This week, we are Take a look at the presentation by Rypplzz (pronounced “ripples”), a spatial technology startup that recently It raised $3 million. Rypplzz uses radio waves to provide location tracking which is supposed to be more accurate and easier to handle than GPS. Places like museums and sports arenas can use its technology to help guide visitors through their space or provide information based on their location.
I have to admit, this combination didn’t burn me, so I was a little surprised by its success. However, it’s worth exploring what could be improved here, so let’s dive into it!
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Slides in this surface
Reading Rypplzz’s nine-slide deck might leave you a little surprised. First, it doesn’t contain a lot of the information you’d expect to see in a deck used to raise $3 million. There’s no slide about the team, nothing about the problem it’s tackling, no business model or pricing information, no competitive analysis, and no email to contact the CEO. As you will see below, the group fails to answer many questions an investor might ask. As I said before: Your group is only one piece of the fundraising puzzle.
The deck is also huge, weighing in at 33MB – a huge number for nine chips. As a general rule, your presentation should never exceed 20MB because many email servers don’t like large attachments.
Below are the slides in the deck, excluding some client names that the company has withheld:
- Slide cover
- Product overview
- How it works
- Disrupting the augmented reality industry
- Market applications
- Physical and cyber security
- Existing GTM partners/clients
- Investment proposal
- Close the slide
Three things I didn’t absolutely hate
I’m not going to exaggerate this: I honestly struggled to find three good slides with useful information in an accessible format. This section is usually called “Three Things I Love,” but that wouldn’t be entirely honest in this case.
However, it wasn’t all bad.
Explore some use cases
There’s a lot to take issue with on this slide: the text is almost unreadable against the cluttered background, and the center panel doesn’t make too much sense to me. Perhaps a voiceover would have been helpful, but the slide decks need to be able to stand on their own most of the time. You won’t always have the luxury of being able to talk to a potential investor through your group.
However, I did enjoy the two panels on the side here. Drawing a picture of how a customer will use the product is a great way to help investors visualize the different ways in which new technology can be applied.
Product overview
The Rypplzz group does not have a clear problem slide, which would have been useful for explaining the problem space in which the company sees itself operating. The result is that this product segment has to do some of the heavy lifting and explain the problem, solution, and product all at once. Sure, some companies can achieve this effectively, but I’m not sure that’s the case here.
While this slide explains what the product is and its capabilities, it falls short of being a comprehensive product slide. Investors often look for details such as a product’s unique features, its stage of development, and how it differs from competing products. Enhancing your product slide with these details can elevate your presentation and make it more compelling.
I like the simplicity of this slide, though. It’s short, clear, and advanced to the product. It makes me wonder Why But they did it. It’s great if the product is useful for “multiple industries”, for example, but this would have been a great opportunity to share some examples.
Request and use of funds
I like the clarity of the question here: raise $3 million – no bullshit, no beating around the bush.
Of course, the “use of funds” portion of this slide leaves a fair number of things to be desired. It’s a very vague method:
- “Fulfilling existing publishing contracts”: be specific. how many? How much revenue will be freed once these contracts are fulfilled?
- “Take advantage of immediate opportunities”: This is so vague and general that every startup that has put together a portfolio of products can add this to their pitch. What are the chances? Why? How does this de-risk the company and drive growth?
- “Standing on the infrastructure”: Well obviously.
- “Additional patents”: Great, but how much and why?
In the remainder of this analysis, we’ll look at three things Rypplzz could have improved or done differently, along with its full presentation!