Good morning, folks are Good afternoon, I guess we're on day three cruising into the end of disrupt here. And it's time for one of the most popular panels we host every year something that we call pitch deck tear down. In this session, we're going to actually look at a couple of pitch decks submitted by founders in the audience, to actually get critiqued by VCs. Those VCs, as you heard from pre recorded Alex are are Maren Bannon, Vanessa, and Ben. And we're going to start at the start here with a company called sniffy, which is the first step we had submitted online from the audience. And this is what's called a personal dog trainer in your pocket. So I just want to start, before we even start going to the rest of the slides. What are you looking for in a title slide? And does this sniffy slide fit that?
For me, it does. I mean, I think it tells me in one line when I'm about to read so very quickly. It sounds like an interesting concept that is aligned with a lot of trends we're seeing in other verticals, and I thought the imagery was was pretty great. And I always appreciate when they include the date. You like the date, I like the date, I actually do. And it helps give it context, especially if we're a few weeks down the line, or they send an update, it helps us with some of the version control on our end.
got it got it. Go Ben,
the the imagery is really good, the branding is good, the font is good. The date thing that ministers pointing out is actually somewhat important. So if you have a date, that was June 10 2021, that's a problem. So that's, that's the key thing on the date that don't have a sale date, that's four months old on your pitch deck.
And then we're gonna go on to a second slide here. So So giving you some top line numbers. Let's take a look at this two, 3 million dogs there have been 700,000 are euthanized. That's a very positive number 43% were banned because of behavioral issues. Is this a good way to create a narrative for a startup?
I think so sorry. I don't mean to jump in for Sony. But I think this is great. Again, the imagery is fantastic. I like the text being off to the side and not covering eyes. Think when you have texts that cover eyes, it's actually very hard to figure out what you need to look for your instinct is to look into eyes. And so I like it being on the side and the right contrast. And I think they're doing a good job setting up the problem space and in conjunction with the size of the opportunities there starts teasing into market size and problem.
I will say a designer is going to love that the eyes are actually looking towards the text as opposed to away from the little nice said design aesthetic. Anyone else have comments on this slide before we move on?
Yeah, I like that. The market size stats, I think it tees up the problem? Well, I actually don't love the imagery, I find it to be looked very much like generic stock photos. And I think just having one of them would be fine. But having two in a row. It I don't think it does too much.
Right, you don't have that sort of like Silicon Valley aesthetic for a lot of these decks. It's very imagery Laden. I think it's gonna be a little bit of a theme throughout all of these. So training is the key to preventing assault behavioral issues. We're seeing a dog with a bullhorn. Also, pretty much stock photography. 75% of dogs never received proper training. So at this point, same theme, same color, pretty short text. Is this still good for a slide deck in terms of pitching with three, three sides?
Yeah, I would say combine this in the last slide. I think there's somewhat repetitive.
I don't know, I think that they're the point of training. And then when it comes to imagery for me, I like when the picture will tell you what the text is on the reinforcement of the text. And so this one's a little cheeky, right around training. But I think putting it into this one, it wouldn't make sense, necessarily. So they'd have to pick an entirely new image if they wanted to combine this one. But I think getting the point home by giving it its own slide, because their solution is a training solution. I think the training piece does actually deserve its own slide.
On my side here that I would say the pace that we're going through the deck is probably one is probably, you know, 15 times long as I was put to the pitch, I would literally spend two seconds on each one of these slides and just keep writing. And so but but so but so far, I would say I really don't usually I'm not a fan of the image of a lot of images. But I think these images are well done. They are they convey the same message that would have missed the same same message that's being on the spot that's on the slide the slides not too busy, it can be one intended conveys one key point so so far I mean, I'm actually I'm a fan of it so far.
Great. So more slides like this greater training class, we did very difficult for owners, or those who have demanding schedules, searching through endless videos and articles online for training is also a pain demanding schedules. So again, obviously, if you're clicking super fast, which is would be way more typical than in sort of this tear down format. But is this, you know, there are a lot of sort of intro slides to get through to sort of the heart of the product, like how many slides is sort of acceptable before you get to like, here's what we're building?
