Happy New Yearand welcome to its 78th installment Pitch Deck Teardown!
This week, we take a closer look Pepper Bioof the seed pitch deck that brought the company $6.5 million. With the slogan “The End of the Untreatable,” the company is taking on a hellish challenge: Finding solutions for all those diseases that doctors can’t target well right now. Unlike CancerVax (which I ripped apart in a previous teardown because it was completely incredible), Pepper Bio has a strong team and a lot of promise.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to destroy, so if you’d like to submit your own, here’s how you can do so.
Before we dive in, I have to admit that I don’t have a deep understanding of this particular piece of biotech and had to do quite a bit of Googling to fully understand the deck. Therefore, there is a possibility that I am doing some things wrong here. This also speaks to an important point, though: your deck needs to be well-targeted to its audience, and I’m probably not the audience in this case. If I were working with Pepper as one of my pitch coaching clients, I would have encouraged them to bring the story to life much more, with examples and anecdotes that are more relatable to the general population. That being said, the simple truth is that I am not the target audience for this deck: biotech investors are.
Read Anna’s story from November for some context, and then we’ll get to the pitch deck itself:
It slides into this deck
- Cover transparency
- Transparency problem 1
- Transparency of personal history
- Group transparency
- Problematic transparency 2
- Solution slide 1
- Transparency of results
- Solution transparency 2
- Solution transparency 3
- Application transparency
- Target market transparency
- Business model transparency
- Go to the market/slide on the beach
- Timeline transparency
- Traction/Revenue Transparency 1
- Traction/Revenue Transparency 2
- Revenue view transparency
- Transparency of technology development
- Transparency of future vision
- Close slide
Three things to love
What confuses me most about this pitch deck is this some of the slides are incredibly accessible, while others are . . . Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.
A personal story
[Slide 3] Making it personal. Image credits: Pepper Bio
I love a good personal story. Connecting yourself to the problem you’re trying to solve helps bring a story to life. it prevents a narrative from becoming abstract or obtuse and enables you to speak from the heart. In this case, the CEO tells the story of their grandmother and how the lack of cures for Alzheimer’s was a sad outcome.
Obviously, I haven’t heard the voice on this slide, but I think there are many ways to improve it (a photo of said grandmother, perhaps?). However, this is a good first step.
ELI5
There’s a subreddit called Explain Like I’m 5 where people try to explain complicated topics as if the reader were a five-year-old. Pepper Bio lost me several times in this deck, but then hits us with this incredible duo of slides:
[Slide 8] Here’s the problem. Image credits: Pepper Bio
This slide is a masterpiece. It explores the problem space the company is trying to tackle in incredibly simple terms.
And then comes the mic drop:
[Slide 9] Tah-daaaah. Image credits: Pepper Bio
I love this pair of slides for their simplicity and power. They anchor the narrative and help set the scene nicely for what’s to come. In a world often loaded with deep technical language, Pepper Bio stands out for a moment.
The mother of all market sizes
[Slide 11] Well, the market is certainly quite large. Image credits: Pepper Bio
This slide is, both visually and in terms of content, a masterpiece. It identifies three major therapeutic areas with significant market opportunities: oncology, neurodegenerative diseases and inflammatory diseases. The financial figures provided are quite impressive, indicating strong annual growth rates for each category.
Of particular note is the startup’s recognition of oncology as a market worth $201 billion in 2021 and a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 9.7%. This indicates a deep understanding of a sector that is in critical need of innovation and holds significant economic promise. The stark statistic that one in six people worldwide die from cancer highlights the profound impact that developments in this field could have.
It then repeats similar numbers for neurodegenerative diseases and inflammatory diseases, each with huge market sizes and promising growth rates.
Overall, the slide does a great job of highlighting Pepper Bio’s potential reach and impact in areas that are not only huge financially, but also critical to global health. A hell of a combination.
Now, of course, the company does it must prove that it is not spreading itself too thin and that it makes sense to operate in all these market segments. But that’s a trick: Overall, this is one of the best market size slides I’ve ever seen.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Pepper Bio could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
