Pitch Deck Teardown: Wilco’s $7 million seed deck – TechCrunch
What’s a poor, freshly minted developer to do when they’re out of coding boot camp but don’t have any real-life experience? You enter the world of simulation. That’s the basic premise of what Wilco offers. Last week, I covered the company’s $7 million seed funding round, and the company’s CEO, On Freund, was gracious enough to let me use the deck the company created to close that round for my Pitch Deck Teardown series.
One of the things I love, love, love about the deck is that it — like the company’s overall design style — uses the Sierra-era games look. Specifically, it harkens back to the old 1980s and ’90s Space Quest games, and the company itself, Wilco, is apparently named after Space Quest’s main protagonist, Roger Wilco.
TechCrunch+ has an Independence Day sale Get 50% off your annual subscription by clicking here.
(More TechCrunch+ here, if you have any questions!)
It’s a particularly fitting name, given that Roger, in the Space Quest series, is a hapless but well-meaning “sanitation engineer” (i.e., janitor) who, more or less by accident, ends up rescuing the world time and time again. The excellent Retro-tasticness series is a great way to go down the rabbit hole into retro-tasticness. Space Quest Historian podcast. Because Of courseThere is a podcast that explains the history of Space Quest.
Aaaanyway — sorry, my 8-bit nerd is showing, and nostalgia does occasionally get the better of me. Where were we? Oh, pitch decks and their tearing apart.
I’m always on the lookout for more pitch decks we can share with our TechCrunch readers.
We even created a submission process. Here’s some more info about how to get involved.
Slides in this deck
Wilco’s seed deck is a 19-slide deck that ticks all of the boxes. The ink on the investment round article isn’t even dry yet, so the unredacted deck would be full of a lot of business-sensitive information; the Wilco team pointed out that it has made a few redactions for them to be comfortable sharing the deck. I’ve noted them in the list of slides below.
- Slide cover
- Team slide
- Problem slide
- “What’s happening today?” — Problem context slide
- Mission slide
- “Who are we” — Value proposition slide
- Solution slide
- “Wilco’s solution is customizable & adapts and connects to common tools” — Product slide
- “Scale vs. Customization” — Beachhead go-to-market slide
- “The Wilco Effect” — Product benefits slide
- “Product Experience” — Product screenshot (and demo, possibly?)
- Go-to-market slide
- Traction slide — Redacted: Monthly active Users (graph of users over the time)
- Traction slide — Redacted: Customer logos removed
- Traction slide — Redacted: Content partner/customer logos removed
- “What customers are saying about us” — Testimonial slide
- Competition slide
- The Ask slide — Redacted: Some numbers have been removed
- “Let’s talk!” — Contact info slide
Three things to love
I’ve already gushed about Wilco’s talent for graphics, but it seems as if the company’s talent goes deeper than that. This deck showcases great storytelling skills. Here are some highlights.
Benefits over features
[Slide 10] By breaking down the benefits to each user, Wilco explains its raison d’être. Image CreditsWilco
Many startups, especially those with technical founders, fall prey to the temptation of focusing too much upon the product’s features rather than its benefits. You see that in all sorts of places, but here’s an example: Nobody truly cares that a car has 400 miles of range; that’s just a number. Consumers and investors care about how far you are able to go. The car can drive you from Los Angeles, California to San Francisco without needing to stop for fuel or charging. That’s benefits-driven storytelling, and it connects with your audience far better than whether a car has 380 or 420 miles of range.
On Slide 10, Wilco does an incredible job of just this; they call it “the Wilco effect,” but realistically, it’s benefits. Junior engineers get practical experience, senior engineering gets more time back, and management has visibility into its human resource development. This also means that the wider community benefits in many ways.
The “how” will be important but risks the temptation of getting into more detail than what’s important for a pitch deck. The “what” is too tactical; for this part of the story, it doesn’t really matter what users need to do to gain these benefits. Focusing on the “why” is why this slide is so powerful; it opens the door to more in-depth conversations if needed, but the groundwork is there. I wish more startups could do this!
A beautiful, crisp ask
[Slide 18]Redactions have removed the details, but the story is still solid. Image Credits Wilco (opens a new window
It’s excruciatingly rare to find an ask slide that actually does what it needs to do. When I saw this one — despite the redactions — I knew I had to feature Wilco, because it’s such a good example of how to do a great ask.
That’s the promise the company is making to its investors: Give us $6 million, and we’ll get it done.
In the first box, the company talks about releasing a “community edition” that enables (not “allows,” but I probably care more about thatI encourage developers to play and create quests more than I should. It isn’t specified anywhere in the deck what the feature set is here, so I’d expect there to be an appendix slide that shows a product road map of sorts. Nonetheless, it’s a clear goal.
The company’s hiring plan is described in the second box. Of course, “strong team” is a little fuzzy; I’d have loved to see some numbers here, but it works.
Wilco does it again in the third box. “Get to X WAUs and Y weekly quests played” is a super clear SMART goal: It is specific and measurable; there’s no doubt whether the goal has been hit or not. The numbers are covered, so I have no way of knowing whether it’s achievable, but that’s the promise the company is making to its investors: Give us $6 million, and we’ll get it done. It’s relevant: Hitting that goal will unlock the next round of funding. And it’s time-bound, presumably “in the next 18 months” — more about that in just a moment. Brilliant. Bold. Yes. More of this — specific, clear, believable goals for what you’re going to achieve with your investments will go a long way toward securing faith in how your company is going to do between this fundraising round and the next.
The company’s fourth box outlines its goals and a list of partners it needs to achieve future growth.
I have one minor point that I’d love to have seen done differently here. I don’t know how many months of runway the company is raising for here, but I’d be willing to bet money that the red box covers the number 18. Why? Well, that’s pretty much the standard for a fundraise these days: You raise for 18 months and restart fundraising when there are six months of runway left.
Much less than 18 months and you don’t have enough time to get meaningful work done. Much more than that and you’re attempting clairvoyance into a timeline that is a little unrealistic. Many startups set a goal for 18 months but then rush to reach milestones earlier.
In a nutshell, you don’t raise money because you are running out of money as planned. You raise money because you’ve successfully delivered on the milestones and you need more money to go after your next set of milestones. In short: Don’t worry about putting the amount of time on your slide deck anywhere; it isn’t helpful, and it’ll show up as part of your operating plan and financial plans anyway.
Problem clearly framed
I usually just share one slide here, but slides three and four go together, so here’s a twofer for you:
[Slide 3] Problem proposition. Image Credits Wilco (Opens in a new Window)
[Slide 4]How companies can solve it today. Image Credits Wilco (opens a new window
Did I mention that it is easy for people to get too technical or too nitty-gritty about a product in their slide decks. Yes, I did in the first part. Well, here’s another example of how Wilco perfectly dialed in. The company can explain the problem in a concise and clear manner in slides three and four. The company discusses the weaknesses of theoretical education as well as the consequences for the business. Any improvement in efficiency is a problem in a world that has some of the most expensive human capital. Investors are more aware of this than others. They see the budgets across all their portfolios.
Even for someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the ins and outs of running a development-forward organization, Wilco’s value proposition is clear and easy to understand. This is remarkable considering the many ways that the company could have gone so horribly wrong.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Wilco could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
Source: TechCrunch
