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AdPushup Angel Stage

Pitch Deck Collection

Here’s the AdPushup pitch deck the team used to raise its $632k angel round with this pitch deck. They went on to raise an undisclosed series-a in 2016. They were founded in 2013.

AdPushup provides a platform to increase a site’s ad revenue using advanced i/o testing. AdPushup’s A/B testing platform allows web publishers and bloggers to create and test different ad placements, sizes, and types to see which ones make the most revenue.

The angel round participants include Kima Ventures, Wingify founder Paras Chopra, SlideShare co-founder Amit Ranjan, LinkedIn director of technology Jonathan Boutelle, Yahoo! principal data engineer and architect Sachin Arora, Avlesh Singh, CouponDunia founder Sameer Parwani, Zishaan Hayath, Krishna Jha, Ashim Mehra, Ravi Srivastava, Subham Gupta, Vikram Kapur, and Sunil Kalra. The company ran its syndicate and took all commits on the startup funding site LetsVenture.

Deck review

Positive

The AdPushup pitch deck is not actually that impressive but covers most of the required points. It is very utilitarian
The format is nice and clean. Something I encourage founders to replicate. It shows you don’t need a graphic designer if things are structured appropriately
The problem slide is a bit wordy but gets to the point. It’s good they reference their claims, which is something a lot of founders don’t do
In the ‘why now’ slide they bring up exits in the space and that they are applying a good application (a/b testing) to publishers
Providing a case study of the results is highly useful! The fact RPM was optimised 4x is a boon
The traction on the milestone page is good. They get to 10 million impressions monthly 5 months of the founders going full time

Negative

There is a lack of graphics and overly text-heavy in the AdPushup pitch deck
The problem slide doesn’t really explain the pain point well. If you understand the industry in detail this may not be such an issue, but it is limiting
The solution slide could be explained better and be more ‘outcome’ orientated
There isn’t a market size slide; it’s pushed into the why now slide, which I think is a bit limiting
The product slide is very wordy and the graphic to small. It requires quite a lot of reading to get the points. It would be better to spell them out so investors can flick through the deck more expediently
The growth on the traction slide is good but could be done in a chart and more metrics
The plan slide could easily be structured to read easier as could the founder slide
It doesn’t seem like they spent too long on the deck, which can also be a good thing if their traction is good

Reading material

Seed announcement:

https://www.iamwire.com/2014/10/delhi-based-startup-adpushup-closes-usd-632k-angel-funding/103380

Series-A announcement in Business Insider where they raised an undisclosed amount of financing led by Geniee, Inc., whose major shareholder is SoftBank Group Corp. Other investors including Purvi Capital and existing investors have also participated in the round.

https://www.businessinsider.in/This-US-based-tech-startup-just-raised-Series-A-funding-from-Japan-based-Geniee-Inc/articleshow/53600109.cms

Slide by slide review

Design is crap, but, it’s pretty great otherwise.

That’s actually funny. It’s like listening to the Olympics with a judge commentating in real-time on a diver. “Oh, their form is great” and you are like, hold up, what? It takes time to notice the details.

Logo: solid

The sub under the logo: Ok you lose me here on clarity since there is another header. There should (to me) be only one message. The statement is really solid though.

Statement: Great

My guess is the founders just pasted in their logo and didn’t consider the fact there is text there too.

Vomit. Ok, we’re doing the check the slides off game. “Problem”.

The founder didn’t get the memo that the problem slide is something you need to talk about. They just forgot to change the placeholder text.

Now look at the slide. What do you see?

You got text!

Boring as balls. No one wants to read. Rule #1 of fight club is no paragraphs (note these aren’t paragraphs, but they look like it).

Nerd alert: they nail sources. The small text at the bottom is ay oh kah.

Not going to repeat it, but they are sticking to the checklist headers! Nothing but consistent.

We have two sentences and nadda else. Oh, the joy.

Wine and dine me before you ask for the cash.

Why now matters. But let me decide that the timing is now. Don’t tell me.

Why the actual heck couldn’t they make a chart with the words?

I can tell they are smart, but there is no effort.

I take time when I work with founders to say “Look, pitch decks are a pain in the ass. They are hard. If the process is not hard, you are not trying. If you don’t want to quit, you aren’t doing a good job“.

Do you think the founders struggled to do better? To strive to do more?

Jeysus. Product time, What an opportunity to splurge out and show the product (images!). But instead, let’s write boring stuff and write instead.

The words aren’t dumb, but did you really need to make me read them?

Coolio. Case studies can be great to illustrate your business works and deliver value. But look at the slide for 2 seconds, stop, and then say what you learned.

I learned the green line had a baby and the yellow line was marginally inconvenienced but not bothered… which is sort of how things play out in real life…

Understand when you make your deck, no one knows anything about you. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t make investors think. Thinking is exhausting.