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Sendgrid Pitch Deck to Raise $750k Seed Round

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Sendgrid Pitch Deck to Raise $750k Seed Round

This is the Sendgrid pitch deck to raise their seed round in 2009. They raised $750k led by Highway 12 Ventures.

David Cohen posted the deck in March 2019

In 2009, coming out of Techstars, SendGrid set out to raise a seed round. The original target was $300,000. They ended up raising $750,000 in that round. Eight years later, they went public at around a $1B valuation. Shortly thereafter, Twilio acquired SendGrid for $2B.

Great success stories have humble beginnings. This was true for SendGrid.

About

SendGrid is a proven, cloud-based customer communication platform that drives engagement and business growth. SendGrid is a leader in email deliverability and its proven, cloud-based platform successfully delivers over 30 billion emails each month for Internet and mobile-based customers like Airbnb, Pandora, HubSpot, Spotify, Uber and FourSquare as well as more traditional enterprises like Intuit and Costco.

Here’s a video where David breaks down their pitch a few years after their demo day at Techstars.

Funding Rounds

Structured Summary Review

Words

There are not enough words on the slide to make the deck compelling. All they do is stick an image and something in the header.

Slide length

There are not enough words on the slide to make the deck compelling. All they do is stick an image and something in the header.

Headers

The headers are terrible. They just say one or two words and leave things at that and for investors to figure out what is going on. It’s very lazy and inconsiderate.

Appearance

The deck is fairly old and designs back then when not amazing anyway. But generally, it is fine.

Narrative

There is no narrative in the pitch deck considering they do not utilize the headers. The slide order is broadly correct other than when they have a problem slide then the solution and then go back to the problem.

Structure

The way that they structure the slides is not ideal but it is not a total killer either. They could easily have improved comprehension by structuring things properly.

Slides

They have all the basic slides that they need in the pitch deck but they would have to add more around their vision for me to get very excited.

Sendgrid Pitch Deck

There is no need to write a welcome or to write the names of the founders on the cover.

The tagline should be centred.

The weird puzzle adds no value.

The header is awful. Explain what the point of the slide is.

In principle the slide is solid. They explained that There are three categories of email and they fit in the transactional box.

There is never a reason to have an interstitial side in a pitch deck. It is a total waste of space and adds zero value. Don’t do it.

SendGrid goes on to explain three examples of these. These could have been put on 1 slide

Now that we have the context of what they are providing they get straight into the problems with transactional emails. Whilst there isn’t a narrative per se, the slide order is definitely right so far. 

I would want to add some specific examples of this. For example, what amounts of emails are not delivered and what issue happens when you try and scale.

Now they’re explaining what the solution is and it’s not terribly clear. There are three benefits and it looks like they send to popular hosts, but it’s not clear, is it? 

Whenever you make a slide you have to critically consider that it’s someone who knows nothing about your business looks at the text, will they be able to understand it?

Okay, now they are going back to the 3 problems. They should have kept the solution slide till after they had fully explained the problem.

There’s no reason they could not have picked this information on the problem slide as it stands now. The examples that they provide are solid but I would like to have a source for them.

The content on the slide is decent but it is structured very poorly which makes it quite hard to read and understand.

The slide is relatively easy to understand it’s just not very interesting.

How do they scale? It’s a very lazy slide.

I mean it’s not like they even tried a little bit to try and make this slide quality.

Okay, they have a dashboard but what is the point of this?

All of these bullet points should have some quantifiable number or metric to make them meaningful. I don’t understand why corporate branding is something that SendGrid does.

Good example I guess.

As usual, they are just sticking an image in hoping that the investor will figure out what everything is about and why it’s cool.

The image is fine but it should have been on one slide with the other two.

This is the point that I would be putting the team slide see, breaking up the story and the execution part of the business.

This is a terrible Market size slide it just says that there are transactional emails and Facebook says a whole lot of them. There is no dollar value.

 

It’s fine to insert a slide like this explaining that yes obviously there are a lot of email companies but they gre should be a comment about them all.

Now they are getting into actually differentiating themselves from the competition by using landscape slides with a list of features.  looking at the features they seem to be reasonable ones bold stop of course they are perfect on every single dimension which always makes my eyes roll.

 the best way to know if you have done a good competition slide is to pretend you are showing it to your competitors and see if they agree with it.

There’s nothing wrong in principle with the slide but they could explain it a little bit better I couldn’t say. All they would have to say is recharge how are you and with a fixed charge depending on the package customers purchase.

It’s a very uninteresting slide.  they could say that we do direct and distribution channels. Why not tell me how many hosting companies or system administrators they have signed up?  That would make things a whole lot more interesting.

The nearest attractions slide and it is apparent that they are quite early on but they have some positive traction. But why do they have to write three bullet points? There are these amazing things called charts!

This is their off-slide. They want $300,000 and they plan to get to 60000 monthly recurring revenue from 400 customers, which is 300 more than they have now. 

The details on the investors that they want are totally pointless surely if they’re talking to investors they want them?

I believe this is the first round of funding so the only other thing I would add is the broad fundraise structure which is either a convertible note or priced round.

Never do the stupid thank you slides at the end.  the investor already has your email since you emailed them. The better thing to do would be to summarize the 3 bullet points of why this is a compelling investment opportunity.

What do you think about the deck?

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