Collecting points is a way of life For many. Getting great deals on flights, for example, by accumulating points and spending them carefully, can make the difference between landing on a cattle row or living in fabulous luxury up front.
Last year, we covered real-time flight rewards search Point.me’s $2 million round, and at the beginning of this month, the company raised an additional $10 million. Today, I’m putting the combination the company used to raise its new round under the lens to see if the startup has missed the point(s) or is soaring to great heights.
When I found out what the company did, I was immediately curious about how to tell its story in a compelling way. I love a good Air Points flight as much as I love the vague feeling you get when you know you’ve “beat the system,” but does this product solve a “real” problem? Or is it a disposable luxury item? Let’s dive in and find out.
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Slides in this surface
Point.me used a deck of 16 slides to raise $10 million:
- Slide cover
- Slice the problem
- Problem impact slide
- “How the issue is currently being resolved” slide.
- Solution slide
- Value proposition slide
- Product benefits slide
- Product segment
- Product delivery segment
- Slide screenshots of the product
- Traction chip
- Tap the clipboard slide
- Trench slice
- Team segment
- Previous investors slip away
- Close the slide
Three things she loves
Point.me gets a lot of things right in this group. It has clearly enhanced its client messaging a lot during its existence.
Great consumer-focused messaging
As you can see from the slides in this deck overview, Point.me spends a lot of time on the product. This is often a cranberry flag in my book, but I can’t really fault it Which a lot. The company piqued my curiosity enough to go check out Its pricing pageWhich means they almost had me.
Some hard facts
This slide is really interesting for a number of reasons. First, I had no idea how big the airline points economy was, nor how great a tool it was for airlines. Issuing $48 billion worth of points and then not redeeming a third of it is a hell of a business model. And it gets worse: The founders told me those numbers were correct when they last went to raise money, but they claim the value of unredeemed points and miles annually is now closer to $30 billion, not $16 billion.
Naturally, this is built into the flight card models. It is very cheap to issue points if you know that many of them will not be redeemed; especially If those points eventually expire.
The economist in me sees this as a risk for Point.me, however: it’s a dangerous place to work. The more success you have, the more incentive you have for the people whose products you’re ramping up to shut you down or at least make your life harder.
However, if you’re making hay while the sun shines, this sounds pretty convincing.
Two categories of customers
Point.me is especially useful for people who have multiple flight points, and these people tend to travel a lot. This makes an interesting target audience: If you travel a lot, it means you are on the road a lot, perhaps for work. This means that you will likely have less time than most to figure out where your points stand.
This company positions itself for success in two ways: it provides a concierge solution for people who are willing to pay a fee to have someone figure out how to get the most out of their saved points; And A self-service platform for people who are willing to do the work themselves.
On the downside, this slide is essentially a sales slide aimed at customers. Now, many VCs travel a lot, so I’m not overly misleading Point.me about that, but in general, remember that the “product” you’re selling to a VC is not the product you want to sell to your clients. Venture capital is interested in your company’s shares, so the sales pattern will be different.
In the remainder of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Point.me could have improved or done differently, as well as its full presentation suite.