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Winnie Pitch Deck to Raise $4m Seed Round

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Winnie Pitch Deck to Raise $4m Seed Round

This is the Winnie pitch deck to raise their $4m seed round led by Reach Capital in April 2018.

As more millennials have kids and try to balance work and parenting, dealing with the issue of how to find safe and affordable childcare is a pressing issue. As a parent, these little brats matter a lot to you. Matter means money.

Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall met whilst working on the product team at Postmates and were complaining about how hard finding reliable childcare as new moms were. The childcare market is fragmented and the best option available for parents is often a Google search. They came up with an online, centralized marketplace that connects parents with certified childcare providers

Winnie has 150,000 childcare providers listed on its site and hopes, over time, to have every licensed provider in the country. Like all SF companies, they’re focused on user growth over profits, but they’ve seen success charging parents for early access to new openings, as well as offering the childcare providers preferred placement on its site for a fee.

I love it when founders share their feedback, so here is theirs.

I love data, but they found that that worked against them! VCs in SF love a story. “We’re both very data-oriented people, and our initial deck was very focused on graphs and numbers and traction. And that actually made the conversations a lot harder,”

So they followed their data and changed their approach until it worked.

“After our first few pitches, we restructured the deck to be more aspirational about where we were going. For anyone who wants to talk about data, it’s in the appendix. But what mattered was that we were in alignment [with investors] — this is a big problem, this is a big market, there’s no good solution today, and this is a really big opportunity for the first company that gets there.”

Seems like sometimes facts can get in the way of a good story.

About

Winnie is bringing transformative technology to people who care for children. Winnie’s mission is to make parents’ lives easier through technology. Their app gives parents the information they need to travel, explore, or even just run errands with their kids.

Funding Rounds

They have raised $6.5m to date.


Pitch Deck Review Summary

I don’t really like their deck. It’s a little basic. However, the founders say they had a data-orientated deck and found being aspirational worked better. There is truth in that, but it all depends on how you do things.

There is no doubt that the deck looks pretty and is easy to read, but it is not super informative. Each investor will have their own view, but I don’t like decks like this. Whatever works though, right?

The girls have solid backgrounds, so that helps a lot to get meetings and then share more details. Decks are there just to get meetings, so if you don’t have too many issues with getting meetings, you can do what you want.

Structured Summary Review

Words

There are very few words…

Slide length

At 16 slides, the length is solid, but just on the short end. There’s not all that information on each slide.

Headers

They don’t really have headers, they have the most basic of statements.

Appearance

It’s pretty. It’s easy to read. No one would say something about how it looks.

Narrative

There is a very basic narrative. It’s mainly correctly ordered slides.

Structure

Things are aligned well. There is negative space. No complaints here.

Slides

They sort of touch on everything they need to, but not in much detail. This annoys me as an investor as I can read faster than you can talk. I would have to ask a lot of questions just to get the basics of what is going on. It’s easier to get into details when you already have a foundation.

Slide by Slide Review

The cover is lovely. Parents and kids. You don’t have to be this fancy, but if you can, why not? It won’t help you raise money, but it gives a favourable impression that you are likely brand-focused.

OK, so millennials again. Some numbers would be useful, but then the founders said too many numbers didn’t work.

They say the market is large as millennials are having the kids, the market is large and the market is fragmented. Their business is not that complicated, so they can probably get away with this level of simplicity.

Now they introduce Winnie. I normally start with a one-liner on what the business is. Their deck is very simple, so order can be a little more flexible as the time to consume slides is low.

Their description is a bit crap though. A website and community for parents could mean anything!?

They explain what they do by using numbers saying 2m parents across 10k cities are using Winnie to find childcare. I don’t know what the preschool and enrichment stuff is about.

They chuck in a load of logos, which I presume are places they have been featured in. Winnie isn’t a company to get featured in websites, so it’s a little peculiar.

This is a vision statement, but I think it is a little lame.

They have over 75k childcare providers on the platform. They have some images on the slide. I mean a chart on the adoption of them, or how they get them would be more informative.

Local search and a picture are simplistic. As I said, their deck is simple as is their business, so why not.

They have a community. That’s all they say.

They send emails… yay.

They have data on the platform which I presume is used to create engagement. I find the way they do slides a little weird.

Paying money for users is for suckers if you can get them for free. They say that once they created enough data, they achieved an inflexion point wherein users grew exponentially.

I don’t really know what the 90% number is about. I think it means they got a client.

Quotes are the lame version of traction illustration. You work with what you have.

This is their market sizing slide. I don’t know what the chart is about. I am going to guess it is a % of income. The market is $80b a year. This is pretty basic stuff.

Team matters. They think they are the right girls for the job.

Their ending slide is a little pointless. Why are they saying thanks?

What do you think about the deck?

 

 

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