Yeah, I mean, I think this one could have been folded into the previous one. Because it's a barrier to training. So this is now I think, you got me in the first three. This is now getting lengthy, like a little overkill. No pun intended. And the text words here on top of the computer, small font in white on a light gray background, I don't even want to read it, right. I'm just I read demanding schedules. And then I'm like, what's the demanding schedule? The dog has a demanding schedule, is it demanding on my dog? And then I'm like, shoot, I have to read and I'm not even going to bother reading this. So like, I would actually not read this slide. There we go. I would think like, yeah, I get the problem. And then I would try to skip to what's your solution? So this would have lifted always slide for me.
Let's, let's skip to the solution. So I mean, obviously, there's actually a lot of these slides. So I think the the theme here is obviously a little bit condensing some of that intro material into to one or maybe two slides. But we do get to the solution side. So sniffy is an on demand personalized Professional Dog Training, and support app, which allows dog owners to access professional personalized training content, anytime, anywhere. So there's quite a bit going on here. We sort of see the app on an iPhone screen, you obviously have the mission statement, you have the solution, a description and some art. Is this a good setup?
I like this slide. I was. Yeah, I was looking for this earlier, just getting to exactly what the solution is. So I like that they're getting to the point now.
Yeah, I would have cut out all the slides you skipped through just, I would have skipped through them as well.
Did you have a pointer? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I
think I think it's fine. I would say on those other slides, I agree with the others. In terms of like that, you don't really need them, per se. But I do think they're helpful in setting the context. And typically, when you're giving a pitch, you can put, you can go through them in like five seconds as you're talking about them. And then also investors will really I mean, when you look at the docs and data investors will click through very quickly. So to me, the first few slides actually, for me, were good, because they set up a couple of things that I thought were important that that are are subtle, which is one, the design was very high quality. And number two, the messages were clear and concise. So it said two things in my head already about this company, which is that one, they have a good sense of product development, they have a good sense of depth design, which then also then may translate into product design, it may or may not be true. And the second thing is that they are able to communicate the problem very clearly and simply, which I think is a good start for a good pitch deck. Well, continuing on time, we can't figure out what's going on in the first like four or five slides.
So in some ways, these are sort of throw ways you're quickly getting a little bit of context. But most like yeah,
we know we get it we understand we understand versus like it maybe in some of these other decks, we'll see like, even know what's going on.
So we see a couple of photos here. How do you like to see products, particularly consumer products like this that are on an iPhone app? How's the best way to sort of show the product? Is it screenshots? Is it a video here?
screenshots is typically great, because if it piques your interest, it would be great if they had a link to like a Luma video or something's if I did want to go deeper. And I was really curious about what the product actually looks like live I could. But when it launches on my into video, I find it typically hard to sift through it unless I am really interested already at this point. So I think screenshots with an option to go deeper, is great. But this looks great, though UI is great and clean. It explains the three core components of the app, which is basically what I asked for upfront. So this is pretty well executed.
And we have a couple more slides here. You know, six slides, or I'm sorry, six different screenshots seems a little bit heavy, at least to my perspective, I'm curious if you like sort of having a lot of different views of the app available in the deck.
I would do the main points. Right, like, what are the three core parts? If the progress tracker is like the number one thing, then yes. But it seemed like the first three were like, the real value add. And these are also like, with the exception of trainer consultation. These other two, I don't know, how popular they're how much of a need they they fit. But I would take the top three, and then maybe in the bottom, say, you know, we also offer these other features or put it in the video.
Can you don't mind having more?
Go for Ben. Oh,
sorry. Go ahead, Ben.
Great. I was just saying I continue to find, like excuses slipped through it really quickly take a quick look, and then just move on. It was not a slide that has, you know, like 15 lines of text that you have to Sydney sort of pull through tells you like with a training tracking, and then there's like on demand things that you can do with the trainer, great, like, literally 30 seconds, and you can go to the next slide. I think it's I mean, it's so it's not a really heavy slide that makes you feel like you know, the investor feel like they don't understand what's going on. It just gives you more color.
I also like this, having more images of the product versus less because it makes the point they actually have a product. And I see a lot of preseed decks that don't have a product. And so I think the more that you can hammer that hammer, the point home that you have something out in the market is really powerful for investors.
Curiosity, I mean, obviously, we see six different features, but they're sort of not interconnected. You know, they're just sort of there. There's a screenshot a name for? Are you expecting folks to do any sort of walkthroughs or, you know, step one and customer come in here? Step two, you know, they're going to sign up, do you need that sort of flow? Or is it fine to just have individual screenshots like this?
