Large supermarket chains They have their own purchasing and logistics functions, but there are thousands of smaller, independent grocery stores and chains. They don’t have the benefit of specialized software and technology to help make everything run smoothly, but that’s where Vori sees an opportunity.
The company agreed to share the pitch floor it used to raise its $10 million Series A so I could see it up close. (He also wrote a bit more about fundraising on his own blog.)
For this pitch duck breakdown, it’s helpful to have a little context on why Vori makes business sense, and it’s great to see the founder explain how the company works — and how he thinks about building B2B software that’s “fun to use like Candy Crush.” Below is a five minute video that beautifully tells the story. I only watched it after ripping the pitch deck so my criticism wouldn’t affect the video, but it’s good enough to watch before or after if you want to delve a little deeper into this particular industry.
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
Vori shared 13 slides, changed some information.
“We’ve removed some of the information in the weeds about growth cycle conversion metrics with sales cycle/revenue absorption,” the team said.
- Cover slide
- Mission statement slide
- Vori at a glance — (KPI slide, slightly modified)
- “We help grocery” – middle slide
- “Our Market: Independent Grocery Chain” – Market Slide
- “Grocery stores still work on pencil and paper” – problem slide
- “How do these stores work today” – problem slide
- “Suddenly, Covid Has Changed Everything in the Grocery Store” – “Why Now” Slide
- “Meet the All-in-One Grocery Back Office with Vori” – Solution Slide
- “What retailers say” – market confirmation slide
- “The Largest Digitized Retail Segment on Earth” – Market Size/TAM/SAM/SOM Slide
- “Competing with Legacy Systems” – Competition Slide (Updated)
- “This is why our team was born” – team slide
Three things to love
When I recently talked with the DocSend team about what are the most important slides in a deck, they shared that the summary slide is starting to become more important. At the time, I was eager to find a good example, and lo and behold – Vori comes up with a great one.
Strict mission
[Slide 2] Straight out of the gate with an oodle of clarity. Image credits: Spring
Vori does a good job of showing – in a fun way – what the problem is.
I love a good summary slide. Most people put it on the cover slide, but Vori takes a different approach – the first two slides set the stage for what the company is doing. The cover slide is at the top of this post and reads “Operating System for Grocery” with a few keywords designed like tags (“Order Management,” “Inventory Management” and “Analytics”). The second slide further completes the hierarchy for what the company does: “Vori is a vertical SaaS solution for local and regional supermarket chains.
In just a few words and a photo, the company makes it very easy for investors to get a high-level overview and some decent context for what they’re looking at. That has many benefits: If investors are intimidated by grocery, inventory management, SaaS, or regionally focused businesses, they can walk away after just a couple of slides.
The only thing I would add to either of these two slides is a hint at the round’s growth and size. Even words like “We have X clients and we’re raising Series A” or “Series A” suggest an order of magnitude.
Clear the market size
One of the most important things to show VC investors is that the company has “venture scale”. In other words, can an investor get a half-decent return on his investment? (“Half decent” in this context is a a lot of More than you think. Angel investors have very different expectations from VCs). One of the big drivers for that is how big the market is.
Pitching a wrong-sized company to a VC shows that you don’t understand how the asset class works. Vori deftly sidesteps that problem by getting straight to the meat of the question: Slide 4 is interstitial (and delicious; check it out in the full slide deck below), but Slide 5 goes bold:
[Slide 5] So is this market big enough to take care of? Image credits: Spring
The first question VCs ask themselves is, “Okay, cool, but how many independent stores are there?” I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was. or “How big is this market?” Or, “If there is a market, is it collapsing or growing under the weight of supermarket chain rolls?” Vori does an exceptional job of painting a picture of a strong, prosperous, growing and addressable market. Now, I have to do my due diligence on that. (The first Google results seem to confirm that indies are about a third of the market and worth about $250 billion, but seem to suggest that there are only 21,000 niches, so I’d like to consider the data source and differences here).
However, the size and penetration of independent supermarkets is more significant than I thought, perhaps indicating that this is a more focused market after all.
This slide makes it easy for the investor to think about the size of the market, as well as the size and growth of the market you are entering.
The alternative is godliness.
[Slide 7] Clear problem and value. Image Credits: Spring
Vori does a good job of showing – in a fun way – what the problem is. It works on slides 6 and 7, but the latter is especially powerful. In a world where software, automation and analytics are consuming everything, it’s somewhat surprising to see how manual the process is. That both points to why this problem is worth solving and raises some curiosity about whether inefficiencies exist here.
I don’t know exactly how Vori would make a pitch for this slide, but if it were me, I would describe the added costs, missed opportunities, and problems with relying on older systems. This goes a long way to clarifying the value proposition. Vori doesn’t connect the dots on this slide, but I think there are metrics here that the company can link the use of the product to higher productivity, profitability and reduced errors. From there it is a short way to conclude that the product will pay for itself in a short period of time.
This slide shows how you can empathize with your customers and use the value proposition to drive home the point that your product is an integral part of your customers’ lives.
For the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Vori could improve or do differently with the full deck.
