This is the Include pitch deck to raise their EUR2m seed round in 2019 for their smart bench startup. It seems this is a teaser deck and not the full deck- this probably partially explains why it’s terrible.
Whilst I don’t like the deck, I appreciate the hustle of the founder Ivan Mrvoš. “When I started at 19, I didn’t know anything about business.” He bootstrapped with a loan from his grandmother and sold his electric guitar and to produce his first smart bench. I respect the hustle and grind.
About Include
Include is a high-tech startup located in Solin, Croatia. They launched the first smart bench in Europe in 2015 and sold almost 100 units in the first year. Their vision is to become world’s leader in creating new and innovative solutions for everyday citizens needs.
Include makes money from selling the benches. In the future, it plans to expand its lineup to include bus stops and trash cans that will also be able to display ads. It eventually hopes to make money from selling advertisements and from offering companies access to the software it’s built to run and manage ads on its products’ displays. Mrvoš has the dubious goal of creating an advertising network in the physical world that has the reach that Facebook or Google has online today.
Funding Rounds
Include raised approx EUR2m. The funds came from a combination of private and venture-capital investment, and a crowdfunding campaign on the equity investing platform.
Pitch deck review summary
This isn’t a great deck. The content is very lightweight. It’s pretty well designed but it would be a hard pass from me.
Structured Summary Review
Words
The amount of words per slide is generally decent. I hate the lightweight font. It makes it hard to read. The about slide has the most text and frankly, you can write the number of benches they sold in a graph.
Slide length
At 13 slides, the length is on the short end. They don’t have enough content to illustrate the opportunity and convince me that they have a solid go-to-market plan.
Headers
Headers are terrible. Sometimes there aren’t any at all. They simply have the shortest grunt of allusion to what the slide is.
Appearance
The deck looks pretty but is actually a bit hard to read. They probably hired a designer. Content is king.
Narrative
There is no narrative. It’s a series of slides thrown together.
Structure
Things are aligned well. There is negative space. For the content they have, it’s good. There just isn’t that much content.
Slides
They don’t cover everything that they need to. Do you even know what problem they are solving? No, they don’t touch that curveball. There’s nothing on how they are going to build the business. Nothing on the market size…. it’s a rubbish deck.
Slide by Slide Review
The cover is fine. I normally add a tagline. If you have some interesting product images, they are good too. Writing ‘Company Presentation’ is totally pointless.
This is what you call a wall of text. You never want to see these, let alone paragraphs. They are not fun to read and no one wants to.
It is good to start out with what you do so investors don’t have to guess, but this is not the best way.
Next… why is there a copywrite sign in the footer? Weird.
I’m not sure how a timeline is terribly instructive. I would really expect the problem to be dealt with first. If you have numbers repeating in a time series this should be illustrated in a graph.
No one really cares about awards. They are the poor man’s version of traction. But if that’s all you have to sell, then you sell what you have. I’m a judge for CESA… so no comment.
A picture of the whole team is not useful at all. I want to know who I am investing in and why they are the best possible team in the world to solve this. They roped in a bunch of homeless people and dressed them up for all I know.
I guess this is a product slide? It doesn’t tell me much.
Don’t write text vertically- it’s a pain in the ass to turn your head around to read.
I don’t know what Steora is. I am going to guess they are product variations.
I’m going to guess this is the next product they are going to ship. I don’t know, they haven’t said.
I want to know about the distribution contracts. Selling in multiple markets doesn’t tell me anything- it could illustrate they are unfocused.
Don’t know what the point of the usage stats is?
A pitch deck is to sell. Stating some numbers doesn’t sell.
Am I old or is it really hard to read the text on the slide? It’s tiny! Don’t be that dude.
Well, here you go. This deck is a teaser it seems. They have a larger deck. They just shared this shorter version for PR reasons I am going to guess. It’s not super useful, tbh.
Deck Collection
See the rest of the collection here:
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