Here’s the deck Twine, founded in 2013, used to raise $500k in seed funding. They are graduates from Seedcamp and have raised a total of $1.1m to date.

Twine is a marketplace that connects companies to their network of over 175,000 creative freelancers in music, design and film.

Their pitch deck went through 23 iterations for the investment round as they kept making changes based on investor feedback.

What’s very interesting is that the founder has shared two iterations of their deck. You can see here the first and twelfth draft of their pitch decks.

Opportunity

• There are over 53 million SMEs in the US and Europe
• They spend on average $30k per year on marketing
• 32% of that budget is for content marketing.
• Content marketing is a $500 billion per year industry and it’s growing.

Problem

Content is essential to the success of companies. They need audio-visual content to engage and delight their customers.
Currently, SMEs struggle to write a relevant brief, set a reasonable budget for content and find good quality creatives. Creative freelancers struggle to build a professional network and find paid work.

Solutions

Twine is a marketplace that connects companies to our network of creative freelancers in music, design and film.

• Companies post project briefs for audio-visual content that our community of 180,000 creatives can pitch on.
• Escrow and rating systems build platform trust.
• Creatives have an audio-visual portfolio that makes it easy to choose a creative to hire.

Deck Review

Overall the deck is decent. Ironically the design is not perfect- the competitive landscape, for example, has terrible logo contrast.

Positive

• I’m on the fence on this one, but they include their ‘Opportunity’ slide first. It works quite well in setting the scene
• A lot of the slide ordering is non-standard, but in their case, it works as they have put in the work to figure out a narrative they want to tell. This is far better than slapping a bunch of slides together for no coherent reason, just because you read a format some investor published
• Their traction slide, what they have termed “Phase 1” shows some epic growth in creatives. To get to 175k is quite an achievement. However ‘Phase 2’ is less than impressive. Their monthly ad is a GMV or ‘project brief of GBP12k. If they hadn’t started their business as Cloudy- sort of like a creative LinkedIn, I would have real concerns about their market balancing approach. What it feels more is that they have not had much time to build the demand side of the market
• The ‘business model’ slide is fine. I do like the fact that they mention “reduce platform circumvention” since that’s a key factor in building a marketplace
• The ‘route to market’ slide is fine. They are quite focused on the initial traction and non-scalable acquisition channels in their direct approach. Their long-term SEO approach long term is great but takes some time to build
• The team slide adds that the co-founders have worked together before which is something investors like to see

Negative

• The opening slide would benefit from including the tagline. It’s otherwise a wasted slide
• The first problem slide is a little unformed. What they say is not terrible, but it could be better. The problem isn’t painful, but the previous slide shows the market size is large
• The second problem slide gets the point across but it could certainly be supported with some data and use the content as the header

Twine Pitch Deck Reading Material

Creative freelancer platform Twine bags £400,000 seed investment

Seedcamp-backed Twine launches marketplace for creatives

Getting Into An Accelerator Is More Than Just Luck

Twine Pitch Deck

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