I think it depends on the product. If it's an enterprise product, and you're rolling out some like, big thing, and you don't want people to subscribe, maybe, right. But in a consumer app, I'm going to assume you have easy onboarding.
Okay, great. Let's Let's go to the market size of classic slide. billion dollar US dollar trading market. 500 million in the US puppy owners a new adopters category and 100 million share of market 20% of market. How are we feeling about this market slide? Is it too detailed? Not detailed enough? It's not what I would expect. A patient light
is fine. But the content is the problem is that for a lot of funds, the market size is too small. So this is not a slide. This is not the slide deck feedback. It's the content feedback.
Yeah, what I would like, but I'm sorry, then go ahead.
I was just saying that for a lot of venture funds, they want to see 500 million or a billion revenue, the larger ones. The Billion Dollar funds typically will ask for that. No. Marin quit?
Yeah, I would, I would say, Joe, what what market this can expand into to make the market size much bigger than this. There's obviously lots of adjacent spaces for this. So I would show this and then show the bigger opportunities.
Yeah, I'd be careful with that, though. I mean, sometimes, like, if you want to stay in the dog, training business, and you're passionate about just dog training, and you think cat training is the dumbest thing you've ever heard. Like, if you say that you're gonna expand into cat training and bird training, and I asked you a question, you roll your eyes like bowling, no one actually does that, then like, there was no point, right? So you have to believe and want to go beyond this market before we actually put on your site. And if you don't, that's fine. Just make sure you target VCs, who this would still be a compelling opportunity for right don't target a six $7 billion fund target seed funds that are Angel networks or something that matches the opportunity. So you just got to figure out like, who would be the right for the opportunity you want to go after. But I wouldn't change what you're passionate about to fit the VCs you want to go after either. We catch on to that pretty quickly. I'd like to think.
So we have a business model here premium content with a subscription payment, and then a consultation with trainers, which they take a 15% take rate. Is this enough detail business? And again, this is a seed stage company. So it's very early, but is this sort of enough to kind of get an understanding of what the business model is for sniffy?
Um, I would have wanted to see like, what are what are the packages? Sorry, I would have I probably would have done done a little more visibility into what the payment plans are. And the add ons for that end user. And then I can and then you can at the bottom put like we take 50% commission here or this is whatever margin but I like to see it from the customer's perspective. What are the How do I pay you?
The price sheet that we want to see like, what is the pricing sheet?
So what's missing here is you don't know, consultation with traders, we don't know how much those traders cost. So we don't really know what 15% of what is, it's just not there, we sort of have this average price per subscription of $76. But that's vague. It doesn't also show the range for customers from the cheapest, the high end. I actually like announcer
whether it's per month, or annual, was my question with this slide, like, what I want to do is the LTV of the customers and so I'm putting it putting it in terms of a monthly or annual number would be more helpful.
I just assumed living in Manhattan that $76 is hourly, for a subscription to a dog training. But you're absolutely right, there's no time on here. So that seems like a huge, huge mess. Now we're gonna move to a very detailed slide unlike a lot of these other ones. So obviously marketing, super important for all startups. stiffy has added a lot of marketing data more than I'm sort of used to. So looking at both how to bring readers on the platform SEO in the App Store ads, and through social media. So you're seeing several different channels, and some estimated CAC costs for each of those is this, this is a lot, but I it's also very transparent. So I'm curious how you all think about this amount of information in the marketing funnel.
I like seeing a team that is concerned about CAC, and has run some experiments and can tell that they had limited budgets or at the experiments because they're giving you the user and then the assumed CAC based on what they think will convert. So it's a lot of assumptions and I, but these CAC numbers are within range for what I see for consumer companies. So it looks about right. But I would give them bonus points for being really thoughtful in trying to arrive at some of these numbers. For a consumer Stage Company, especially early stage, I need to believe that this team is sophisticated enough to be able to run a good user acquisition playbook. And this gives me more confidence in this team. So I would take them more seriously because of this slide.
yet to be tested. But I like the testing that they've done. But I think the issue I'd have with this slide is it looks like over reliance on paid. And I would want to see other channels that are not relying on paid ads.
So to me, I like the fact that a thinking about the channels. However, it doesn't have really enough information about the experiments and then also what the expected payback is. But that's okay, this basically slide will invite a conversation in person about that
demonstrates competence, but it doesn't show it doesn't show that it doesn't show actually the information that's needed. It's a little unclear the stage of the company also like what's the scale of revenue, the scale of users. So in a lot of ways, it's not, if they only have like 10 users, then this is not really all that useful. But if they have, you know, some meaningful amount of revenue, then some of this may actually be useful and can give you partial credit.
