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Almanac pitch deck to raise $9m seed round

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Almanac pitch deck to raise $9m seed round

This is the Almanac pitch deck to raise a $9m seed round in 2021.

Some confidential information has been removed from the slides.

About

Almanac is a collaborative documentation tool that helps teams do their best work. Almanac saves users time at work by making it fast and easy to discover, customize, and collaborate on knowledge for 15 different roles in technology. Almanac’s mission is to democratize access to 21st-century skills, insights, and tools so that no one is limited by knowledge in pursuit of their potential.

It was founded in 2019 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Months before the coronavirus pandemic hit the US, open-source platform Almanac raised $2 million in seed funding, then closed another round of $7 million in May according to Crunchbase. CEO and cofounder Adam Nathan estimated at least 70% of their pitches in this round were done over the phone or video conferencing.

The company predicts that nearly all full-time work will move online over the next century and positions software developers as the pioneers of this transition.

Now, as the workplace and boardroom have gone remote, more investor meetings must take place online.

Almanac’s founders started the pitching process over email by sending their pitch deck in advance. Investors were already sold on the company by the time they got on the phone.

“Before they even heard about the product, they understood the market and the user and the pain point,” Nathan told Business Insider. “I think a lot of that was due to the effectiveness of the deck.”

Almanac shared its pitch deck exclusively with Business Insider. Nathan walked us through the slides, divided into three major parts, and gave his top pitch advice for entrepreneurs.

Funding rounds

Announced Date  Transaction Name  Number of Investors  Money Raised  Lead Investors 
May 28, 2020 Seed Round – Almanac 9 $9M Floodgate
Nov 29, 2019 Seed Round – Almanac $2M
Apr 1, 2019 Pre Seed Round – Almanac 3

Pitch deck review summary

 

Structured summary review

Words

They don’t go overboard with the words. It’s pretty solid.

Slide length

There are 22 slides in total which is fine.

Headers

They have consistent headers which is great. I think the font size is a little large, but generally it’s good.

Appearance

The design is solid. It’s about as designed as you want it. I like it.

Narrative

This is an example of best practice. If you only read the header of each slide you can sort of tell what the story is. This is critical and something almost no startup does in their pitch deck well.

Structure

It’s great that the headers are always in the same place. Body content is generally structured well. They’ve clearly used a designer because some font becomes so small it’s barely legible.  There are some decent learnings to be had on how to structure slides here, though I’m not sure about all the content.

Slides

For an earlier stage company they do a pretty solid job in covering everything that they need to.

Slide by slide review

One of the biggest mistakes Nathan sees entrepreneurs make in their pitch decks is introducing their product in the first slides. Instead, they should tell a story to create empathy around the trend, customer, and pain points.

The cover should have the company name. Also, remove the date as it only serves as a reminder as to how long they have been raising.

Almanac Pitch Deck

According to Nathan, a founder’s goal should be to tell investors how the world is changing and communicate what they see in the future. Almanac’s pitch deck achieves this goal by priming investors for the solution the company is building.

“There’s already a group of people who are living in the future who are developers and everybody else is living in this past that is very, very painful,” he said.

This is one of the few decks I’ve seen where they actually start off by explaining what is happening in the industry. This is important to set the scene for investors.

The content is good. They tell you what the point is above the charts. The text on the three circles is a little hard to read but is acceptable.

Almanac Pitch Deck

I feel that having 5 points is a little too much. It feels like too much text.

The headers above the 5 points are a little small. You typically want headers to be larger than the body copy.

Almanac Pitch Deck

This slide is well done. You would need a designer to make up the 3 images. I personally don’t like using designers as I want to be able to quickly change something if I need to.

Almanac Pitch Deck

I don’t quite understand the problem to relate, but the slide is very good.

Almanac Pitch Deck

I presume the 0 coming off the 2,36 is from a PPT to PDF conversion. Watch out as these things can happen. Don’t presume a conversion to PDF will always be perfect. I suspect it’s to do with the fonts used.

The font headers of “as an individual” and “as a company” are too small and faint. If you are going to write something, it should be legible- otherwise, why is it there?

