AI is everywhereand, unsurprisingly, sales teams are among the first to adopt. So I wasn’t surprised to see Scalestack raise $1 million to make life easier for sales teams.
So like we’ve been doing every week for the last 18 months or so (I can’t believe this is going to be the 75th demolition of the stadium!), we’re going to put the Scalestack deck used to elevate its round under the proverbial microscope and see what went right and where it could have done better.
Let’s go!
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 so.
It slides into this deck
Scalestack closed the $1 million round with an 18-slide deck. The company left all the slides, but redacted some of MongoDB’s revenue and ROI figures from its product:
- Cover transparency
- Group transparency
- Pull Summary/Transparency
- Problematic transparency
- Problem impact transparency 1
- Transparency impact problem 2
- Transparency impact problem 3
- Solution transparency
- Drag transparency
- Customer story slide 1
- Customer story transparency 2
- How transparency works
- Product transparency
- Market transparency
- Competitive transparency
- Placement transparency
- Why now slip
- Close slide
Three things to love
For the past couple of months, I’ve been experimenting with building an AI deck checker. He gave this deck only a 67% chance to cash in (you can see the full report here). Of course, Scalestack He made raised money and did a lot of things extremely well, which shows that AI has a long way to go.
Taking a closer look at Scalestack’s deck, I’m not surprised that the company raised money. It has three big things: a killer team, impressive traction, and a customer testimonial to die for.
Big team
A company’s team is its heart and soul. In the early days of a startup, when there may be no substantial track record or extensive financial data, the team’s background and capabilities can be one of the most persuasive aspects of your pitch.
It is important to present your team effectively and show why they are the right people to bring the business to success. Scalestack got this right and smartly starts the story with a group slide.
[Side 2] It’s awesome to see this company come out of the gate unapologetically. Image credits: Scalestack
Do you know what investors love? Founders with a proven track record. This slide shows that its team is well-connected in the startup world and has operational experience to boot.
I’d also love to see links to the founders’ LinkedIn profiles, but that works great nonetheless.
Longtime readers may notice that this slide is missing something I often advocate for in team slides: Founder-Buyer Matching. Nothing in these resumes screams “sales” or “AI” to me, so why am I so enthusiastic about this company? Well, that’s because it doesn’t matter when you click on the next slide:
Craving for dayyyysss
Your startup team is important, but traction will make up for all the sins you can imagine. It makes sense, then, that after such a good team slide, Scalestack is on a pull victory lap. The actual data is deleted, but you get the picture.
[Slide 3] Overgrowth shows the beginnings of product-market fit. Image credits: Scalestack
Even with adjusted numbers, this slide tells one hell of a story: Marquee customers, growing ARR and a strong bottom line. This checks a lot of boxes. The team could probably raise money with just these two slides, so I’m not giving them away that difficult time to lose some important pieces. Would it be better to include all the data that investors would be looking for? Sure, but if you have traction and a solid team, you’re 90% of the way there.
If you are raising money, take a close look at these two slides. That’s what you’re dealing with, even for a company raising “only” $1 million. Does your company look like this? If not, can you tell a story that has a similar refrain?
And if you can, will you be able to end the story with something so powerful?
One hell of a customer testimonial
Let’s get one thing straight: Customer testimonials are, by and large, vanity metrics that don’t tell the story on their own. However, they can create powerful narrative elements.
[Slide 11] This isn’t a testimonial so much as a “We Made Ourselves Indispensable” slide. Totally baller. Image credits: Scalestack
You better believe that if I were leading an investment in Scalestack, I’d want to have a chat with Mr. Underhill. If he is as enthusiastic as this company in the report call, he will convince me to invest.
Is everything perfect, though? Well no. Objectively, this is not a very good pitch deck, because it is missing some important parts of the pitch. So, in the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things that Scalestack could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
