It’s rare to come across a pitch deck that ticks almost all the boxes. It’s so good, in fact, that I fed Plantee’s deck into an AI tool I made, and determined that there was a 97.7% chance that Plantee would raise money. This tool generally determines that only about 7.5% of all pitch decks are up to scratch, so Plantee’s is positively off the charts.
What the bots didn’t realize, however, was that Plantee’s Kickstarter campaign was canceled before it was completed, and there are a few other confusing bits. Let’s dive in to see what works and what could be improved.
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It slides into this deck
- Cover transparency
- Summary slide
- Group transparency
- Advisors and investors are slipping
- Shipping transparency
- Purchase validation slide
- Problematic transparency
- Solution transparency
- Product transparency
- Competitive landscape slide
- Drag transparency
- Targeted customer transparency
- Market size transparency
- GTM transparency
- Pricing and financial unit transparency
- Transparency of vision
- Transparency Demand and Use of funds
- Operational plan transparency
- Close slide
- Annex slide I: Products under development
- Appendix slide II: Sources and references
Three things to love about Plantee’s pitch
It turns out that the Plantee team has been reading my Pitch Deck Teardowns very carefully and it shows. The company includes tons of details in their deck.
This is how you make an introduction!
Slides 1 and 2 together (Slide 1 is at the top of the article) set the stage for an investor to 100% understand the what, why and how of the company:
[Slide 2] A one-page summary to applaud. Image credits: Plantee
Plantee Innovations pitch deck opening slides are solid. Between the two slides, the founders provide a clear and compelling introduction to what the company stands for and what it aims to achieve. The brief grabs the audience’s attention from the start, but also serves a dual purpose of effectively setting the bar for investors and filtering interest based on alignment with the investment thesis. The cover slide includes “IoT Smart Home / B2C Consumer Electronics / AgriTech / Raising $1.7M” — it’s basically a bingo keyword to help investors decide whether to lean or immediately dump the deck. That’s a good thing: If that company isn’t a good fit for investors, they can move on right away.
Gotta love a good technical solution
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a raging nerd and I love a good gadget. I also love plants. I have dozens all over my apartment and can keep most of them alive. As mentioned, I like Plantee’s approach to eliminating plant motherhood.
[Slide 8] Technology, artificial intelligence and happy plants. Image credits: Plantee
I would say that most plant owners think about light exactly once: when they first bring the plant home. They will think about watering as often as they can, hopefully the plants are dry, crunchy, sad in the corner of the dresser. I’m glad there’s an AI that takes care of all the other stuff, because I had no idea plants needed so much!
On the one hand, this is a relief. Then again, maybe I’m just a naive and newbie plant dad, but it left me a little confused. I’ve never heard anyone mention moistening the air and warming the soil. I could be convinced that these things make a difference, sure, but I’m definitely curious to what extent it’s worth worrying about.
Good competitive landscape
This is a market that does not have many competitors. From one perspective, that’s a good thing: It means there’s a thriving market, and Plantee can see what its competitors are doing well or poorly and position itself accordingly.
[Slide 10] There are many competitors. Image credits: Plantee
As a competitive overview, this is pretty comprehensive. It separates the competitive landscape into ‘hard to grow’ and ‘easy to grow’ and into specialists (eg mushroom/avocado growers) vs generalists. This all makes sense, but there’s still a small piece of the puzzle missing here: The only real exit to this space that I know of is ScottsMiracle-Gro acquires AeroGarden, for about $50 million. It’s not the smallest achievement in the world, but it’s not particularly encouraging either.
The other question I have is whether this dichotomy makes sense. If someone plants a bonsai—a specific use case presented by the Plantee team—they’re probably not going to replant the plant, which is an interesting challenge. If you’re marketing yourself as “you can grow anything”, I’m going to assume you’d want to replant occasionally. The small bonsai tree, however, can grow up to 800 yearsso it’s hard to argue that the “all plants grow” argument is such a strong selling point.
