a happy new yearAnd welcome to the 78th installment of Tearing up the playing surface!
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Vital pepperThe initial promotion that netted the company $6.5 million. Under the slogan “The End of Untreatable Disease,” the company faces a daunting challenge: finding solutions for all those diseases that doctors cannot currently target well. Unlike CancerVax (which I tore apart in a previous teardown for being completely unbelievable), Pepper Bio has a strong team and a lot of promise.
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Before we dive in, I have to admit that I don’t have a deep understanding of this specific segment of biotech, and I had to do a fair amount of Googling to fully understand the group. As such, there is a possibility that I may get some things wrong here. This also brings up an important point: your group should be well targeted to its audience, and in this case I’m probably not the audience. If I were working with Pepper as one of my presentation coaching clients, I would encourage them to make the story more vivid, with examples and anecdotes that are more relatable to the general population. Having said that, the simple fact is that I am no Target audience for this deck: Biotech investors.
Read Anna’s story from November to get some context, and then we’ll get to the trailer itself:
Slides in this surface
- Slide cover
- Problem slide 1
- Personal story segment
- Team segment
- Problem slide 2
- Solution slide 1
- Results slide
- Solution slide 2
- Solution slide 3
- Application slide
- Target market segment
- Business model slide
- Go to Market/Bridgehead Segment
- Timeline slide
- Traction/Revenue Segment 1
- Traction/Revenue segment 2
- Revenue forecast slide
- Technology development slide
- Future vision slide
- Close the slide
Three things she loves
What confuses me most about this presentation is just that some Some slides are incredibly accessible, while others are inaccessible. . . Okay, we’ll get to that in a minute.
Personal story
[Slide 3] Make it personal. Image credits: Vital pepper
I love a good personal story. Attaching yourself to the problem you’re trying to solve helps bring the story to life; It prevents the narrative from becoming abstract or obtuse and enables you to speak from the heart. In this case, the CEO tells the story of his grandmother, and how the lack of Alzheimer’s treatments was a sad consequence.
Obviously I didn’t hear the voiceover for this slide, but I think there are many ways it could be improved (picture of the grandmother in question, perhaps?). However, this is a good first step.
ELI5
There is a subsection called “Explaining Like I’m Five” where people try to explain complex topics as if the reader were five years old. Pepper Bio has lost me a few times in this collection, but then they blow us away with this amazing duo of chips:
![](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/pdt-78-6.5m-seed-pepper-bio-slide-8-of-20.png)
[Slide 8] Here’s the problem. Image credits: Vital pepper
This slide is a masterpiece. It explores the problem space the company is trying to address in incredibly simple words.
And then comes the microphone drop:
![](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/pdt-78-6.5m-seed-pepper-bio-slide-9-of-20.png)
[Slide 9] Lost daa. Image credits: Vital pepper
I love this pair of slides for their simplicity and sturdiness. They anchor the narrative and help set the scene beautifully for what is to come. In a world often filled with deep technical language, Pepper Bio stood out for a moment.
The mother of all market sizes
![](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/pdt-78-6.5m-seed-pepper-bio-slide-11-of-20.png)
[Slide 11] Well, the market is certainly big enough. Image credits: Vital pepper
This slide is a masterpiece both in terms of visuals and content. It identifies three important therapeutic areas with significant market opportunities: oncology, neurological diseases, and inflammatory diseases. The financial numbers presented are very impressive, indicating strong compound annual growth rates for each category.
The oncology startup’s identification of a $201 billion market in 2021 and a CAGR of 9.7% is particularly notable. This indicates a deep understanding of a sector that desperately needs innovation and holds great financial promise. The stark statistics that one in six people worldwide die from cancer underscores the profound impact that progress in this field can have.
It then continues to replicate similar numbers for neurodegenerative and inflammatory diseases, each with huge market sizes and promising growth rates.
Overall, the slide does an excellent job of highlighting Pepper Bio’s potential impact in areas that are not only financially vast, but also critically important to global health. Hell of a combo.
Now, of course, the company Do You need to show that it’s not spread too thin and that it makes sense to operate in all those market segments. But that’s a mistake: Overall, this is one of the best market volume slides I’ve ever seen.
In the remainder of this analysis, we’ll look at three things that could have been improved or done differently on Pepper Bio, as well as the full presentation suite!