in a world People working from home still need access to the web and a host of other use cases, network manufacturer Allowing users to create and manage VPN connections without a learning curve, as Romain wrote last year when the company announced its seed round.
Netmaker submitted its pitch to TechCrunch+, and today we’re taking a closer look at the materials the company used to raise $2.3 million in funding.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you’d like to submit your own pitch deck, here’s how.
slides in this platform
Netmaker has a compact 14-slide platform. The company told me it redacted certain sensitive data (such as financial information), but those sections were clearly marked so the deck still made sense in context.
- cover slide
- question slide
- visual slideshow
- Solution slide
- Market Size Slideshow
- product slideshow
- how it works slideshow
- Traction Slide (“actively used on over 10,000 devices”)
- Product Evolution Slides
- listing slide
- Roadmap Slides
- contest slideshow
- team slides
- close slideshow
three things to love
Netmaker shared a lot of information in a few slides in what might be considered a fairly complex area of technology. The company does a fantastic job of keeping things accessible.
traction is king
(Slide 8) Great traction forgives all other sins, and this graph points in the right direction. image credits: Network Manufacturer
Having strong traction is great for any startup, because rapid growth means the company has found something important in the market and can attract new customers.
That said, some of these stats seem like vanity metrics to me. For example, why is it important to have 5,500 stars on GitHub? Will this convert to customers? Why is the number of 1,000 community members important? Netmaker could have tried to connect the dots: why are these metrics important to the company, and how do they show rapid growth?
I do find myself stumbling on the “50% month-on-month growth in 6 months” statement. It’s hard to overstate how impressive this is, and as an investor I find myself eager to understand what the growth engine is here. How much did the company have to spend to acquire these customers? How does it continue along this trajectory?
how it works
(slide 7) How it works. image credits: Network Manufacturer
When your target audience is people who design, implement and maintain network infrastructure, you can bet most investors you talk to won’t fully understand the intricacies of the market. I do know VCs with deep domain knowledge, but even experienced VCs can have pretty outdated information. Like many other spaces, the landscape of this space changes almost daily.
This “how it works” slide might be a bit also Simple, let’s be honest. I’d love to see screenshots of the actual provisioning/setup screens to see how difficult it would be to configure the network or add machines. Having said that, it’s a good base-level introduction to explaining the “here’s what we do and why it matters” part of the story.
A clear vision for the future
I love that Netmaker has left no stone unturned in its vision of the future of the industry. That assumption may prove to be inaccurate, but the company isn’t fazed. It’s refreshing to see such clarity and the company’s ability to fit into its vision:
(Slide 3) A clear vision for the future. This is one of my favorite slides from this platform. image credits: Network Manufacturer
The company did one thing very right here: It painted a clear, bold and differentiated vision of the future.
Now, you can argue whether this is correct. Wouldn’t anyone own their own networking hardware? Is there no need to configure complex networks? I’m not a network architect, but this sounds a bit far-fetched. At the very least, the Internet itself and the underlying technology that powers Netmaker likely require some amount of hardware.
Still, I think the company is doing something right here: It paints a clear, bold and differentiated view of the future and backs it up with the steps it must take to position itself at the forefront of the movement. Forefront.
In the remainder of this teardown we’ll look at three things Netmaker could improve or do differently – and its full pitch deck!
