How to Pitch a New Business to investors: Monthly

This is a rare occasion. I am going to pitch you a new business today. It's a real business; I made a real pitch deck for it. I am going to assume you guys are investors, and this is our first call. And I'll pitch it. Then- I'll breakdown some of the key slides and how I solved them. 

Let's do it. 

Monthly app: The pitch

Traction

Alright, guys, the product we are working on is called Monthly. 

One of the things I love about this product is that few companies are positioned as well as us to build it. 

We've been selling to startups for over seven years now. Our platform Slidebean has over 15,000 active subscribers, and our new Slidebean Agency branch is on route to breaching it's first $1MM in revenue only one year after we launched it. 

But more importantly, we figured out a sustainable way to get over 35,000 leads per month. 

These are not paid- we've actually cut our ad spend in the last few months. These are organic leads. They come from our YouTube videos, and the 250,000+ visits our website gets every month. 

And the vast majority of them are startup founders. An audience that is usually very hard to target with positive unit economics. 

We are a startup ourselves, a team of 30 people now, and recently stumbled upon a problem, which is that the SaaSOps platform is not available to companies like us. 

The Problem Slide

The average small business has 42 SaaS tools and spends ~$200K/yr.

‍We are not the exception, and the problem is, there's no centralized overview of this stack. 

I like to think I'm organized with these expenses, and I often see myself checking that a tool is indeed being used by all the seats we are paying for. 

When attempting to find a platform to organize this, I realized all of them are focused on businesses larger than 100 employees. These are not known brands; they are companies that operate mostly on outbound sales. 

But these small businesses, us, have a problem. The average company under 100 employees has 3.6 duplicate apps, 2.6 orphaned subscriptions, and an average of 17 platforms per employee. And this is, of course, continuing to grow. 

Solution Slide

So how can we solve this for small businesses, where there's an absolute focus on optimizing expenses? We can connect to their accounting software and to their emails to collect invoices, we can measure user activity using SSO and their Gsuite logs- but most importantly, we can offer Smart recommendations. 

Product Slide

We can highlight tools that do the same thing. 

We can point out the potential savings of switching to another tier. We can even recommend up and coming platforms that could replace and merge what other platforms do.

More importantly, we can optimize billing. SaaS platforms get billed on different days, on different cards- You need to go to each platform to manage, add or remove users. Monthly centralizes all of this so founders or office managers can move quicker. 

Customer Profile

And like I said, in this SaaS world, organizing the stack is a critical need for all companies, but companies <100 employees don't have a solution, because monetizing, selling to them with positive economics is very hard. 

Business Model

We understand now that this product needs to start as a free product. The startup with 1, 2, or 3 founders will not pay to optimize their expenses; they are too few. I know that first hand. 

We can monetize that audience by offering sponsored recommendations, but our real focus is companies that are scaling: 10, 20 people, where this is starting to become a mess. That is where our premium product comes in. 

We have the capacity to sell a $49-$99/mo product with little to no touch sales. We've been doing it for five years, to the same audience. 

And in the future, we think there's massive potential for monthly to be integrated directly into these sales platforms: allowing customers to manage billing from one single platform and not having to put in credit cards in 42 different systems. 

Go-to-Market

But first, we need a presence. We need a reliable platform with a solid user base. Once again, leveraging our existing audience for initial traction. 

Our website gets +300,000 organic hits per month. This YouTube channel gets 500,000 organic views per month.

That's more than twice as many websites like startups.com or gust.com. If we can get paid customer acquisitions for the same $60 we get today, our CAC vs. LTV multiplier will be great. 

We are rolling this out now. The video above is part of our experiments. We want to understand how people react. We want to understand if people sign up for our limited beta in monthlyapp.com. 

We expect to open this to the general public in August, and we project to reach our first $10K in MRR by the end of the year. 

TAM

A bit on our addressable market, there are 2.5M companies with 10-100 employees in the US- that is our initial target. However, we are making sure we can also integrate with companies in the major startup hubs in Europe and Latin America, a market that we know all too well. 

Competitors

SaaSOps competitors have been around since 2016, and some of them are rather well funded; however, as I said, not a single one of them focuses on business our size. 

It's just unsustainable to make outbound sales on companies this size, with lower LTVs. That is our advantage. That is why other companies trying to compete for these markets will struggle to reach the exposure that we already have. 

Secret Sauce

I also believe that we are coming in with a brand name that can become a true reference. No offense to Blissfully or Intello, but they have nothing going on against a brand name like Monthly. 

Team

The founder team who founded Slidebean, bootstrapped it, raised venture capital, and made it profitable, not needing to raise money again, is the same for Monthly. I led all our marketing efforts and continue to be involved heavily with our growth and sales teams; Jose is the brains behind the product that we have today. Both our Artificial Intelligence engine and our app in its current state led by him. Vini is our chief design officer and is involved directly with our UI and user experience optimization. 

Behind us, a team of almost 30 people with an average time with the company of 2+ years, and very much able to keep up with our pace. 

This business is part of Slidebean. We envision leveraging this massive audience that we have to develop other products tailored to the needs of these companies. 

That is also the reason why we don't want to raise money at the moment. We don't need it to get this product to market and prove that there's a need for it. The great thing about being profitable is we can fund these experiments ourselves. 

If things move as we expect them too, we'll likely be raising money in early-2021, so if you'd be interested in learning more- please reach out to us at founders@monthlyapp.com 

A breakdown of the slides

I want to highlight a few of them that fall outside of my standard deck recommendation. You can check my video on a 'standard' decks.

• First, I started with Traction. In our case, traction is not only important to get some credibility, but it’s our secret sauce. The reason we believe we can succeed with this business is because it’s useful to the customers we already serve. I probably would have shown revenue metrics rather than user metrics on a real investor deck, but well, this is our blog and I don’t want to tell you what our real numbers are.
  
  
• Notice how I merged the solution to the Product. I spent very little time talking about the ‘Solution’ and quickly jumped to the Product slides, so that we could showcase the product.
  
  
• I also included a customer profile or customer persona slide. Two reasons for this- first, we felt it was important to clearly state how much we understand these types of companies- we are one of them after all. But beyond that, I think a customer persona slide  is useful for a lot of decks. Sometimes products are very abstract or very complex, and explaining who is the customer persona that uses it can provide a lot of clarity.
  
  
• On Go-To-Market, you should normally talk about your growth strategies. If you are pre-revenue, you need to show that you have the ability to grow and scale a product. If you are post-revenue, then the Go-to-Market slide can very much focus on your existing unit economics and how you expect those to behave moving forward.
  
  
• A rollout plan or timeline is also a good addition to a Go-to-Market slide.
  
  
• Probably the key here is the purpose of the video above. Aside from helping you out, giving you some pointers, we are measuring success rate. We are measuring conversion rate on our landing page. We are measuring how excited you are about this product. It’s the Lean Startup style.
  
  
• I am not settled on TAM- what I did is a very rough pass of our potential market. There’s probably some narrowing down that needs to be done to understand how many companies we can truly acquire. I just haven’t had time to do it. My real investor deck would probably have more research there.
  
  
• Last but not least, fundraising. Our situation is special: We don’t need money now, we want to dilute the company unless we see the potential of faster scale and I understand better than ever that we need traction.

Raising money on ideas is really hard. Really hard. We want to raise money on metrics, and we can, we just have to wait, and test our assumptions.

Investors don’t fund these tests, you need to do them yourself. And we are. 

This pitch deck was very much made with Slidebean, so if you want to follow this template, we’ve made it available for use. You can sign up for free at slidebean.com/youtube

And once again, check out the beta: Monthly App