I'm assuming I'm just yeah, Ben, to your point, I'm just assuming it's not giving them credit for thinking through this way. So it just gives me an idea of how they think about user acquisition. But I would just count all of these numbers.
Yes, if I want to wrap that up there, I would say you know, obviously getting a sense of what I told you is a very early stage company, because I talked to the founder to do it. But obviously having some context of scale, you know, how far along you are in the in the pipeline of building up the company is super helpful is this, you know, multi million dollars worth of spend, and you sort of understand it from that context of it's $1,000 to spend and you've spent, you know, $200 on Facebook, you got to get these numbers makes a huge difference to contextualize the pieces. Moving on. We're almost at the end of this deck. So a classic competition slide showing doggo popper and one mind dogs, I realized we're now in a totally weird world of sort of names, kind of a classic showing a couple different features, kind of this pawprint $16 a month versus some others. Does this do what you needed to do for a competition slide?
A bit. It gives me my curiosity would be around like this is probably offline. But how big are these competitors? When were they found it? like are they just super old school? And that's why they don't have the first thing I think of is like, why does no one have live video consultation? Is it a bad business model? Is it a technical infrastructure thing where they're just really old apps and didn't build it to support that? But that immediately for me is like is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know. I think
I find be helpful because like, if you will do this Vanessa will go
first. It takes a lot of latency to Miami, bad
lag.
Vanessa, go for it.
Good. Anyway, I did my
Oh, yeah, so I was gonna say, this format for a competitive slide, I find these always for the company that is presenting, it's always check marks all the way down for them. And the competitors are always missing a whole bunch of check marks. So I don't love this format. I like the like four quadrants a little bit better, because you kind of can see like, where they fit in the competitive landscape. But that's maybe personal preference.
Yeah, I agree with that completely. The other thing is that unless these companies are of any sort of reasonable scale, it's not really useful to have them on a slide and compare with like midgets. So if they're giants and or, you know, a well funded companies that I think you, sometimes you put that, in my opinion in the appendix, because it really should be focused more about your company versus other companies. And then like, I would rather have a slide around your durable advantage, or your competitor, your comparative advantage, whatever advantage that accrues over time as the centerpiece rather than the competition.
And then, finally, I think this is the last slide or at least the last slide we'll look at, we have a team slide. So nine folks, you can see the co founders here, Howard and Ting, obviously a couple of other folks here, pictures, titles, anything more that you'd want to see in a team slide.
I typically like when I know where they work prior to this, or what they're, you know, just give me like a very quick glimpse of background to get an idea of how applicable your skill set is to this type of problem. I do like that everyone has a dog and their pictures are a cat. I guess one person has a cat.
The Secret cat? Yeah.
Yeah, I like I like when these slides make the point that this is the best possible team to solve this problem. And so I think, if I were them, I would probably just put the leadership team on here. And I would have a little bit more about why they're the right people to build this business.
So this this slide, the team slide is one of the This is a classic, like one of what I call the classic Sins of the team slide, which is that it doesn't have the information necessary for the investor to tell anything about this team. So the design of it is okay. Because it's like, you know, clean font images, clean background. And consistency. However, it doesn't tell you any relevant information. So for example, I don't know anything about Howard, what did he do prior to this job, or to this rule that makes him qualified to do it, that makes him the best person. And the other thing that people that I definitely have to explain, which I find to be a little bit awkward is that investors are not investing based on what you look like, and your name, their you know, they want to see what it is that you've done, that helps with the current initiatives, or whatever the relevant background is that you bring with and so on with social work of the team. So sometimes, teams try to lift their entire team, which actually isn't particularly helpful. Because really, what the investors need to see is the leadership team, or the key key people who are going to drive the value of the company. So here, like, will be helpful, it's like, what, what did they do before and if you haven't done it before, that's okay. Because, you know, there's a lot of people that are just coming, or someone who marries like, you know, college dropouts, or just right out of high school, and they can still build, you know, multiple billion dollar companies. That's not a problem. But if you do have a background that it's important to highlight it. And we're highlighted, usually through logos, not through words.
