Carbon credits (and their trading) are big business, but they can be unnecessarily complicated to sort out. Good carbon just raised a €5.25 million (about $5.5 million) round. to put a dent in this market. Let’s take a look at the deck the company used to bring home that bag of cash.
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It slides into this deck
Goodcarbon has an 18 slide deck that has a lot of repetition in it; more than half of the company’s pitch deck is the problem and solution section. The eagle among you will have realized that this means a lot is missing, but we’ll get to that. Below is a list of the slides. The company says it has removed the request and use of funds slides, while some of the other slides have also been modified. What’s left behind is still a pretty decent deck:
- Cover transparency
- Problem transparency: Global context
- Problem transparency: market context
- Problematic transparency: The need to decarbonize
- Problematic transparency: The price of carbon credits
- Problem transparency: Carbon credits are hard to come by
- Solution Transparency: Carbon Portfolio Building
- Solution Transparency: Building Carbon Credit Portfolios
- Solution Slide: Examples of portfolio projects
- Solution slide: How it works part 1
- Solution Transparency: How it works part 2
- Customer transparency
- Adhesion Transparency: Income
- Adhesion transparency: Customers
- Drag Slide: Supply
- Case study slide
- Group transparency
- Close slide
Three things to love about Goodcarbon’s pitch deck
Decks are all about telling a compelling story that paints the picture that says, “Um, if you lose this investment, you’ll really regret it for the rest of your life.” Goodcarbon does a good job on this front.
A large and growing market
It’s surprisingly complicated to tell good stories about coal companies because it always involves a degree of describing a future that everyone knows it is coming, even though no one knows never comes. Goodcarbon does a great job here:
Painting a picture of something huge, inevitable, and growing is an easy way to explain that you’re aiming for a market size worth paying attention to. If you can find a way to describe such a trend in your pitch deck, you’re on the right track.
Gotta love a good portfolio approach
You know one thing VCs really love? Briefcases. They live and breathe spread risk portfolios as part of their investment theses, and if you are able to convince them that you are helping reduce risk through a portfolio approach, you are often speaking the right language.
One of the big challenges with carbon offsets is that you don’t necessarily know how safe those credits are. “Many of the carbon offsets offered today are outdated, of poor quality or difficult to verify. They risk boosting global emissions rather than curbing them,” according to recent S&P Global report. So what do you do when the risk is high? Spread the risk – if one part of your portfolio goes down, the rest will (hopefully) balance things out.
The problem, of course, is that carbon offsetting and the credit market are already complicated enough, so balancing the risk is even more difficult. Goodcarbon does not that much of the portfolio angle of what she does, but it’s been one of the most innovative and creative aspects of her business, in my opinion. Glad I found room for it on the deck.
Social proof out the wazoo
Goodcarbon has a few super traction, but overlays it with social proof: companies that trust good carbon with their carbon strategy.
Social proof is a powerful tool in a pitch deck. Goodcarbon would be fine without it, but it can’t hurt – and what the company could do is prime the pump for some of the reference calls that undoubtedly happen between the initial meeting and the investment.
Three things Goodcarbon could have improved
As hinted above, the Goodcarbon deck is pretty decent, but it’s there So a lot of information is missing. Some of this is left out on purpose, but even then, this deck wouldn’t fly if you were drawing from a US institutional investor.
A checklist of missing information
I fed this deck through our AI powered deck review tool and it gave a pretty devastating summary:
Yes, many puzzle pieces are missing.
- Competitive transparency: You by all means a competition slide is needed.
- Go-to-market transparency: How will you reach your customers?
- Target customer: But first who? is your customers? Of course, you can probably infer this from the rest of the deck, but there’s no harm in being specific. Good customer personalities really help pull it together.
- Functional design: I’m a big fan of an easy-to-read operating plan in addition to the more detailed financials. I’m guessing they were left out of that deck when the company pitched it to TechCrunch, but the investors are finance people, so you might as well catch up on that discussion.
- Business model: There is very little in this deck that explains how Goodcarbon will make money.
- Pricing model: Or how much he charges for his services. Both are critical aspects of a pitch to know if it is a good investment.
- Unit Finances: Unit economics (ie, how the cost of providing your service changes as your company grows) is toward the “advanced economics” end of the scale, but for a business of this complexity, it would be a very good idea to include .
- Moat: There are an awful lot of companies trying to solve this problem. The fact that there is no competition transparency is one thing, but how does Goodcarbon see its business being defended? Are there any patents? is there technology? Is there anything else that sets it ahead of its competitors?
There are tons of great checklists for what to do in a pitch deck (oh hey, here’s one I created earlier), and there’s no excuse for leaving anything out.
We need to talk about this team slide
Take a look at the slide above and ask yourself: Is this the perfect slam-dunk team to run a carbon credit company? My gut says no, so when we get to that slide on the pitch, I would say to the team, “Okay, so you’ve convinced me that this is a problem worth solving. Explain to me why you are the right team for my $5.5 million.”
For the record, the “correct” response here would be for the team to look at me like I’m a raving lunatic and click back on the grip slide. “Look what we did, papa. We have proven ourselves.”
However, this team slide could do a lot more heavy lifting.
If you need so many slides to explain the problem…
Honestly, there isn’t really good product transparency anywhere in the deck. What does the product look like? What are the features and functionality? How much of it is actually built versus a figma figma? But I’m not going to cut Goodcarbon too hard for it. But what I will grill it for is this: The company spent more than half its deck on the problem and solution slides.
Put yourself in the investors’ shoes: Do you really think it takes five slides to convince them that (a) this is a problem, (b) this is a problem with huge impact, and (c) this is a problem worth solving?
The company could have removed nearly a quarter of its pitch deck by summarizing the 10 problem and solution slides in two or three slides, highlighting only the things that might be new or unusual about how the company approaches the problem. The truth is that if an investor in this space It does not suit fully aware of the problem and impact of climate change, they are not going to invest anyway. Don’t waste your breath or your pixels trying to convince them otherwise. instead, just get to the point.
The full field
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