There are around 250.000 hair and beauty professionals working in the UK and Glambook wants to be the shared economy platform that caters to them.
The company recently raised $2.5 million at a $12 million valuation, and I thought I’d share the pitch deck with you to see how the company pitched its story to its investors.
We’re looking for more unique pitches to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own, here’s how to do that.
Slides on this floor
Glambook raised the investment with a 19-slide deck, and they agreed to share it with us in full:
- Cover slide
- Problem slide
- “Unsolved by reason” – luck slipper
- The solution slider
- Value proposition slide
- “People love our product” – product proof slide
- Market slide
- Accessible market slide
- Drag slide
- “Why now” – time slide
- Slide layout
- Business model slide
- Go to the market slide
- Road map slide
- Social impact slide
- Group slide
- “Here’s our story” – “Why” slide
- Summary slide
- Contact slide
Three things to love
For an early-stage company, Glambook has a lot going for it — it’s seeing meaningful traction and operating in an exciting market. The biggest challenge the company has to overcome is convincing investors that this is indeed a market crying out for technological change. And it does a great job.
Here are three things that work particularly well:
Tractiooooooooooooo
[Slide 9] Traction: If you have it, you’re laughing all the way to the bank. Image credits: Glambook
Is your team terrible? Is your product dirty? Is it your marketplace? I’m not saying any of these things apply to Glambook, but in general, it doesn’t matter if you have traction.
You can answer all questions like this: “Maybe it’s stupid, but look at the numbers.” It’s working!” Actually, the question becomes why it works, and if you can make it work, even in moderation.
For a relatively small, $2.5 million round, having 20,000 customers in 38 countries is impressive. (Though the most important metrics of traction—how sticky is it noticed? How many orders are being processed? How much revenue is being generated?—are missing.)
Glambook’s selling story here is that “things are changing, and so are we,” which is the best place to be as a startup.
After all, it’s not a good story to say there are subscription sales happening without monthly or yearly recurring revenue figures. I am impressed by the number of countries and the number of experts on this slide, but I would like to know the number of customers and the cost of subscriptions. Not including those numbers immediately made me suspicious.
But those are aside. The company is showing real, measurable, useful figures. The takeaway here is that if your company has those, display them proudly. why? VCs naturally invest in high-risk businesses. Any drag—and any growth—goes a long way toward showing that the business is at least partially risk-averse.
Like I said, if you have traction, you’re doing it. Something Right, and that Something Maybe it will develop into a good company one way or another.
A rising tide
[Slide 10] A rising tide lifts all boats. Image Credits: Glambook
Glambook uses this slide to tell the story of the market’s evolution. In the year In 2019, 54% of hairdressers and hairdressers were self-employed and in 2020 this will increase to 60%.
I would love to have a graph that pulls this data back so I can see more trends, but there is definitely something powerful about this market. Glambook’s selling story is that “things are changing, and we’re right there with them,” making it the perfect place for a startup.
If you can work macroeconomics and big societal changes into your pitch and show how they apply, you could have a winner.
This slide is titled “Why Now,” but I think it goes hand-in-hand with another slide titled “Unsolved for Reason.” I’ll talk about that another time, but suffice it to say that with this deck the company points to some of its biggest challenges without providing 100% satisfactory answers.
“This market is bigger than you think.”
[Slide 7] A great opportunity. Image Credits: Glambook
Often times as a VC, you end up with companies in unfamiliar industries and markets. I had to sit with that for a moment.
Estheticians, hairdressers and hairdressers – is that a big enough market to build a business empire around? The UK has a population of 67 million or so, so if these numbers are correct, there are around 1,400 people in the hair and beauty business. That means 4% of the UK population work as beauticians, hairdressers and hairdressers.
As a gut check, that seems a bit high to me, but a quick Google search seems to confirm those numbers in the article the company mentions on this slide. That’s interesting, at least because a few searches don’t identify a clear market leader in this space. Can Glambook be the market leader?
The tone here is a bit disingenuous: Glambook is a Berlin-based company that uses a lot of UK-based statistics and claims to have customers in 38 countries (I’ll get to that in a moment). An important part of this particular slide is showing that there is a large market ripe for disruption.
As an investor, this is the kind of thing that makes me lean forward and pay more attention.
For the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things with the full pitch deck that Glambook could improve or do differently.
