Carbon credits (and their trading) are big business, but their solutions can be unnecessarily complex. Goodcarbon has just raised 5.25 million euros (approximately $5.5 million) in funding to shake up that market. Let's take a look at the deck the company used to bring home that bag of cash.
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This deck slide
Goodcarbon has 18 slides and includes a lot of repetition. More than half of a company's pitch deck is a problem and solution section. Astute observers will have noticed that this means a lot is missing, but more on that later. Below is a list of slides. The company said it removed the slides about requesting and using funds and redacted some of the other slides as well. What's left is still a pretty decent deck:
Cover Slide Problem slide: Global context Problem slide: Market context Problem slide: The need for carbon removal Problem slide: The price of carbon credits Problem slide: Carbon credits are hard to find Solution slide: Building a carbon portfolio Solution Slide: Building a Carbon Credit Portfolio Solution Slide: Portfolio Project Example Solution Slide: How It Works Part 1 Solution Slide: How It Works Part 2 Customer Slide Traction Slide: Revenue Traction Slide: Customer Traction Slide: Supply Case Study Slide Team Slide End Slide
Three things I love about Goodcarbon's pitch deck
The key to the deck is to tell a compelling story that says, “Oh, if I miss this investment, I'm going to regret it forever.” Goodcarbon does a good job of that.
Large and growing market
Telling a good story about carbon companies is surprisingly complex. Because we need some explanation of the future that everyone knows, even if no one knows when it's coming. Goodcarbon does a great job here.
[Slide 5] The explosive increase in the cost of carbon credits means that the overall opportunity is growing huge and rapidly. Image credit: Goodcarbon
Painting a picture of something huge, inevitable, and growing is an easy way to explain that you're aiming for a noteworthy market size. If you can find a way to outline such trends in your pitch deck, you're on the right track.
Value a good portfolio approach
You know the one thing VCs are obsessed with and love? Portfolios. They practice spread risk portfolios as part of their investment thesis, and if you can convince them that you are contributing to risk mitigation through your portfolio approach, you will often have the right words. You are talking about.
[Slide 7] Are you positioning yourself as a managed risk balancing platform with a portfolio approach? Yes, very smart. Image credit: Goodcarbon
One of the big challenges with carbon offsets is that we don't necessarily know how secure these credits are. “Many of the carbon offsets currently on offer are outdated, of poor quality, and difficult to verify. According to a recent S&P Global Report, they risk increasing rather than reducing global emissions.” , what do you do when the risk is high? Diversify the risk. If one part of your portfolio deteriorates, the rest (hopefully) balances it out.
The problem, of course, is that purchasing carbon offsets and credits is already quite complex, making balancing the risks even more difficult. Goodcarbon doesn't really focus on what they do from a portfolio perspective, but in my opinion, this has been one of the most innovative and creative aspects of their business. I found a space for it in the deck and it worked out great.
Wazoo Social Proof
Goodcarbon has good traction, but that's layered with social proof, companies that trust Goodcarbon with their carbon strategies.
[Slide 12] Hey, I recognize some of the logos. Image credit: Goodcarbon
Social proof is a powerful tool in your pitch deck. Goodcarbon was fine without it, but it can't hurt. And what the company can do is stimulate a pump of some reference calls that will definitely be made between the first meeting and the investment.
Three things Goodcarbon could have done better
As I suggested above, the Goodcarbon deck is pretty decent, but there's so much information missing. Some are left out intentionally, but still, this deck won't work if you're raising money from US institutional investors.
Checklist of missing information
When I fed this deck through an AI-powered deck review tool, I got a really bad summary.
Goodcarbon slide deck summary: There is a lot of information missing. Image credit: Pitch Guide/Haje Kamps
Yes, there are many missing pieces of the puzzle.
Contest slides: Contest slides are a must. Market Development Slide: How do you approach your customers? Target Customer: First of all, who is your customer? Of course you can probably infer it from the rest of the deck, but explicitly There is no harm in showing it. A good customer persona can really help pull this together. Operating Plan: I'm a big fan of an easy-to-read operating plan, along with more detailed financials. I suspect they were left out of this material when the company submitted it to TechCrunch, but since the investors are financial people, they might as well get ahead of the conversation. Business Model: There is little in this material to explain how Goodcarbon makes money. Pricing model: or how much you charge for your services. Both are important aspects of the pitch to determine if this is a good investment. Unit economics: Unit economics (i.e., how the cost of providing a service changes as a company grows) is in the “advanced financial” stage, but for a business this complex, it can be very That would have been a good idea. include. Mort: There are so many companies out there trying to solve this problem. The fact that there is no competitive slide is one thing, but how does Goodcarbon think its business is defensible? Does it have patents? Does it have technology? What else do you do better than your competitors?
There are lots of great checklists out there for what you should include in your pitch deck (oh, and this one I made a while back). There's no excuse to leave anything out.
I have to talk about this team slide.
[Slide 17] Yeah, but… Image credit: Goodcarbon
Look at the slides above and ask yourself the following questions. Is this the perfect team to run a carbon credit company? My gut says no, so when I get to this slide on the pitch, I say to the team: Please explain to me why you are the right team for my $5.5 million. ”
Just for the record, the “correct” answer here is for the team to look at me like I'm an enraged lunatic and click back to the traction slide. “Look what we've done, you Muppets. We've proven ourselves.”
Still, this team slide could probably lift a lot more weight.
If you need this many slides to explain your problem…
To be honest, there are no great product slides anywhere on the deck. What is the product like? What are the features and functions? How much of this is actually built compared to Figma's fictitious one? But I'm not too harsh on Goodcarbon about it. I'm not going to evaluate it. However, the reason I bring this up is: The company devoted more than half of the deck to problem and solution slides.
Let's think from an investor's perspective. It took him five slides to convince them that (a) this is a problem, (b) this is a high-impact problem, and (c) this is a problem worth solving. Do you really think it's necessary?
The company says that by condensing its 10 problem and solution slides into two or three slides and highlighting only what's new or unusual about how the company approaches the problem, it can reduce almost a quarter of its pitch deck. You could have deleted it. The truth is that if investors in this space don't have a firm grasp of the issue of climate change and its impacts, they won't invest in it anyway. Don't waste your breath or pixels trying to convince us otherwise. Instead, just get to the point.
full pitch deck
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