Screentel’s $1M floor • TechCrunch

There is no shortage Tools for brainstorming, collaboration and keeping all your knowledge in one place. Still, judging by the number of new devices that are constantly coming to the market, it seems that people are frustrated with the available devices.

ScreenTal recently raised $1 million to build its visual collaborative intelligence infrastructure and shared its deck with us to take a look under the hood.

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

1. Cover slide
2. Problem Slide Part 1
3. Problem slide part 2
4. Solution Slide Part 1
5. Solution Slide Part 2
6. Value proposition slide
7. User credentials slide
8. Drag slide
9. Income slider
10. Retaining slide
11. User profile slide
12. Growth forecast slide
13. Vision slide
14. Question slide
15. Contact slide
16. Appendices cover slide
17. Appendix 1: Why Now?
18. Appendix 2: Competitive landscape
19. Appendix 3: Production and Development Model

Three things to love

Scrintal is entering a crowded and chaotic market; Without actually trying, I can name five or six well-established competitors in that space. The good news is that the company seems to be aware of that and is tackling the benefits head on.

Clarity of value proposition

A 10x work speed increase is a claim, and I’d like to see some proof as an investor – but the story is well told. This value proposition slide comes after a thorough analysis of the problem space and the solution the company is building, and provides great clarity on what the tool does and who it works for.

A story to explain the benefits

[Slide 7] ScreenTal does a great job of letting its early customers do the bulk of the story. Image credits: screenshot

Getting your customers to tell your story is an obvious storytelling technique often used on the sales floor. It’s surprisingly rarely used in VC pit decks, which I think is a shame. Here, Screental uses customer testimonials to highlight various selling points and benefits in a seamless and elegant way.

The statistics on the slide (66% fewer apps used, 50% less time spent, 30% fewer meetings) tell part of the story. The headlines say otherwise. The quotes help flesh out the story, and a quick look at the job titles of the people sharing the testimonials can help give a broader sense of how organizations can benefit from ScreenTal.

I assume the “username” fields are fixed and the “real” deck shows the names and businesses that are using the product, but even without that, it shows how much you use testimonials and user interviews. .

For starters, this slide is a lesson on how to think creatively about sharing your journey with investors today.

I don’t like how much text is on this slide – you don’t want to use this for a presentation – but it’s a great slide for a homecoming deck. It adds a lot of context and makes it super easy to understand even without audio or extra information.

A bold look

[Slide 13] It is important to include a clear vision in the near future. Image credits: screenshot
(Opens in a new window)

This slide is not strictly a visual slide – it does much more than that. It shows what some competitor reviews are and explores the nature of those competitors’ business models. It shares the direction of the plan (although the steps are a little unclear to me, from Visual OS to Machine Learning to Workplace to Visual Knowledge Base). Having said that, in context, I can see this being a helpful slide to steer some conversations with investors in the right direction.

This slide isn’t completely polished, though, and there are a few things that could be improved. I wish the vision was clearer: “Change the way 1B+ people create ideas” is too soft. Yes, the company wants to change, but from what to what and why? Also, why the company only talks about the European market is a little confusing to me – it’s a big world there, and the company’s price is in US dollars, so seeing the limit of “platform expansion” itself is confusing.

For the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things with the full deck that Skrintal could improve or do.

Three things that can be improved

One of the biggest things that investors look for when evaluating a startup is the ability to gradually de-risk it. A million dollars isn’t a huge fundraise by most standards, and the company may be early in its value-creation journey. That means the deck needs to make one thing clear: what is it doing at the current level to prove some hypothesis? Unfortunately, the screen surface is a bit lacking on that front.