AirBnB’s 2009 pitch deck shows the problem clearly with a few sentences in text, but it doesn’t do a great job at proving that this problem is real or that the product would work at a large scale. For example: “hotels leave you disconnected from the city and its culture.” Is this an assumption that everyone can agree with? Another example is that they show user testimonials, but they don’t say the type of person that they are or any other information beyond their age and hometown; for all I know, those users could be cherry-picked, and the app could be servicing a very specific type of person.
It shows the size of the market relatively clearly in a visual way, but I am curious about where their numbers came from or what time frame they’re operating under. For example, “We plan to reach 15% of the market in 1 year.”
What I would steal for my sanity check next week would be the table with competitive advantages and the graphs showing the competition. They listed out the competitive advantages to make it clear why this was different from existing companies. Additionally, I would steal the visual depiction of the clear product itself. It shows how easy it is to use and gives a great picture of how the action flow would be like as a user. I’m not sure how long they had taken to pitch this, but I would have expanded on this slide more.
As an investor, my questions would be:
- Where did the 84M estimation of SAM come from? What specific time-frame is this bound to?
- How many transactions do you have right now, and what percentage of them contain positive experiences?
- What are your biggest challenge right now with your product?