Three things Plantee could have improved
On first impression, the Plantee deck is pretty great, and the AI tool gave it a 97% chance of success. As a human investor, I am less convinced and disagree with AI for a few critical reasons.
Does it make sense as a product?
I love a good indoor growing system and there have been many that have tried (and failed) in this space. GROW raised $2.4 million in 2017, before eventually shutting down. I reviewed the $1,000 Abby a few years ago, which, like the Plantee, had pre-sold $100,000 worth of products on Kickstarter and was pretty awful. I also have i built my own hydroponic system for less than $150which is obviously a lot more work, but shows that these kinds of systems don’t have to be expensive.
Plantee faces some pretty formidable competition. At the low end, for just $40 you can raise a pod-based hydroponic system. If you want to spend a little more, Click & Grow has your back. Rise Gardens recently raised a $9 million round. People kill houseplants all the time, but most of them are pretty easy to take care of. If you need help, a quick Google search for “AI plant growing app” gives you dozens of options, most of them free.
My biggest challenge with the Plantee deck isn’t what’s there, it’s what’s missing: wider context. If you take all the company’s claims at face value, it’s a great deal. However, zoom in a bit and talk to a few plant enthusiasts and you’ll realize that perhaps there isn’t as big a gap in the market as one might think. It seems the inherent assumption in Plantee’s story is that people who are bad at plants will spend $1,400 on a fancy automatic plant pot.
I’d argue that’s a fallacy, and that people who are bad at plants get a kitten, or dabble in watercolors, or a plastic plant, before they’re willing to invest four months of car payments into a fancy piece of technology.
So what happened to that Kickstarter campaign?
[Slide 11] Plantee maintains that its Kickstarter campaign is part of the validation of the purchase. But there is a catch. Image credits: Plantee
Plantee did, in fact, convince 109 supporters commit more than $100,000 to her product. The campaign was fully funded in less than eight hours but it was canceled just under a month later.
What happened? Image credits: Screenshot from Kickstarter
This puts the Plantee team in an odd position: It claims the Kickstarter campaign proves market validation. And that might be true: The company says it was able to get customers to pre-order it for a CAC of $275. Selling 109 units, basic math dictates that the company spent about $30,000 to make $100,000 worth of sales. That’s not too shabby, assuming there’s enough margin in the product for that customer acquisition cost to make sense.
The problem, however, is that the company does not mention anywhere in the pitch deck that the campaign has been canceled and does not discuss Why canceled. He could argue that he never intended to do the Kickstarter campaign and that it was just a marketing test to confirm if there was a market for such a thing.
I’m not sure that makes sense. Prior to Plantee’s campaign, EcoQube ($300,000 funded in 2019), GroBox ($70,000 funded in 2019), Herbert ($280,000 funded in 2019) and dozens of others had already succeeded, and it is not entirely clear what Plantee learned from this exercise. Since then, many others have run successful Kickstarter campaigns (Herbstation, MarsPlanter, GrowChef).
Simply put, I’m having a hard time understanding how the Kickstarter campaign fits into the overall narrative, and Plantee does itself no favors by seeming to sidestep the issue within the deck. Maybe I’m painfully sensitive after one of my own Kickstarter campaigns went up in flames a decade agoand finally he took the whole company with him, but personally, I’d include a “so what happened to Kickstarter” slide in the appendix to preempt that part of the story. Bad news must travel fast.
A little on the dramatic side
I love a good narrative, don’t get me wrong, but parts of this pitch seem to have lost all perspective. Phrases like ‘never lose another green child’, ‘it started when my good friend died’ and ‘stress affecting the mental health of growers’ are no doubt powerful and emotional, but for those of us who have lost a good friend, it had severe mental health challenges, or actually lost a human child, it seems pretty distasteful to compare the immense and almost unbearable pain of that to the loss of a houseplant.
[Slide 5] I’m sorry for your loss, Ondra, but this smacks of bad taste. Image credits: Plantee.
The full field
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