There is no shortage of tools to brainstorm, collaborate and keep all your knowledge in one place. Still, judging by the number of new tools that hit the market on a regular basis, it seems that people are getting frustrated with the tools available.
Scrintal recently raised $1 million to build its visual collaborative knowledge base and shared its deck so we can take a look under the hood.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own pitch decks here’s how to do it.
Slides into this deck
- Cover slide
- Problem slide part 1
- Problem slide part 2
- Solution slide part 1
- Solution slide part 2
- Value proposition slide
- Scrolling user testimonials
- Traction slide
- Revenue slide
- Retention slide
- User profile slide
- Growth projection slide
- Vision slide
- The question slide
- Contact slide
- Appendices cover slide
- Appendix 1: Why now?
- Appendix 2: Competitive landscape
- Appendix 3: Product and growth model
Three things to love
Scrintal enters a busy and chaotic market; without actually trying, I can name five or six established competitors in that field. The good news is that the company seems to know that and is tackling its benefits head-on.
Clarity of the value proposition
[Slide 6] Having a clear value helps tell the story. Image credits: Schrintal
Promising a 10x faster operating speed is a great claim, and as an aspiring investor I’d like to see some proof – but the story is very well told. This value proposition slide comes after a pretty thorough examination of the problem space and the solution the company is building, giving great clarity to what the tool does and who it does it for.
Storytelling to explain the benefits
[Slide 7] Scrintal does a great job of letting his early clients tell most of the stories. Image credits: Schrintal
Letting your users tell your story for you is one such obvious storytelling technique, often used in sales pitches. It’s remarkably rarely used in VC pitch decks, which I think is a huge shame. Here, Scrintal uses its customer testimonials to highlight various selling points and benefits in a way that feels seamless and elegant.
The stats on the slide (66% fewer apps used, 50% less time spent, 30% fewer meetings) tell part of the story. The headlines tell another. The quotes are helpful in fleshing out the story even further, and even a quick run through the job titles of the people sharing the testimonials helps to get a sense of how broadly the companies are able to take advantage of Scrintal.
I assume the places where it says “username” has been redacted and the “real” deck shows the names and companies using the product, but even without that it shows how well you can use testimonials and user interviews to your advantage.
For startups, this slide is a lesson in creative thinking about sharing your journey to date with potential investors.
I’m not in love with how much text is on this slide – you wouldn’t want to use this for a presentation deck – but it’s a great slide for a home deck. It adds a lot of context and does so in a way that is super easy to understand, even without a voiceover or additional information.
A bold vision
[Slide 13] Including a clear vision for the near future is helpful. Image credits: Schrintal
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This slide isn’t strictly a sight slide – it does much more than that. It shows what some of the competitors’ valuations are and examines the nature of those competitors’ business models. It shares the trajectory of its plan (although the step functions from visual operating system to machine learning to workspace to visual knowledge base are a bit unclear to me). That said, in a pitch context I see this as a useful slide to steer some conversations with the investors in the right direction.
However, this slide is not a complete slam dunk and there are a few things that could be improved. I wish the vision was clearer: “transform the way 1B+ people create ideas” is rather light-hearted. Yes, the company wants to transform it, but from what to what, and why? It’s also a bit confusing to me why the company only talks about the European market – it’s a big world out there, and the company’s prices are in US dollars, so seeing the “platform expansion” limit is confusing.
In the rest of this teardown, we take a look at three things Scrintal could have improved or done differently, along with his full pitch deck!
Three things that can be improved
One of the most important things investors look for when evaluating a startup is whether it has the ability to step-by-step reduce the risks of what it does. A million dollars isn’t a huge fundraising round by most standards, and the company is probably in the earliest stages of its value creation journey. That means the deck needs to make something pretty clear: what is it doing at the current stage to prove some of its hypotheses? Unfortunately, the Scrintal deck is a bit lacking on that front.