Alright, we're going to call the end of sniffy because we're already burned through, there's more here, there's the last slide, we'll get a ton. The next one, I'm actually going to skip I apologize to like a glove. Because I do we're already halfway through on one deck. And I'd like to get to an enterprise one. So like a glove, super interesting company. I apologize to the founder, who we're going to skip through to get to the next one. But I want to get to for what it's worth. I it sounded interesting,
very different ways worth you put through very quickly, but I got the I got the sort of key points.
That was the speed at which Ben read the deck is the way I can as quickly as possible, click on a right key button here. So we're gonna move on to render rows. So this is a cloud based solution for filmmakers, graphic designers and animators so much more into the enterprise world, as opposed to the consumer was sniffy. This is a bit more interesting of a slide title slide because I've never seen traction and sort of this photo and this design right on a title slide. I was curious if folks kind of like this launch date plus CMG are available right there on the first page.
I get what they're trying to do, I just, again, they actually what this is a great exercise because we went in from a consumer deck and Homage Enterprise deck, and you want me to read a bunch of stuff and get into the mind frame of this company, on slide one, and I just need a little bit of a warm up. And so I think like one line to get my brain to shift into like, okay, new company, new problem set, just give me one line to like frame, get my mind there and then dive into stuff. So yes, I think there's, there's a reason there's like a slide that doesn't have too much weight on it is the cover slide. So I appreciate that getting me into like deep in the trenches. On slide one, it's just a bit of a shock to the system for me, personally.
Yeah, I agree, I would say try to make this slide just much simpler kind of the one liner on why you exist.
To me, this is actually okay. Because I feel like they combined the first the title slide with the executive summary slide. And to me, this says, tells me what you do. Number one tells me number two, that you have some good traction three tells me of a product. And so I'll probably pay more attention to the deck that they go through.
So it's going in so
this conversation as you can see that there's there's a variety of different points of view on all these things. Well, that's that's
the beauty of singularity as people are reading them. We had a pitch deck session yesterday, and people reading them in their beds in the morning while driving to work, which has nothing to do on their driving. So yeah,
actually, I think it says that's important to talk about this slide will not work on the phone. Yeah, yeah,
the text is too small, went like well, I really don't like having different multiple different size fonts on a slide, it drives me nuts. So if you're going to do it, you got to start with like very big funds to have four different size fonts on a slide. Going from size 16 to size nine, is like not the right range.
Well, I'm particularly because this particular product is focused on graphic designers. So we almost expect the design to be particularly superlative. And having multiple font sizes is one of the cardinal rules didn't ever do on a particular slide.
I've seen it done well, actually from like the designers on my team, they make these like very cool slides. But you have to get it perfect. Otherwise, it's like it's either like really cool or just unreadable.
Let me skip ahead. So we're gonna do the meet the customers. So we get some feedback from different types of folks who are using it and discussing it. This is a little bit different. I mean, normally, we started here, like case studies, but we're actually trying to hear the customers, you know, their actual words, so to speak, does this sell you in the second slide of a deck, particularly for an enterprise company?
I get what they're trying to do. It's just a lot going on. It's a lot of text. I would rather see the problem set up. They appreciate that they're setting it up from the user's perspective. But it needs to be easier to follow along.
and simplify this one, it was it was very hard to digest. And I came away more confused actually about what exactly the problem is that the customer has.
Yeah, I agree with that. So to me, this slide makes sense. But the way that I the way that I look at the slide isn't that I understand it, I will look at the next slide and flip back to this slide. And the next line is the back to the slide. This slide, but so this is not the this is the other other customer problems. And
so I'll jump ahead, Ben. So let's go straight to the solution side. So here's render row, they offer cloud theaters and cloud storage, pre installed software managed platform to handle all the issues around graphic design. So you would look at this and then go back and try to look at some of the customer information. That is the combination usually,
yeah. Usually, like we tell our founders try to make it so that it's parallel. So then you have you have problems, like you showed three problems. And you solution, you you show the three solutions, like how solves the three problems, and then becomes very clear versus having a mapping which map now I'm trying to figure out which of these columns maps to which of these problems. Are they really the most important problems or the small problems?
And still confused?
Okay, I think that's actually really important information. As always, being authentic here is the only way these paychecks get better. I mean, I was confused for sure. I also okay, and
to be clear, I think to be clear, actually one of the things that literally were thing now is that maybe like, I don't know, 40% of the time investors are confused. Like, we're just flipping back and forth and back and forth, right? But what does this company do? So if you can summarize what the company does in one sentence upfront, it really helps.
