Startup Lessons: Pitch Deck

This week me and my team created the first pitch deck for our product Algowork.

What did we think?

• We thought we would collectively agree on our mission statement.
• We could create our first pitch deck fast.
• We had product idea in mind but we just needed to refine it.

What did we do?

• We did charette exercise to refine what our product is. It turned out we all had different ideas in mind, but we eventually found what we were looking for in our product. We ended up with the idea of students having one-day experience of the future career, to learn how their desired job feels like in the real life, before wasting time and resources on following undesired career path.
• The same happened with our Mission Statement. We were struggling a lot, we wrote almost 10 different variations on what our mission statement could be, and there was none that would resonate the best with all of us. We decided to move on with this one: “At Algowork, our mission is to ensure no college graduate is ever stuck in a career they do not enjoy.”
• We prepared our first pitch deck, you can see it here: https://medium.com/the-creative-founder/algowork-bridging-the-gap-between-college-and-the-workforce-b536adf0cd9e

What did we learn?

• The mission statement was understandable and resonated well with our audience.
• Our competitive 2x2 analysis had the right x’s, but some competitor examples were confusing. Having clear 2x2 with good examples would show that we have control over our target market.
• Our audience didn’t understand at which stages of life/ year of study our customers could use the product, also our product features were confusing. Having one product feature per slide with clear explanation could be our go-to.
• There was some feedback about market sizing: our audience wanted to learn more where numbers came from and what are average spendings on career counseling. We must make sure no informations like these are missing when we pitch to VCs.
• There is no need to show research findings in the pitch deck.

Next week we plan to:

• Validate our idea with students.
• Contact people from our desired board of advisors.
• Ask businesses and individual professionals what incentive they would be willing to receive for exchange.
• Focus on our revenue model.
• Try doing concierge test with our product, with at least one customer.

See my previous week post: https://medium.com/the-creative-founder/this-week-me-and-my-group-made-a-landing-page-for-our-product-and-started-acquisition-5447b367ea54