Why this deck raised $2.3M

During the summer of 2020 I decided to quit my job at a startup accelerator to start a social commerce startup called Huddle. This would be the first time my cofounders and I had raised significant VC, but we had spent the last few years working in tech & reading everything we could about tech & fundraising. We knew that we would need a killer deck to raise, so for our first draft we took inspiration from many of the popular & publicly available pitch decks on the interweb (i.e. uber, airbnb, etc). After a couple practice pitches & cold emails to friends and shitty tech investors we felt what many of you reading probably felt: our first deck was boring & kinda sucked.

We decided to go back to the drawing board and we booked a ‘pitchapalooza’ - 20 back to back pitches with friends/family/anyone who would listen. The goal was to aggressively refine our story & hopefully come up with a new deck that people would understand. Below is the deck we came to, and ultimately led to us raising our $2.3M seed round a few months later.

This deck is unorthodox and investors either LOVED it or HATED it (and they let us know this immediately lol). This is what we wanted. The investors who loved it, loved it because it was dead simple & immediately booked time with us. The investors who hated it, hated it because it felt like a tease & they were left wishing we included more info. Love it or hate it, one thing was true - they almost always booked meetings.

Before we get into the deck, let me start with the goals of this deck

1. We wanted our deck to be remembered

   1. As the saying goes, it’s better to be remembered than forgotten. We knew investors we’d be cold messaging would be getting hundreds of messages a week (if not every day). So we wanted our deck to stand out from the rest.

2. We wanted our deck to take less than 1 minute to read

   1. On average, investors spend 2 minutes per deck - hard stop. I know this sucks, but it’s true. So I recommend sucking up reality and playing the game. Every slide that doesn’t get read is a waste.

3. We wanted to use this deck to book a 1st meeting

   1. We were really good at pitching live - so we knew that was our best chance at convincing investors. Essentially, we prioritized a teaser deck with minimal info so investors would have to speak with us live.

4. We wanted our deck to tell a story

   1. Humans understand information best if it’s relayed in a story format. So we decided to write our deck as if we were telling a short story. That way we controlled the message and could make our minimal traction & progress seem more exciting.

The Fated Deck

Slide 1

Note: removed our phone #s & contact info for obv reasons

Why this worked

• THE LOGO: Ok the red lips were literally from clip art lmao. BUT they grabbed people’s attention and investors were literally like ‘wtf is up with the lips’. TBH we just thought it would grab attention & some of our customers were beauty brands. It ended up paying off.

• THE TAGLINE: We did a TON of pitches. 5-6 investors said ‘oh this is kinda like ‘modern tupperware parties’ so we changed our tagline to that since it seemed like something a lot of investors understood

  • For those that don’t know: tupperware parties were a HUGE multi-level marketing biz started in the 50s. You’re probably using tupperware today because your grandma’s friend sold her tupperware after lunch one day. [Kinda crazy, read more here.]

Slide 2

Why this worked

• We were a bunch of 20 somethings with minimally cool experience. So we framed everything we had done in the sexiest way possible.

  • Dan went from being a “PM at my dad’s cybersecurity business” >> PM @ B2B startup

    • No shade to Dan - his Dad’s small biz does more business than most Series C startups thanks to his abilities. But the ‘real experience’ was less sexy to investors so we reframed.

  • Jack went from ‘Failed crypto community manager’ >> CCO GameCredits

    • I really was the CCO of a big crypto back in 2016-18 - but it failed miserably

  • So Kevin is just legit a brilliant ex google engineer lol. That was an easy sell.

• One of us was the Sales person turned CEO, one of us was the community & growth hacker turned COO, one of us was the google engineer (CTO).

Slide 3

Why this worked

• Like I said earlier. We wanted to tell a story and give context on how we ended up where we did. This first slide just set the stage of our story.

Slide 4

Why this worked

• Pivoting isn’t a bad thing. It shows that you can follow momentum & move quickly.

• VCs invest in startups by following patterns, this is known as pattern matching. Some of you may have heard it said before. By setting our first 2 slides up like this, we match the pattern of so many successful startups that start one place and end up doing something else.

Slide 5

Why this worked

• This was our market sizing slide! Instead of showing a boring & forgettable graph or some nonsensical TAM/SAM/SOM, we manage to convey a large market in a conversational way.

• You’ll notice we do this in the rest of the deck as well. We provide all the pitch deck essentials (market size, GTM, traction, etc).

Slide 6

Why this worked

• Experimentation is the name of the game. Good startups can build a business without investing 6 months building product.

