to set the pace. Here, we’re closing our entry with a three-slide arc. It summarizes the value proposition for the creator (“it takes 15 minutes”), reminds investors that this company has real traction (average growth of 30 percent per month), highlights early indicators of product-market fit, and summarizes. Product and Market Positioning “Having branded products is a huge advantage,” he said.

It works on this slide In fact, I’m going to remove this slide from the sender deck, copy the mission and the four bullet points, and paste it into an email to open the deck for the would-be investor. But I like to show clearly and simply why someone would want to read and invest $1 million.

What can be improved? There’s a damn typo on the slide! The cover slide and financial data show that the company is raising $1 million, but this is $2 million.

While we were working on the OS plan (second-to-last slide), we decided that the financials looked good and we only needed to raise $1 million, and we changed it, but we forgot to change it here. Would it be easy to go back and fix that and export the slider again? Yes, but I want to illustrate that mistakes happen when many smart people try to build the ‘perfect’ pitch deck.

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Slide 4: Problem slide

Every company needs a problem statement. Here, Supliful explains that this market already exists but is not available to low- and mid-level content creators and influencers.

Branding consumer packaged goods is possible—you can white label it or develop your own—but bringing a new product to market, then branding, manufacturing, and handling shipping logistics can be an expensive and time-consuming nightmare.

That’s the problem with backer addresses, and the dreaded fear is laid out beautifully at the bottom of the slide: What if I spend $25,000 and a year of my life creating something that’s useless?

It works on this slide Selling by alleviating fear works really well. I like that the problem statement is short (“time-consuming and expensive”) and gives us specific reasons why the process is difficult. Simple, clean and easy to understand.

What can be improved? Many investors have been bitten by companies that try to market to “influencers.” It is a very amorphous demographic that is relatively difficult to market to. My concern here is that, reading this slide, an investor might go, “So what?” That’s what it says.

Another, more important issue I have is the potential environmental impact angle: “Do we really need brands selling more products?” But I suspect that if this is at the forefront of the investor’s mind, no amount of shouting will make them change their minds.

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Slide 5: What makes a great CPG brand

This slide is a bit of a curveball because you don’t have to explain what your market is to explain your company.

However, the point here is that Supliful solves a unique problem at the intersection of two industries: taking care of product development, branding and manufacturing is one industry, and taking care of billing, logistics and the rest of the operations stack is another. . The companies on the left are well-known, successful brands in the industry, and the companies on the right are successful logistics companies.

It’s an unusual slide to have in a pitch deck, but I love this “perfect pitch deck” because it clearly shows that you’re not limited to the 15-16 slides that are typically recommended. If you need a slide or two to tell a part of the story specific to your company, industry or market, then go for it. Make sure you have a deep understanding of why you’re including it.

In my pitch coaching practice, I ask my clients, “What are you trying to convey here?” I have to ask. and “Is there a way to tell this story on one of the ‘standard’ slides?” If you got a clear answer to the first question and answered ‘no’ to the second question, chances are you’ll need to create a smaller slide.

One caveat, though: If you find you have four or five irregular slides, you’re probably missing something from the overall narrative, or you’re getting into the weeds.

It works on this slide This slide plants the seeds for some truly massive possibilities. The 3PL (Third Party Logistics) brands on the right are very successful businesses, and building on their great following, the brands on the left are interesting market challengers. Supliful is trying to convey that it is the ‘right’ company to launch these business models.

What can be improved? I guess this story could be told without this slide, but I wanted to use it as an example.

For the rest of this article, we’ll take our example X-ray machine back to 2010 next to 15 slides of this deck.