CommandBar, a B2B tool designed to make software easier to use, closed $4.8 million in funding in 2021 with one of the boldest minimalist decks I've ever seen. The deck only has seven slides and is missing a ton of really important information, but that didn't stop Thrive Capital and Y Combinator from opening their checkbooks.
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This deck slide
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- Problem/Conflict Situation Slide
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3 things to love
Even among decks with fairly narrow pitches, there are some notable innovations.
Information design, not graphic design
I've long thought that design is far less important than people think when it comes to early-stage pitch decks. This is not surprising. The main purpose of a pitch is to communicate your startup's potential to potential investors. These elements are fundamentally rooted in the content and clarity of the message, rather than the aesthetics of the presentation.
That doesn't mean design isn't important, but startups should pay more attention to information design (i.e., whether the content is easy to consume and read) than graphic design. Early stage investors are primarily focused on substance rather than style. They are looking for compelling business ideas with strong market potential and teams who can execute those ideas.
Too much focus on design often leads to misallocation of valuable resources early on. Start-ups typically operate under tight budget constraints, and spending significant time and money designing a pitch deck may not be the best use of limited resources. Your time and effort would be better spent validating your business idea, conducting market research, and improving your product or service. If you have talented designers on staff, give them free reign. However, keep in mind that good pitch deck design is a highly specialized field in itself, and other design disciplines may not be as transferable as you think. .
CommandBar gets around this by essentially not designing a deck at all. In doing so, the company created stacks of slides that are concise and easy to ingest.
[Slide 1] What about being a minimalist? image credits: Command bar
If you're using pitch deck revision 900 and can't get your design completely right, less may be more.
An elegant combination of problems and competitive environment
I've been perusing pitch decks for years, and I can't say I've ever seen a combination of the slide in question and a competitor's slide, but in this case it worked.
[Slide 5] These go well together. image credits: Command bar
Startup founders are always looking for ways to make their pitch decks stand out to potential investors. In this case, CommandBar integrated the competitive situation and problem slides to create a new interpretation.
Yes, the design is utilitarian, but combining two slides makes your presentation crisp and helps you do something different. In other words, it consistently represents what your company is about. Deep market understanding and unique value of our solutions.
The most effective part of this slide is that it shows that CommandBar can take on a very large market. The company doesn't have a market size slide (boo!), but you can get an idea from this slide example. WalkMe has a market capitalization of $830 million. Zendesk last raised a valuation of $10 billion, according to PitchBook data. As of the last investment round, Intercom and FullStory were valued by investors at $900 million and $1.8 billion, respectively. Back-of-the-napkin math says CommandBar is targeting a market of at least $13 billion. Don't dress too dirty.
There are several benefits to merging these slides, but I want to emphasize that clarity is important. Make sure your slides are not crammed with information. The aim is not to confuse, but to increase understanding and engagement. Careful design and content selection is essential for this strategy to work. Also, don’t forget that more and more VCs are using AI to read their pitch materials to do the initial sifting. My own AI-based pitch deck tool was confused by this slide and incorrectly identified it as a customer slide. Although it has many uses, pitch materials must be machine-readable.
simplicity
Many founders have trouble expressing what their company does and who it serves. Of course: course Startups are complex and full of nuances. But investors don't need that level of precision in the weeds, especially when looking at startups for the first time. His second slide for CommandBar breaks the temptation of complexity and provides:
[Slide 2] Summarize your purpose in as few words as possible. image credits: Command bar
Product-driven pitches rarely work well, but CommandBar is different here. It is described as a “search-based interface for interacting with software.” whatexplains how to enable “Configure command bars in web apps.” how. “Level Up Your UX” shows why CommandBar can benefit your business. This is great and shows that the founder really understands his CommandBar. why.
3 things you can improve
Clever innovations aside, this deck leaves a lot to be desired.
Team slide has no team
[Slide 7] where is the team? image credits: Command bar
Princeton, McKinsey, Bain Capital, and AngelList are all impressive, but this slide shows nothing about why CommandBar's founding team is the best team to run this company. That's not all. The Team His slide is often the most important slide in the deck. You should highlight your team's deep experience, connections, or anything else that gives this particular startup a competitive edge.
Information is missing
This deck doesn't contain enough information to know if it's venture-sized or not. I have no idea how big the market is. No funds are requested or used. The team is missing. There is no financial plan, no business model, no go-to-market plan. There are no clear pricing or unit economics. It's not clear who the target customer is, how this company can be defended, or why now is the best time to start one.
Image credits: Haje Kamps
For reference, my AI-powered pitch deck tool gave this deck a 16.9% chance of raising money.
needs traction
CommandBar's deck doesn't have any real traction indicators, but that's not great. Even if there is no revenue, at least some work has been done to reduce the company's risk. That's traction. Report it and display it as a graph.
what happened?
CommandBar likely raised the round with no deck at all, and investors may have come into the pitch knowing more about the company than seen here. Perhaps this team is exceptional and the investors knew this because they had invested in previous companies or had contact with the founders in the past. Perhaps the company had a compelling demo when it joined Y Combinator.
We asked the founding team what actually happened.
“Vinay, Richard, and I are overthinkers, so we created some principles before writing the seed deck,” said James Evans, CEO and co-founder of CommandBar. The company took an unusual policy. “We looked at Seed Deck as a memo to ourselves about why self-professed smart people who have so many other things to do with their time should invest the next 10+ years of their blood and sweat. Tears for the company. If it's clear and we can rationally convince it, then it should be easy to get that message across and attract capital. And if it's not… So why me in the first place? Did we waste our time raising money for this company?”
Evans actually dismantled his own deck in a recent blog post, which is a great behind-the-scenes read (which I hadn't read until writing the teardown above). Ta). He said he doesn't know if the company will raise the next round of funding (shhh), but said it raised the next round without a deck, saying, “This was not a traditional process.” .
When TechCrunch asked Itai Chidon why, he said, “What led us to the A's was a series of factors that were present at seeding: a team with big ambition and clear thinking. , and it was a product that was clearly loved by customers and became popular.” Series A round has ended. “Good customer traction early on with some marquee logos certainly helped.”
full pitch deck
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