Slide 7

Why this worked

• Investors read this and thought: “Woah?! These guys ran an experiment and did 1400 of sales? Also WTF is a huddle? Are they doing 100’s of huddles a day?”

• Funny enough, at no point in the deck do we explain what Huddle even is. Is it a website? Is it an app? Are they doing these things in person? But WHAT we were doing was way more important than HOW we were doing it. We found that by adding product slides & description we lost the magic & investors got confused.

Slide 8

Why this worked

• This is our unit economics slide. The last slide told them we sold $1,400 and now this slide tells investors we took 15%. Once again we were able to provide investors unit economics without a boring & hard to read chart/graph.

• I have a hypothesis that making investors think for themselves can be a good thing. Rather than telling them explicitly ‘here are the numbers’ we made them do basic napkin math & thinking. They were coming to their own conclusions about our business, but we were guiding them to those conclusions.

Slide 9

Why this worked

• Wait, wait, wait? They got traction & sales without a product? Remember what I said about pattern matching? This slide showed investors that we could be scrappy & prove out a business model with minimal resources. This is a common pattern amongst many of the best founders.

Slide 10

Why this worked

• Here we’re keeping the narrative going while setting the stage that all the exciting things prior to this slide were just the beginning.

Slide 11

Why this worked

• This is and the next slide are essentially our GTM (go to market) slides. We signal to investors that we know what a beachhead is - which is an important sales term. Every tech company needs two things 1) sales 2) something to sell. This slide signals that we understand sales & GTM strategy.

• Beachhead: The term originates from WW2 when the U.S. stormed Normandy. A beachhead in business is when you focus resources on a small area in a market which then allows you to break into the entire market after.

Slide 12

Why this worked

• Ok so this was our most exciting point of customer traction. Smashbox is a pretty big beauty brand owned by Estee Lauder (one of the largest beauty brands in the world). We wanted to wrap up the story on the most exciting part of our story. It also gave us a chance to signal that we could make money through subscriptions in addition to a percent of sales.

• This slide alludes to the fact that the beauty industry is just our beachhead. After breaking into beauty - we’ll break into lots of other markets.

Slide 13

Why this worked

• This slide wraps together the entire narrative and succinctly tells investors what it is we do. Notice that we keep fluff words to an ABSOLUTE minimum. Say what you do in the fewest words fucking possible. As the great Jeremy Irons says in the classic movie Margin Call, ‘speak as you might to a young child, or a golden retriever’. (watch the scene here)

• Some common bullshit fluff words include (but are not limited to): revolutionary, democratizing, innovative, freedom, advanced, etc. If you use any words like this in your deck CUT IT OUT.

Slide 14

Why this worked

• We literally just repeat our tag line here from the cover of our deck. This is intentional. If investors remember 1 thing, we want them to remember the tag line. Again, investors talk to one another and share deals. Our hope was to give them something to remember when chatting with friends.

Slide 15

Why this worked

• This is our last slide, here we just call investors to action. Notice that we don’t tell investors how much we’re raising - this was intentional. Our first deck (that sucked) had an ask in it and it ended up working against us. The truth is - pre-seed & seed investments are pretty much indistinguishable these days (at least this was the case in 2020-21 when we raised). When we told investors we were raising $2M, some pre-seed investors said this was too high, and some seed investors said this was too low. But when we took the number out BOTH groups of investors spoke with us & we were able to get much more traction.

• When we joined pitch calls with pre-seed investors, we would look up what size checks their firm wrote and adjust how much we were raising depending on the investor.

  • If a pre-seed investor wrote 500k checks - we told them we were raising $800k-$1M.

  • If a seed investor wrote 1-3M checks - we told them we were raising between $2-$4M

  • (Note, this strategy is risky because investors talk to one another)

• Often times investors will tell you to include how much you’re raising, but I feel like that info is good for them & bad for founders. Again, the more info you include the more they can use against you. The truth is, if your deck is REALLY exciting most early stage investors will take a call (as long as they invest in your market).

Final Thoughts

Think about this for a second: this deck had less than 100 WORDS.

Now the point of this essay isn’t to get you to do exactly what we did. You shouldn’t take anything anyone says as gospel. All of our cards are different and trying to apply exactly what someone else did to your own situation leads to the downfall of many great entrepreneurs.

Instead, I want to give you a different perspective and encourage you to forge your own unique path. By daring to do things a little different and experiment, you can increase your chances of closing money by giving investors a deck they actually remember.

Best of luck with the deck, and if you feel like getting in touch for fundraising help hit me up at [email protected]

Jack