Pitch Deck Teardown: SuperScale’s $5.4M Series A deck
Reading Time: 4 minutesThere are two industries that make a ton of money but they’re traditionally largely ignored by venture capital — movies and gaming. That comes as a bit of a surprise to many: Venture capitalists are known for their keen eye on high-growth opportunities, predominantly casting their lot with tech startups, healthcare innovations, and the next big thing in the digital sphere. But Deadline reports that movies made $33.9 billion last year, and global gaming revenue was $184 billion, according to Newzoo. Still, the proposition of investing in movies introduces venture capitalists to a landscape far removed from the calculable metrics of SaaS platforms or the relatively predictable risk of biotech.
Gaming and movies are extremely hit or miss, and that’s the kind of unpredictability that’s seldom embraced by traditional venture capital investment theses.
I am always particularly curious about pitch decks in the gaming industry, so when SuperScale threw its hat in the ring, I was excited. The company is promising to make marketing for games easier, and given that great marketing is one of the crucial differences between an okay outcome and a smash-hit success, it tickled my curiosity nerve in a most delightful way.
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Slides in this deck
The company submitted a 22-slide deck, but ‘details of customers and customer case studies where we didn’t get approval for distribution are redacted,’ according to the company.
- Cover slide
- Problem slide
- Solution slide
- Macro market size prediction slide
- Market size prediction slide
- Market size slide (2027)
- Target customer slide
- Platform interstitial slide
- How it works slide
- Market segmentation slide
- Business model slide
- Case studies slide
- Competitive landscape slide
- Business plan interstitial slide
- 5-year plan summary slide
- The Ask slide
- Use of Funds summary slide
- Summary slide
- Team slide
- Appendix interstitial slide
- Company history slide
- Closing/contact slide
Three things to love about SuperScale’s pitch deck
SuperScale has an incredibly slick-looking deck that gets right to the point. Twenty-two slides might seem like too many (the optimal length for a slide deck is around 16 slides these days), but there are some interstitial slides and an appendix in this one, and those don’t really count.
Let’s take a look at some of the things that really work.
Making your own market
It’s bold and brazen storytelling. Of course, the company is now setting itself up for having to share a plan and show the receipts, but it’s a good way to get investors interested right off the bat.
A new lease on life
It’s extremely smart, and investors will be able to see that, too.
That’s how you do a summary
Design and almost-unreadable text aside, the content on this slide is great:
Three things that SuperScale could have improved
Overall, this is one of the better pitch decks I’ve seen, but there are a few things that made me go ‘hmm.’
Wait, how big is your team?
When a company raises around $5 million, I typically expect a team of 10 to 15. This team slide came as a bit of a surprise:
There’s some info about revenue, but only in the form of case studies:
That’s impressive, but it’s a terrible way of showing off this level of traction. A proper traction slide would display these numbers not as totals, but as revenue graphs that show how much and how fast revenue is growing over time.
Why is SuperScale raising money?
It’s confusing why the company is raising around $5 million when it’s making proper revenue numbers.
There’s also the internal inconsistencies here: It says it needs $5 million to achieve targets, but then says it will have ‘follow on organic investment’ through reinvesting profits.
In the M&A space, $5 million is almost no money at all, so now I’m very curious about who the acquisition targets would be, and how the company presumes these acquisitions will work toward its bottom line.
Tell a coherent story!
SuperScale, on first read-through, seemed like such a fantastic investment opportunity, but as I started poking and prodding at the deck, it made less and less sense. The company seems to want to acquire other companies (or is it games?). It has 70 people on staff, but it’s only raising $5 million. It doesn’t share its past successes, nor how it is planning to find the future success it needs.
I think a much better way of telling this story, overall, would be to have an end-to-end story, told consistently:
- We bought game A for $B.
- We invested $C into growth infrastructure for the game.
- We invested $D into marketing for the game.
- Revenue for the game went from $E to $F, after only investing $C+D.
- As you can see, we made profit of $X on this project, and we predict this playbook will work on games that have this particular profile.
- We want to build a portfolio of 30 games, which is why we are raising 30*($B+$C+$C), after which this becomes a self-sustainable business with a repeatable playbook and business model.
That story would make sense to investors.
The full pitch deck
Reference: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/sample-series-a-pitch-deck-superscale/
Ref: techcrunch
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