Staffjoy’s Pitch Decks That Raised $1.7M

Staffjoy is shutting down. This post is a part of our efforts to open source parts of our startup journey.

To raise money for a company, you pitch potential investors on your business. They evaluate it on a variety of metrics such as growth, the strength of the founding team, the size of the potential market, and the terms of the round in order to determine whether they will make money. It’s important to keep in mind that most startup investors are not looking for modest returns — they want your business to have a chance at being worth over $1 billion. Logistically, raising a round of funding in the Bay Area can take anywhere from few weeks to multiple months.

As a first-time entrepreneur, I found it intimidating to give so many presentations about a nascent company. However, seeing other companies’ pitch decks demystified the process for me. For the benefit of future entrepreneurs, we’re opening our pitch decks so that you can learn from them.

Y Combinator Fellowship Demo Day

November 2015. No money raised, but we received a $12K grant from Y Combinator at the beginning of the program. You can read our YCF application here.

Angel Round

December 2015. $520K raised.

Seed round

July 2016. $1.2M raised.

My learnings about pitch decks

• Make it legible.
• Lead with traction — Right after the title slide, show impressive metrics about your business.
• Don’t specifically put in the deck that you are raising, everybody already knows it. Verbally state the terms, if they have already been set.
• Focus on the huge, unaddressed problem that you solve. The opportunity matters more than the product you made, at least in the early stages.
• Marginal improvements over competitors are not enough.
• Your competitors are not other startups.
• The size of the market is important. I like using Wonder to do market sizing research. Opt for a bottom-up approach, e.g. “There are 75 million hourly workers in the USA. With $5/worker/month, that gives a $4.5B total attainable market”. A market size of under $1B is probably too small to be a good venture capital investment and a market size over $50B probably is too broad to be credible.
• Do a live demo of your product. It creates credibility. However, always have a backup of slides ready to walk through.
• Pick a core metric that shows week-over-week growth, and feature it prominently. Revenue is always good, but it can be a lagging indicator (especially with large deal sizes). We use “people scheduled per week.”
• Your “GTM” (go to market strategy) slide explains how to you plan to grow. Do research on sales strategy, and understand how the deal size correlates with different sales methodologies.
• Some approximate rules of thumb for sane sales strategies based on annual contract value (ACV): <$1K ACV = self-serve, $1K–30K ACV = inside sales, >$30K ACV(but more likely >$100K) = enterprise sales.

Operations Advice

• Don’t send investors your full deck until after you have met with them. Have an abbreviated “overview” deck that gets distributed before meeting (with metrics, industry overview, and GTM slides).
• After meeting a potential investor, send access to a “deal room” with the deck, term sheet, cap table, major contracts, and any other important documents.
• Many later-stage investors will hear your pitch, even if they don’t intend to invest in such small rounds. It’s common to hear “Let’s talk later during your Series A” — this is called the “A Pass”. It’s not a waste of time though— some will invest personal money or make valuable introductions. However, you can always ask for introductions to their portfolio companies — so research the companies that they have invested in beforehand to see if any are sales prospects or potential integration partners.