I mean, that's if you're willing to flip in, if I have five, exactly. my inbox every day. If I can't figure this out quickly, I just like hammer on to the next one. I'll get back. I'll read this one again later. And then. Okay, nevermind, I like another deck I read earlier, and pursue that one.
That was really hard, I think is really important. But good.
Oh, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I think it's really what's really hard. I can't control
the lag, it's the last guy No. And so the thing here is that, you have to assume that investors are looking to the deck. And if they can't figure out what it is that you do, or they can't make a decision, they'll put a star by the by that deck, and they'll come back to at another point in time. But basically, you've lost that quick opportunity to get a meeting. Because when they put a star by it, they have to work wait till they have time to go through all of the other things that they that's going to take longer to process. And then so sometimes that happens the same day. And sometimes that happens, like two or three or four days later, if there's a ton of backlog of you know, other things that are going on, well, like to get
the meeting, if my folder gets too long, I just wave the white flag, delete all and start all over, because I'm so rubbish. at something, I'm just gonna call it leads or like a few months old, they've probably raised already. And then I just just delete everything, and then start all over from a clean slate. So that also happens.
Well, yeah, I completely agree. I think I, as a founder, I think it's really hard to get your exactly what you do down to one line, I think it takes a ton of iteration. So I think just knowing that as a founder that you know, you're not going to get it on the first try. Just keep showing it to people and get it so that you can do it in one elevator ride or one really simple, simple line about yourself.
And specifically to run Daro. With Mike's I think we're still talking about Mike, is Mike the buyer? Or is Mike the user? Is the user the buyer? Are they the same thing? I don't know.
I they may be i don't think so i think if you go if you go to the next slide here. So here I have this red duro work. We're talking about Mike, again, this is sort of creating a user centric story in the deck, which is unusual, but I think is is certainly an engaging way to show like a prototypical user. This seems like a lot of text, though. I don't know how other people felt about that.
I still don't know if Mike's the buyer or the user like this. This is he does the the project he's working on by for him for like everyone on that project. And so he gets a license and a seat, or does he buy it as himself? And then he like, influences all the other people working on this film to buy it to? Who's the buyer? And do you need everyone else on it or not? I don't know yet.
And then we get into I think the core of the the differentiation here. So looking at render farms, cooperation platform, software developers and service providers. There's a lot of competition, I guess this is I would call it a competition slide. Although I was the purpose of this slide myself. But I was curious if you had thoughts on this particular slide.
Just makes me feel like I really don't know, this industry, like right here like, Huh, render farms, corporate Corporation platforms. Okay, wow, this is like a whole new world. I need to study up more on it and then immediate, like, Am I the best partner for this. And there hasn't been anything to convince me that I should spend the time to become more knowledgeable in the space. So there's no like, we have great traction, or this is a massive market or this is how much is spent on it. So at this point, I'm like, Man, it's gonna take me like a few hours to read up on this industry and understand how it all works. And I haven't been convinced that it's worth the effort to do it. And I'm not a film buff, so I'm not like right off the bat like Oh, I'm so personally curious to go investigate this.
Yeah, to me, I would just click Next. I would just click back to slide.
And then there's a two by two, Ben. competitive analysis here. Is this doing it's a general purpose. My screen is blocked, complicated, easy to use. Is this sort of the two by two you're thinking about or how do you usually structure those axes?
I think married was one talking about this. I would also click Next on there and yeah,
there you go. married men are Maren well Got yourself?
Yeah, I think I would probably find different axes, I think easy to use versus complicated isn't isn't particularly descriptive. It doesn't give me a great sense of the landscape and the competition. And really, I think the point that you want to make on a slide like this is just how you stand out. But I generally like this format of slide because I think it is a good visual visual way to see the landscape.
Yeah, sometimes people put like modern software or cloud based or something that is more concrete and easy to use. And then complicated would be legacy players on pren, something that makes them seem old, stodgy, slow laggard, and it's also implied that it's like not easy to use. So I try to use more compelling words there on that axis.
That we have a sort of serious competition slide with all the checkboxes. And this one was unusual, cuz it was horizontals versus verticals. And I had not seen that particular format. But I was curious if this was easier with the horizontal model versus vertical axis.
