Series A Pitch Deck Example: Faye’s $10 Million Deck

One year ago, Mike Butcher reported that Faye hopes to do for travel insurance what Lemonade has done for general insurance, and that’s as good a summary of what Faye does as anything. The company was kind enough to share its (slightly redacted) pitch deck with me so I could peek under the hood to see the narrative it weaved to close out its $10 million.

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Slides in this deck

Faye kicked off her Series A with a set of 19 slides, a few of which have been lightly redacted to protect sensitive data from prying eyes:

1. cover slide
2. Summary slide
3. Team slide
4. problem slide
5. Merchant size zipper
6. Insurance market presentation slide
7. Product presentation slide
8. Product features slide 1
9. Product features slide 2
10. Product features slide 3
11. Product features slide 4
12. Go-to-market slide
13. Financial Growth Indicators Slide
14. Slide of customer growth indicators
15. Customer validation slide 1
16. Toboggan Competitive Landscape
17. The Ask Slide
18. Customer validation slide 2
19. Closing slide with mission statement

three things to love

Let’s put that aside at the outset: this is a truly excellent pitch deck. I’ll be adding it to my rotation of decks that are great examples of how to distill a potentially complex story into an easy-to-follow narrative.

I love a good summary slide

As I mentioned in my article on recap slides, the combination of cover and recap slides sets the context for the rest of the conversation. Faye has done a great job of showing how a good, concise slide can set the tone.

The company cites traction (millions of dollars in sales) and market penetration (available in 48 states), along with market size and market growth rate. These four numbers paint a picture that presents a pretty compelling investment opportunity.

If we take all the numbers at face value, the next step in the story is to convince investors that this is the right team to tackle this market.

Which brings us to slide 3, the corporate team slide. Unfortunately, it’s not that great, so we’ll talk about that in the “What Could Be Improved” section later in this article. For now, let’s move on to another slide that did a great job of adding to Faye’s story.

Great narrative on the market size slide

[Slide 5] What a great way to use market sizing to your advantage. Picture credits: fay

Again, there is redacted data here.

Faye’s numbers aside, this is a rare example of a market sizing slide that also provides the rest of the context. I thought it was really well done.

Showing that the market size is (presumably) huge, and then essentially saying, “But the TAM could be bigger by expanding the service offering and international rollout,” is very clever. This shows that there is a great opportunity available right now and the opportunity could develop further.

The data points on the left are also great because they contextualize the business in the larger market.

This slide teaches us that you can tell a full story without blurring the message. I imagine the voiceover for this slide would be something along the lines of:

The market we are looking for is currently $xx and could grow to $yy once we fully resolve it. What is Really What is exciting here, however, is that the market is easily disrupted. There is little innovation, no recognized mainstream brands, successful brands have low market penetration and the overall market is growing 10% year over year.

The story ties it all together, describing travel insurance as a very attractive opportunity.

Intermarket comparison

Faye targets travel insurance, using certain adjacent markets (car and home insurance) as comparisons to show that travel insurance is a better deal. Again, the numbers here are redacted, but as far as storytelling goes, this is a pretty good approach:

[Slide 6] Insurtech galore. Picture credits: fay

I suspect the company added this slide to appease investors who have been put off by other insurtech plays. Assuming the numbers are good, it’s a really inspired way to position the market – and Faye within it. Well played indeed.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Faye could have done better or done differently, as well as her full pitch deck!

Three things that could be improved

I already said that the team slide could use some love, so let’s start there.