I recently wrote about DeckMatch’s $1 million seed round. On condition that the tool evaluates pitch decks, it’s only fair that I offered to guage pitch deck, too. The founders saw the irony in that and offered its pitch deck as a sacrifice to the teardown gods.

Slides on this deck

The deck is calmly redacted. A piece on upcoming hires and an appendix on how the corporate is training its model have been removed.

That aside, DeckMatch raised with a good 14-slide deck:

1. Cover slide
2. Problem slide
3. “Generative AI is an element of the issue” slide
4. “Who experiences this problem” slide
5. Problem impact slide
6. Solution slide
7. Demo slide
8. Market opportunity slide
9. Go to market slide
10.  The Moat slide
11.   Goals/milestones slide
12.  Team slide
13.  The Ask slide
14.  Closing slide

Three things to like

Because this product directly targets VCs and even tries to guage decks, you’d higher imagine I’m going to look particularly close at this deck. Even with that in mind, the startup tells a really compelling story.

Turning the issue into the answer

It’s clever that the issue statement shows that the issue is the answer. The convenience with which businesses can send vast amount of high-quality outbound requests is a bonus for corporations, but not in the event you’re on the opposite end. I’m already seeing an enormous uptick in web optimization spam, for instance. High-profile VCs get 1000’s upon 1000’s of inbound pitch decks.

Turning the issue on itself, then, is solution: In case your inbox is filling up with customized, automated emails because of generative AI, why not use AI to guage and cope with all of it? This slide makes it very easy to grasp, it’s funny, and it’s an ideal visual representation of the issue at hand.

Bonus points: Read the slide rigorously, and also you see that it doesn’t say pitch decks or VCs anywhere. It says “inbound,” which hints at what the remainder of the deck entails. But that also signifies that the corporate’s name, DeckMatch, is probably overly specific, considering that the market opportunity is big.

An awesome team

[Slide 12] The “fun fact” is cute, though. Image Credits: DeckMatch

This isn’t necessarily one of the best team slide, but it surely one way or the other works to indicate off the standard of the team  the slide.

Experienced founders tackling an issue that is sensible makes me perk up immediately. Founding Edgefolio signifies that Leo Gasteen has experience with the financial industry, and while Homefair doesn’t immediately seem all that relevant (and maybe the team could have done a greater job at explaining it’s relevant), Walid Mustapha has deep AI and marketplace experience (I learned this during my interview with him). On the surface, this looks like a solid team.

If you might have an ideal team, I normally recommend leading with the team slide. As a rule of thumb, if the team slide is near the top of the deck, that typically means the founders try to bury it. But DeckMatch is doing the alternative: By sticking the slide at the top of the deck, they hope that the conversation will end on a high note. It’s a high-risk approach, but I believe it worked well on this circumstance, in a humble-brag form of way.

Problem impact slide

[Slide 5] Problem → Who has this problem → What’s the impact of this problem. Image Credits: DeckMatch

I rarely love decks which have three different problem slides, but DeckMatch is doing a extremely clever thing here, breaking the story into 4 different steps:

• Slide 2: What’s the problem? An excessive amount of data.
• Slide 3: How is the issue evolving? It’s about to get rather a lot worse.
• Slide 4: Who experiences this problem? Investors, HR, procurement, grant-making institutions and industry.
• Slide 5: What’s the impact of this problem? Missed opportunities and wasted effort.

DeckMatch does an ideal job spinning a narrative around a fancy, almost universal problem. It’s an ideal technique for helping investors understand what the chance is.

In the remainder of this teardown, I’ll take a take a look at three things DeckMatch could have improved or done in a different way, together with its full pitch deck!