This is the Bespoken Spirits pitch deck to raise a $2.6m seed round in 2020.
About
Bespoken Spirits is a food and beverage company that has developed technology to precisely tailor spirits for aroma, color, and taste in just days. Its proprietary ACTivation technology makes it possible to extract the key elements of the barrel that enhance aroma, color, and taste (ACT) but with precision, control, and speed.
It was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
The Silicon Valley-based firm is working to disrupt the global spirits industry, which experts at business analysis firm MarketLine say could be worth more than $800 billion globally by 2022.
In order to acquire their distinct flavors, spirits like rum or whisky usually have to be matured in sealed barrels for months or years at a time.
But Bespoken Spirits says its technology can reproduce the same taste in a matter of days.
“The traditional spirits production process is outdated, imprecise, unpredictable, unsustainable, and inefficient,” said Janousek, a material scientist and former exec at Bloom Energy.
“The barrel aging process costs billions of dollars in lost product and limits ability to pivot along with consumer tastes and demands,” he added. “We’ve reimagined the process with modern science and sustainable technology, using the same all-natural elements of wood, toast, and char.”
The firm’s backers include TJ Rodgers, the billionaire and Silicon Valley luminary, and professional baseball icon and businessman Derek Jeter.
Funding Rounds
| Announced Date | Transaction Name | Number of Investors | Money Raised | Lead Investors |
| Oct 7, 2020 | Seed Round – Bespoken Spirits | 2 | $2.6M | — |
Pitch Deck Review Summary
Structured Summary Review
Words
They are acceptable on the word count front. I would take a scalpel rather than a machete to their deck.
Slide length
There’s whatever 12 slides. This is on the very short end. It’s not long enough to do a good job.
Headers
They are a step above rubbish decks. They use their teenage words, but not their big-boy words. I am obsessed about how one should use headers in a deck to make life easy for investors.
Appearance
They have an aesthetic. There is likely a designer involved. I don’t like the design, mainly because I don’t like dark backgrounds.
The thing I want you to know is you don’t need a crazy fancy deck. An ugly but structured deck works well if it is easy to read. Content is king.
Narrative
There is basically no narrative in the deck. The slide order is not correct.
Structure
The structure is acceptable but not great. I think there was a designer involved at some point but the founders did it themselves.
For normal people (non ex-IBD/consulting people- you go through hell learning to make PPT) they do a solid enough job.
Slides
They do not cover nearly enough slides that I care about. They have an approach which is interesting to me and which I would like to know about, but they don’t explain anything enough and how I would like it.
Slide by Slide Review
Don’t write the date. It reminds investors how long you have been raising.
Start with what you do, not anything else (including market size).
The only text vaguely useful is in the grey bot, but none of that is backed up by anything.
Their key trends are total garbage. No shite, the pandemic happened, but so what?
Ok, I have to read a mini-essay to get to the point, but there is the foundation of something interesting here. It is just not expressed well. I would explain how things are done now and then why things don’t make sense. As an investor, that’s super interesting to me and shows you as a founder know their business (industry).
Your deck isn’t just about what you write, it serves to illustrate a lot of things about the founding team. It’s an essay to explain why and I’ve done that somewhere already.
The barrel method needs to be introduced first. They would have done this if they had structured up their narrative properly.
Eh, the content on the slide is interesting, but so what? Why do I care if there is wastage in the industry? I give precisely zero flarks.
If you are selling better booze, I want to know why you will break in and sell lots of it. I’ve not heard people state the issue with booze is low-profit margins. The issue is normally selling more.
Don’t go off on seemingly interesting tangents. Stick to the boring basics about how you will make oodles of money.
Don’t do big black boxes like this. They are jarring and frankly a huge waste of toner if someone prints your deck. I’ve always hated waste.
Flow charts are good in general. They take a bit of time but are generally instructive. This slide is poorly designed.
Look at the bottom with “Bespoken ACTivation Tech”, it is just randomly inserted there. It’s a bit odd.
The slide could be good, but it’s not quite right.
Interesting slide, but it comes out of left field. You need to set up the problems before you explain how you solve them. They bang on about how they are going to fix booze, but they haven’t explained why they need to do so first.
Generally, I like the rule of three, the structure of the slide is solid, though it is a bit wordy.
They had 4 bullets on MaaS on the last slide. Did they add this much more on this slide to justify another?
They are repeating a bit again. The upshot of this slide might be about their GTM through distribution channels. They don’t have a specific GTM slide in the deck.
It’s a starter for a traction slide, but I would expect a lot more in a deck.
They allocate a lot of space to a picture. Is the text or the pic more important?
Pretty sure this slide would make sense at the start of the deck, you know, to explain what they do?
It’s not a great slide.
WTF is this slide about?
WTF is this slide about?
Pointless slide.
Deck Collection
See the rest of the collection here:
Comments (0)
There are no comments yet :(