Contently Pitch Deck Seed Stage Startup

7 min readApr 17, 2017

Here’s the deck Contently, founded in 2010 by David T. Goldberg, Joe Coleman and Shane Snow, used to raise a $9m series-b from my friend at Jackson Square Ventures. In total they have raised $19.1M in 7 Rounds from 13 Investors.

Contently’s mission is to is to build a better media world — for creatives who live to tell stories and tell stories to live, for businesses that want better ways to connect with consumers, and for everyday people who rely on stories to understand the world better.

Contently is a technology company that helps enterprise companies create results-driven content by providing them with smart technology, vetted creative talent, and proven expertise. We are a software business built by content creators, and both our products and our philosophy reflect this — which is why we count some of the best content marketing brands in the world as our clients.

Contently Deck review

The deck is professionally done and they used a graphic designer to spruce things up a bit. For a series-b deck it is rather short, but we don’t know if this is the full deck or not. This deck certainly passes the VC ‘flick test.’ You can flick through it in 15 seconds and be able to roughly explain what they do. All in all I quite like this deck- it’s quite friendly and approachable. It’s not the best deck I have ever seen, but certainly something I would review to steal a few ideas from.

Positive

Consistent formatting and large set font. The font is far larger than most decks, but it works
Great use of visuals to tell their story
They don’t simply write ‘ problem’ or ‘solution’ as a header which is wasted space. They use space to make a point on each slide so the deck flows
The opening slide shows some of the customers, whom looking at their website are top tier. This sets a good tone
I like their tag line of “powering the brand publishing cloud.” I think it describes them quite well
The first slide is powerful, setting the tone for the deck. It asserts a very large market, they presumably are operating in
The next ‘problem’ slide makes good use of header and supporting evidence that doesn’t take too much time to understand. The next slide is juxtaposed with a quote from Forbes that asserts Contently is going to be the leader in this massive market
I like their vision of owning the end to end value chain. The ‘secret plans’ intrigue me ;)
They implicitly state their special sauce which is their network of talent. Network are one of the 3 only ways that I actually see of defensibility in startup
The team summary slide is decent. They have some ballers as advisors: founders from Behance and Hubspot. I find the addition of the technology (RoR and postreSQL) a little weird; it’s not really enough to be useful

Negative

They don’t source their statements, which is best practice
The “Our platform” slide is not terrible, but it could be a little bit easier to understand. They have just introduced the concept of journalists here, but not explained the point of them. One has to make a leap that they might be using journalists to make content, like a marketplace?
The next slide then alludes to the journalists but just says they have a lot of them. They could easily have added a statement like “we leverage the power of the crowd to utilise journalists to write content and get paid” etc
The SaaS metrics could be more refined and granular. They don’t have any concept of churn etc