How doola's Pitch Deck Earned Them a $1M Investment
Arjun Mahadevan, CEO & co-founder of doola, shares how their pitch deck helped them get a $1M investment from HubSpot Ventures.
written by: Ron Dawson
What is doola
doola aims to simplify the process of starting a business by offering a service called "Business-in-a-Box™" for LLCs, which streamlines the steps of company formation, obtaining an Employer Identification Number (EIN), and managing bank accounts. By providing this support, doola enables entrepreneurs to focus on their creative endeavors while the platform takes care of essential backend business tasks.
Ultimately, their goal is to assist 1 billion founders in realizing their business dreams.The strategic partnership with HubSpot is expected to not only bring added value to customers but also improve the success rate of SMBs utilizing doola's platform, ultimately benefiting the businesses that rely on their services.
The Million Dollar Pitch Competition
doola's dream to partner with HubSpot was made possible because of HubSpot for Startup's "Million Dollar Pitch" competition done in collaboration with HubSpot Ventures. The premise was simple: HubSpot for Startups put out a call for founders to submit a video and pitch deck for review. HubSpot Ventures narrowed the selection to six finalists who presented their pitch at INBOUND 23 before a crowd of over 100 INBOUND attendees in the audience, and a panel of six esteemed judges on stage (no pressure at all):
- Arlan Hamilton, Founder & Managing Partner @ Backstage Capital
- Lily Lyman, General Partner @ Underscore VC
- Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer @ HubSpot
- Sarah Hodges, General Partner @ Pillar VC
- Howard Wright, VP and Global Head @ AWS Startups
- Brandon Greer, Head of Ventures @ HubSpot
Arjun's presentation garnered not only one of the most enthusiastic crowd responses, but also captured the hearts and minds of the judges, winning them one of the two investments HubSpot Ventures decided to make.
doola's Pitch Deck
Arjun created an ebook explaining why they joined the competition and the strategy behind how they crafted their deck. Here's an excerpt from the ebook:
First, we knew that this would be a large audience and that small text would not be readable. We thought, “What is the one major takeaway or message that we want the audience to take away from each slide?” Y Combinator has a great guide on this that we followed. For every slide, we sought to do the following:
- Make it legible
- Make it simple
- Make it obvious
From there, we knew that we only had two minutes to pitch and went through an exercise of thinking:
What is essential for the business that we need to show?
Furthermore, we knew that investors typically look for the following in a slide deck:
This led to the final slide structure:
- Slide 1: Title Slide: Aspirational one-liner
- Slide 2: Social Proof: Show our fundraising history
- Slide 3: Problem: What is the world today / status quo?
- Slide 4: Solution: What does the world look like with doola?
- Slide 5-9: Vision: What is our master plan (multiple slides)?
- Slide 10: Monetization: How do we make money?
- Slide 11: TAM: What is the total addressable market?
- Slide 12: Differentiator: What makes us different?
- Slide 13: Team: Why is this team special?
- Slide 14: Thank You: Outro slide with contact info
~~~~~
doola's ebook is a great resource for learning how to structure an effective pitch deck. But the deck is only part of what's necessary. You also have to give a great presentation, which Arjun definitely did. And we have both available for you!