BoostUp Seed Stage

This is the BoostUp pitch deck to raise a $6.3m seed round in 2020.

About

BoostUp.ai’s Connected Revenue Intelligence & Operations platform is designed to help sales teams achieve forecasting accuracy, efficiency, predictability, and growth across the entire sales process. BoostUp.ai accelerates revenue performance with a single connected experience across revenue operations and digital revenue intelligence creating complete transparency, automating processes, and identifying risk and opportunity in the pipeline while improving forecasting rigor and accuracy. This drives team efficiency, leads to a high-performing sales team, and boosts sales execution and revenue.

Data analytics technology lets businesses collect and quickly analyze large swathes of information for insights into areas like increasing revenue or finding new customers.

BoostUp sells a platform that takes that idea one step further by handling even unstructured data from communications such as emails, Slack chats, Zoom calls, or social media posts. It then uses machine learning to make “very predictable, extremely efficient, and transparent” suggestions, BoostUp CEO and cofounder Sharad Verma told Business Insider.

For example, the BoostUp platform can analyze historical data from a wide range of sources to determine what makes a business deal successful or not.

Funding Rounds

Pitch Deck Review Summary

Structured Summary Review

This is a better deck than many. They’ve put in some work. They do some of the right things, but not consistently and particularly well. There are certainly some things to be learned.

Words

Use of words is ok, but they need to explain a number of slides in more detail.

Slide length

The deck is on the short end, particularly when you account for the fact that around 4 slides are build-up slides.

Headers

They attempt to do headers well but don’t completely succeed. They have the right idea though.

Appearance

If they used a designer, they got a cheap one. I hate using slide backgrounds to add design. It just makes things hard to read – don’t do it.

Generally, things aren’t particularly designed, but they are designed adequately. You really don’t have to do too much fancy in your deck.

Narrative

There is a form of a narrative and slides are broadly in the correct order. The headers need to be improved to construct a better narrative.

Structure

Typically slides are structured well. The second slide is a mess. Most of the slides are as good as you need to deliver.

Slides

There are a number of slides missing for me to have a solid view of whether this business is investible.

Slide by Slide Review

The cover is fine, but the text is a bit verbose. Just get to the point on the cover and quit with the sales BS.

Don’t put background images in the background. It makes reading hard and adds zero value at all.

They need to start out by explaining the industry. They just drop a bomb and expect us to know what is going on.

The content sort of is fine, but I just feel a bit of ick. I want founders to prove things not just make claims (unless the points are obvious).

Ergh, never write text on the vertical as you can see on the right.

Don’t capitalize words for emphasis. It is always SHOUTING.

The header is wordy but it is more how I like them than the garbage way most write.

I like 3. It makes for a great slide structure. Ideally, there would only be 3 bullets each but 4 is ok. I like that they get to the point but I’m not taken with them. They don’t speak to me.

For some reason, the header font size has expanded like my belly tends to do over Christmas, and basically every weekend after a booze-up. Be consistent. Keep headers in the same place, same size, same font, and same style.

I don’t get the point about the five verticals. I doubt companies are using more than one of each, so what is the point?

I do like slides structured up a bit like this as they show a bit of effort but are also easy to read.

I presume they have redacted the content.

Don’t capitalize each word. Just use sentence case.

Again, the content looks redacted. The headers are solid enough.

Oh, the slides aren’t redacted. They are doing a build-up. Gross. Don’t do this. Just make one slide.

Another build-up slide…

The image and the zoom-in are cool and I like it. The header is not specific enough. I don’t get it.

I like the look of the images again. They need to write more to explain what is going on.

I like the visuals in the slide. It shows effort.

The issue is that it takes time to understand. They need to write more so I don’t have to study the slide to understand it. Always make slides simple for investors even if it means losing some detail. You can always get into more detail when you are asked and have more meetings.

The header needs to be more useful. I always have a main header and a sub-header. I use the sub-header to make sure the slide is adequately explained.

The body is solid. It is structured well. Adding icons is a simple touch to make slides less boring.

The traction slide is a bit lame. What’s the point? These are the new clients?

Ok, this could be a really solid market sizing slide. I’ve seen a few startups use this approach.

They need to kill the awful global background. Just keep the slide design boring and consistent and focus on legibility. Decks are a communication competition, not a design one.

I hate the text in the footer, well the look of it. I hate superlatives such as “vast horizontal”. I’m perfectly capable of deciding if something is large, let alone vast.

I want to get an idea of where the numbers come from. This is easily attained by adding a footnote/source. Just the fact you bother to add these gives me the feeling that the numbers are more credible, rather than something they just made up.

Are they really unique?

The team clearly is experienced. Personally, I like the text to explain each person. I guess since it looks like these guys are seniors they might not need to do this.

Pointless slide. Close with the ‘three things to remember’.

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