If you’ve been following my Friday posts, I’ve been building up the story of Good Neighbors, a startup I invented. It must not be a good idea because no one has stolen the idea. Now the pitch deck is done I can do a proper teardown of the complete story.
One change I made was replacing my generic slide titles with full sentences. I should have done this to start with. Writing the titles first makes you hit the key points. When you read all the titles out loud it should form a complete story.
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I’m going to pretend to have a first impression and critique how the story is told, ways it could be better and questions that come up. We’ll see if I can be my own worst critic!
The Teardown
Good info on the title page and helpful to know they’re early, but have traction and some customers already. Boring 1-liner but at least I know what they do. The yellow background is burned into my retinas.
Looks like this is about sharing things (like lawnmowers) that people have but don’t use all the time. This is a pretty simplistic slide that could have used one more level of detail. I do get the idea though. People have a lot of stuff.
They obviously didn’t invent geo-tagging or image search. So I want to know how they integrate those technologies in novel ways. I like the emphasis on walking distance though: constraints = focus.
Mobile app, check. But I definitely want to test their “1-click” claim in my own garage. Insurance and repairs answer a key objection: what if someone breaks my stuff? I want to know more about limitations: what images can’t be recognized and what things can’t be insured? How detailed their answers are will tell me a lot.
Yes there are a lot of homeowners but you can’t easily reach them. I want to really dig into their go to market slide. At least they’re saying mid-sized cities. I’m less skeptical about bartering happening in smaller cities.
This map would be more convincing with more competitors. I get that I could use Facebook or Craigslist to share my lawnmower but it would definitely be a hassle (and not worth it if I was doing it for free). Knowing your stuff is with your neighbors feels safer, and insurance means no hard feelings if something breaks. Sorry Bill.
Wow, no transaction fees so this is all about making this valuable enough to keep paying a monthly fee. A lot of people will expect this to be free. I can see the upsell potential if they can get to scale. If.
I’m skeptical about how this GTM scales, it sounds expensive. But I like that’s it’s specific. The actual dollar figures make me think they’ve actually done this and have more data to back it up. It’s only short-term focused (12 months) and could have talked more about what happens later as they scale.
Ok, these are first time founders, not world experts in the barter economy. But they have good complimentary skills and it looks like they’ve been able to achieve results without a lot of outside help. This looks like an idea the CEO has been thinking about since his lawncare business.
No revenue numbers but I care more about engagement at this stage. I’m impressed they knocked on 1000 doors. Did they get bitten by a dog? Good traction but over a short time period obviously. This slide should have included stats on word of mouth given how important that is to the GTM.
It looks like they are saying that they won’t take tons of money to be profitable. We’ll see. But at least there’s a coherent plan. This could definitely be way bigger in year 5 if they crush it.
Clear ask and next milestone. I like that they previewed the next $5M raise in the last slide. It shows they know they need to spend money to keep growing.
Overall
It’s impossible to be objectively critical about something you created. With Good Neighbors my goal was to show how to construct a story and to talk about different ways it could be done.
I could have changed the order of some of the slides to change the emphasize. There could have been more emphasis on sustainability or community being core values. In person I would literally snap photos of objects to show how easy it is. The design could have been less…yellow.
But one thing this pitch decks shows is that it’s possible to tell a story about an early stage company that balances selling the dream with a dose of reality. It’s not impossible.
Post a comment if you can think of even better ways to tell this story. Or send me your pitch deck if you want to be part of my next teardown.
Subscribe for free to receive weekly posts about pitching, a copy of my ebook Pitching a Leap of Faith, and invites to my Pitch Masterclass.