I haven't been hooked enough to really care yet about this slide. So maybe it's an impending slide, it feels like a bit of a waste, because I still don't understand how big the market is, or how much spend goes into it is vagin. And one in one motion seems like the incumbents, are they big companies? Are they public companies? How much revenue they make? I don't know, I'm still not, there's that there hasn't a hook yet for me.
Agree, I will click Next.
And I've answered every slide.
And we get along great. We, we've got to go through like 30 or 40 pitch pitch decks every day. So you got to grab the attention some way or another very quickly. And, but But again, this is not, it's not a I when I say I cook on Next, I basically have to make a decision at the end of the entire thing of whether I want to take a meeting or not. Does that make sense? It doesn't mean like a specific slide, I click next means that it's like, No, I don't want to beat this company. But I just find that this slide doesn't add any value. So we can move on.
With every subsequent slide that you go without a hook or without like, Ooh, that's interesting. You just like diminishing like that the stakes are even higher for the next slide. Now it's like, um, that's right, I don't get it. It's confusing, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, and then you start skipping faster and faster to the end, because like, nothing has taught yet. And so if you if you get nothing interesting, in the first few, the stakes are so much higher for the next few. And then like your probability of emailed back is just, you know, not there.
So a price slide, I'm going to quickly click through with an addressable market, I think sort of typical, we do have a little bit of like, what I would call attraction slide, I think there's a bigger, more popular as you know, obviously, companies are getting further into their development as they're fundraising. This is sort of show you the kind of traction you were looking for the kinds of numbers you would look for in a SAS or B to C SAS company.
And, yeah, a few things. He says, from European companies using the comma, use the comma, if you're pitching to European investors use the period if you're using to American investors, and I tell that for our companies, when they're trying to pitch to overseas investors, you know, translate it have different versions for different audiences. So that shows some thoughtfulness. And then the other piece here is, I don't have to go back to the very first slide to figure out when they launched. So like, I don't know if this is good traction, because it's just one data point. And I need to see a line. So I have to go back to like, when were they started? We launched October 2020. Oh, now that's, you know, this is better, but if they launched in like 1999, this is terrible. So for us, it's the trend line versus like the absolute dot.
I would also pick two or three of the stats that you think are the most important and probably the the things that you think will pop most for investors and just keep it simple. I think the MRR is obviously a good one to have for a SaaS business. But I would simplify this for sure that they have traction. So one thing just to say about this deck is they actually have traction and I would have put this further up in the duck.
Yeah, like way further up like this would this is like this would have grabbed my attention or not. But like, this is the most interesting slide they've had so far.
And you've got the final word because we're writing the end of the time here. According to the ticker, I've been yelled at a
graph graph. We should see graphs, probably two graphs, maybe the Mr. graph, maybe the usage graph.
And then overall, I mean, you know, quick summary. worry. I mean, do either these attract you overall, holistically, yes or no for sniffy and for render row? Would you have done a follow up meeting? Given what you saw here today? We will talk about tarp, what's this the first
it's just too small of a market. And so I would be the wrong audience for that.
If he may be this, the market thing is a problem, as I mentioned, and the thing is, Vanessa said you should talk to, you know, funds that are smaller, which is true, and we are a smaller fund. We're seed stage fund of like 80 million. However, we also think about who are the downstream financers if their company's downstream financing. And so typically, the market size these days have to be larger for the venture firms to be interested. So it's one of the calculus, imprints of calculus that we do have, like, should we invest in a company with a smaller market size? Can it become, you know, a 500 million or a billion dollar company with very minimal venture capital? Because if you if you need to raise a lot more venture capital, then it's the selection, the opportunity set for foreign investors is smaller
than question for you, though, if they were to put that they could hit profitability with this financing, like this will make them profitable, and they never need to raise money again. And they showed like interesting growth profitably past this financing. Would you bite them?
Yeah, it's possible. I mean, also, the team should have showed a little bit more background. I think we might take it. I think the deck was well designed enough that I think we might be willing to take a person meeting just based off that.
And there you go, I agree. I know we're up on time. Obviously a lot to talk about. We got there to have six decks, unfortunately. So for the founders who waited thank you for waiting. I apologize. I didn't get through more. Obviously a lot of great detail here. I want to thank Marin, Vanessa and Ben for joining us on the panel today for pitch deck, tear down and please enjoy the rest of disrupt day three. We got battlefield finals later today.