most of The pitch deck teardowns to date (here’s a helpful list of the 30+ we’ve published so far) have been for rounds of institutional funding, usually in the millions or tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars raised.
Those are interesting to watch, of course, but I also know that many of you will be there much earlier in your journey. I’ve been looking for a good example of an angel deck to share with you, and I found exactly that on laoshiThe ‘s angel deck. The company tells me it raised $570,000 capped at $5 million for its very early-stage language-learning app, explicitly aimed at Chinese tutors and their students.
The platform isn’t fancy and it’s not perfect, but the company claims it was successful, so let’s take a look at what it did right and what could have been improved.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you’d like to submit your own, here’s how you can do it.
Slides in this deck
Laoshi’s deck consists of 11 main slides and four append slides.
- deck slide
- problem slide
- market slippage
- solution slide
- competition slide
- roadmap slide
- team slide
- Teacher Growth Slide
- Teacher Retention Slide
- summary slide
- “Contact Us” Slide
- Appendices Deck Slide
- Appendix I: Viral Effect Slide
- Annex II: Business model slide
- Appendix III: “The Question” Slide
three things to love
The deck is sparse and simple, which is quite refreshing – a lot of the early stage decks don’t seem to have much story woven into them and try to cram too much information (that isn’t really relevant) into the slides.
The most important thing to remember for an angel deck is that your investors know that they are in the business of high risk investing. So make it clear why your company is a good bet, that you have a path to solving a real problem and gaining a huge market, and that you have the team to do it.
The team slide is A+
[Slide 7] A team slide should convince investors that they 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, a scammer, and a hipster (H3) to build a good founding team. The hacker is the person with the technical knowledge to build the first couple of versions of the product. The go-getter is the person who generates sales and investment and understands how the market works for this company. And the hipster is a person who can put together designs so that the product looks cool and fresh and is easy to use.
Not sure if I agree 100% with H3 Founder Team Building Ethics: It’s much more important that you have the right, in-depth domain knowledge and drive (often phrased as “founder market fit”), but you also you need a variety of skills to build a good startup. I admit it h3 It’s often a good template for quickly checking a team’s skill set and determining if there are any major gaps in the team.
This team slide does two things: it shows that the team is international and it is distributed. It is diverse and experienced. And it manages, in the box at the bottom, to show that the team has relevant experience in the market. Now, you’d still need a voiceover to find out:
- How did the team meet?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of each team member?
- What is missing to the team?
- Why is this team able to deliver in a way that no one else can?
- What is the recruitment plan for the current fundraiser?
But as a base level team slide, this ticks a lot of boxes. What it doesn’t show, however, is past successes in startups, and I’d like to dig a little deeper into that as well. It’s certainly a much better slide than many of the previous ones we’ve covered in these teardowns—you know, the ones that basically stick a Stanford and Tesla logo under an image and call it a day.
What you can learn from this slide as a starter is that your team slide ranks right up there with the most important slides, and you need to make it count. Use it to tell your story and convince us that 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 summary slide is a great way to engage investors, and I probably would have placed this slide somewhere towards the beginning of the deck instead of right at the bottom; it really helps to fix the progress and stage of the company in time. It shows that yes, this company is small and finding its footing, but it is also making real, measurable progress.
Almost as important as the numbers themselves are which numbers that the company is measuring. It shows monthly and daily active users (MAU/DAU), which are crucial metrics to see how sticky an app is. Shows the number of teachers. and how long they stay on the platform, which again speaks to the rigidity and reach that the company has. It talks about active user engagement, which shows that people are actively using the app.
For perfect grades, I would love to have seen these numbers as graphs instead of just collated numbers. I would also have liked to see dollar figures here. It’s great to have 200+ paying subscribers, and that’s impressive for a pre-funded company. But even though the revenue numbers are likely to be very small, it’s also important to see a graph of them. If he doesn’t put it on the slide, the investor will suspect why and ask for it anyway; he can also skip that conversation and give them what they need right away.
What you can learn from this slide as a startup is to be deeply aware of the metrics that will help you build and deliver your business.
Business model front and center
[Slide 14] It’s always a good idea to show that you understand the levers of your business. Image Credits: laoshi
I have to say that I don’t like the dark gray on light gray layout, and I find it curious that it’s in the appendage instead of the main deck. As an investor, I think this would be one of the most important slides. I would also love to see where the business is now. For example, when the company says that its TAC (tutor acquisition cost) is $50, what is its TAC now? If each tutor is supposed to have five students, how does that work out in practice?
Having said that, these numbers are very important in your conversations with your investors; essentially, he is showing how he is thinking about his business and his market and that he understands the levers of his business. In other words: What if each tutor had 10 students instead of five? What if each tutor cost $100 to purchase instead of $50? By plugging all of that into a model and running experiments to increase your confidence in the model, you can go a long way toward building a great picture of your business in numbers.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll be taking a look at three things Laoshi could have improved or done differently, along with the company’s full introduction!