This slide isn’t as well done. It takes a bit of time to see what the point is. I like to be boring and put everything in boxes with a clear body header which makes the point.

Almanac Pitch Deck

There’s no need to sneak in the “until now” at the top.

I feel this slide should explain the product in 3/4 steps. Give investors a clear idea of how the product provides value. It would look similar to slide 5.

The description should have its own slide at the start. It’s what I call a one-liner.

Almanac Pitch Deck

Once you’ve laid out the trend and problem, investors want to know why your team is positioned to solve it and lead a company. Investors are betting on the decision-making abilities of the founding team more than they’re betting on the product, Nathan said.

“Every experienced investor knows that the product’s going to change. They’re really trying to assess, do I trust this person to be able to recognize when to shift and then to be able to execute well through that pivot,” he said.

Nathan built a strong management team early on, which showed investors that he could recruit high-caliber leaders. “Beyond raising money and setting a vision, the number one job of a CEO is to recruit a team,” he said.

The slide is solid but 6 people on a slide is a bit much. I would either kill a few people or make 2 slides.

It’s more important to have slides easy to read than a shorter deck.

v

After showcasing the team, Almanac’s next slide talks about the customers already on board and provides quotes from them to illustrate traction. The results of the product will speak louder than the product itself, Nathan said. “People care about the product but only if it really works.”

Almanac Pitch Deck

Slide is solid, but they have squeezed 2 points under each chart which is a bit messy. If the points were important I would have compressed the chart to create some negative space.

Almanac Pitch Deck

Nathan said the third major set of slides finally brings in your product and how it solves the aforementioned problem. He talked first about market size and trends, which in Almanac’s case is the transition of professional work to digital platforms, with 100 million people moving to online work.

In Nathan’s experience, market is the most important factor for most early-stage investors. “Most investors believe that an average product in a huge market will still be a bigger success than an extraordinary product in a small market,” he said.

Almanac Pitch Deck

An effective pitch will understand the mindset of the investor who ultimately wants assurance that the business can generate thousands in returns. That’s why Almanac framed many of its product slides around the potential objections and questions investors might have.

For example, slide seven explains how Almanac works as a hub for documents with a searchable database and structured collaboration. One objection investors may have is how the company would source this information. Slide ten goes on to show how Almanac quickly sources its knowledge from credible contributors at top companies.

Similarly, slide 11 gives a demo of how versioning and branching works with documents instead of code. And slide 12 shows the features that facilitate a seamless workflow and organization.

The slide is fine. It reminds me of a slide Canva did.

This is a flywheel. It’s a little hard to understand and frankly, I don’t really buy it. I don’t see how this really builds defensibility.

Again I think there is a conversion issue messing up the %s. Again, I don’t really buy these as being flywheels. They just look like engagement metrics.

These competitive landscape slides are a little dangerous as they say we do everything, which can imply a lack of focus. Do they have all the functionality of Airtable? I doubt it but this sort of seems to be what they are saying, or are they? I am not sure.

How can they easily try? There is no free tier?

Are there any actuals on the slide showing they have been growing at 30%+ month already? The slide is a bit dumb. Anyone can say they plan on growing at whatever rate that they feel like.

The slide is a bit hard to understand. They are saying they think they will be as large as a payments company (Stripe)?

How do they generate economies of scale? Economies in what? And bundled services make them defensible? There is a lot of smart speak jargon here and I’m not sure I buy any of it.

For milestones, they have set out a roadmap for releasing features. If you are raising to really focus on building the product this isn’t a bad idea.

Almanac Pitch Deck

Pointless slide. People know when a deck is done.

Almanac Pitch Deck

Nathan said entrepreneurs make the common mistake of serving their own objectives in their decks to show off how great their products are. Instead, he advises to design a deck around the data points investors need to say yes and strip out anything that doesn’t serve that purpose.

“Think about an investor who walks into a room with our PowerPoint on the screen. They’re probably sceptical. They may be tired. They’ve probably seen a lot of decks. And what we want to do at the end of the meeting is to get them to yes.”

 

What do you think about the deck? What’s your favourite part of it?

 

 

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