The company deck I chose to review was Mixpanel, as I’ve used their product before in my role at a startup. I was surprised by how simple the deck was, and it came out of the gate directly referencing the problem it was trying to solve. “Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.” was listed as problem 1. Problem 2 was listed as “Companies on mobile & web are measuring bullshit metrics like page views and installs. It’s really hard to be really sophisticated.” This was the core problem of decision-making, applied to mobile & web companies specifically. They then provided their monthly recurring revenue over time as evidence that the problem was real, as they had customers who were willing to pay; the chart, although with the specific numbers blacked out, shows impressive and consistent growth for the product over two years. The size of the market was blacked out in the slides, but we can assume that it is pretty significant as this is a problem faced by most if not all companies with digital products.
If I was an investor, I would probe more deeply into the competitors slide. Although the slide provides a matrix of competitors, it doesn’t mention what differentiates Mixpanel and how their product can compete. I’d also ask what makes the founding team specifically the best team to go for this problem. In our slides, I want to steal the the straightforward and concise style of the deck, allowing the product to speak for itself.
