Pitch Deck

14 Pages·2016·1.3 MB·English

Pitch Deck
Book rooms with locals rather than hotels
Pitch Deck
Book rooms with locals rather than hotels
Airbnb pitch deck:
teardown and redesign

The Airbnb pitch deck from 2009 has become an increasingly
popular reference for entrepreneurs around the world. The company
founders, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk used
this pitch t1o raise $600K from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures. The
company has since become a giant in the Travel industry, closing
a round in early 2015 on a valuation of over USD $20 Billion.
Originally recovered from a 2011 talk by Blecharczyk on Startup
Bootcamp in Boston, we got a glimpse at the exact slides that
they used to pitch investors on their original fundraise. The deck
was incredibly successful at summarizing the company vision
and the huge market opportunity they had before them.
We’ve added all the original slides in this article along with a
redesigned version using our optimised pitch deck templates,
and we’ll be tearing down each one of the slides.
Based on an original article by Slidebean
PPiittcchh DDeecckk
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Airbnb’s
slide distribution
1. Cover 8. Adoption Strategy
2. Problem 9. Competition
3. Solution 10. Competitive Advantages
4. Market Validation 11. Team
5. Market Size 12. Press
6. Product 13. Users Testimonials
7. Business Model ← KILLER SLIDE! 14. Financial
Cover Slide
Cover slides should stick to the very basics: company name and tagline.
Tagline are actually easier said than done, this should
be a 5-7 word sentence that summarizes what your
company does. ‘Book rooms with local, rather than
hotels’ is a perfect explanation of Airbnb’s service,
business model and target audience. It’s written
in simple words without any startup jargon.
Defining your product this early on the deck is truly
fundamental. If the viewer doesn’t have a good
idea of what the product does by slide 2, they are
Original 2009 slide
less likely to engage with the presentation.
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Problem slide
I’ve seen a lot of startups struggle with the If you can’t describe what
problem slide, and I believe that Airbnb solved
your product does in 7
it marvellously. While a common approach to
words, go back to the
this is showing an image of the pain or the status
quo, the guys at Airbnb went with 3 simple drawing board or ask us
lines that perfectly explain their approach.
for help.
Airbnb’s product tries to solve a pricing problem
with hotels (line 1), a cultural
problem for leisure travel (line 2)
and finally a technology problem
(line 3), that other competitors
like CouchSurfing had tried to
solve in the past, unsuccessfully.
Finally, notice how a keyword/
keyphrase is highlighted in
each sentence. If you are just
screening through the slides,
those are three words you
will absolutely not miss.
redesigned version
Problem slides need
to create a connection
with the audience or the investor that you are pitching. Make sure they are written in
simple words and in a way that allows them to empathize with the problem easily.
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Solution slide
In a similar manner to the Problem slide, the Solution
slide should summarize the 3 most important
reasons why a customer would buy your product;
in other words, your core value propositions.
For your Solution, it’s important to talk about the benefits
of your product rather than the features. In this Airbnb
example, notice how instead of writing something along
the lines of ‘search thousands of places to stay online’,
they’ve summarized it to just ‘Save Money while traveling’.
Original 2009 version
Again, less is more when it
comes to pitch decks, and
the better you are able to
summarize these benefits,
the bigger impact you will
cause on your investors.
redesigned version
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Market Validation
Time to start crunching the numbers. It is
only on very rare occasions that a company
has absolutely no market comparison.
What you want to do here is provide the closest
existing reference to a company in your space, to give
investors a real idea of your market opportunity.
Airbnb used a combination of Craigslist and
Couchsurfing for their validation. Craigslist had been
Original 2009 version
‘solving’ the issue of temporary
hosting for a while, and the 17K
weekly listings for SF and NY
were the best possible proof of
a demand for a similar product.
redesigned version
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Market Size
With a similar importance to the Market Validation
side, the Market Size slide should confirm to your
investors the size of your opportunity, and should
provide 3rd party proof of the size of your industry
and its expected behavior for the upcoming years.
Airbnb’s Market slide makes a strong emphasis the
HUGE 2 Billion+ trips that are booked worldwide
on a yearly basis. More importantly, they verify
this data with a credible source such as the Travel
Original 2009 version
Industry Association.
redesigned version
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Product
Product slides should summarize the core functionality
of the product in as few words/images as possible.
The Search by City > Review Listings > Book it!
helps guide the user in what the interface does, and
implies that the process consists of 3 simple steps.
Another great way to approach this slide is with a short
30 second video. A video is truly worth a thousand
images, and as long as your technical setup allows it,
that’s definitely the way you should go. Make sure to Original 2009 version
keep the images version around in case Internet fails.
For the product slide in our redesigned version, we
decided to dedicate one slide to each one of the relevant
product images. The original presentation didn’t really
allow you to appreciate the product, and we believe this
approach causes a much better impact on the viewer.
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Business Model ← Killer Slide
“We take a 10% commision on each
transaction” explains the company’s business
model in a single line, it’s perfect!
Your business model may be more complex
than that, but always make sure that you
can summarize it in a single line.
Airbnb’s approach for this slide in their pitch deck was
to run a simple projection: assuming that they were
Original 2009 version
able to conquer 15% of the
market (and we know those
market numbers are accurate
because they were reviewed
in the previous slide).
With an average transaction
fee of $25 the company could
easily project $200M in revenue
between 2008 and 2011, which
is bound to get anyone excited.
We believe this is the killer
slide in Airbnb’s pitch deck:
it confirms their simple The circles were to keep some uniformity across the content, and gave more importance to the
business model, the HUGE 10% commision statement.
potential the company has
in an existent market, and
it defines the vision of the
founders on where they expect
this product to be in 3 years time.
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Adoption Strategy
This slide is often called the go-to-market strategy,
and should summarize 2-3 core customer acquisition
HACKS that you will use to grow the business. By hacks
I mean that these methods need to be better, more
scalable and more profitable than your competition.
In case of Airbnb, one of their key growth channels
was a hack on Craigslist they called the ‘dual posting
feature’. Basically, they developed a simple program
that would automatically post any Airbnb listing
Original 2009 version
on Craigslist, which at that
point was one of the few
options available to sublet
apartments for tourists.
For the redesign version, we removed the logos which we felt were distracting to the point of the
slide (and also a bit outdated)
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Competition
This 2-axis diagram is a perfect
way to establish against your
competition. By defining Offline
vs Online on the horizontal axis,
and Affordable vs Expensive
on the vertical axis, it’s easy to
visually convey your point.
Market leaders like
CouchSurfing and Craigslist are
definitely affordable, but require
a lot of offline coordination,
far from one-click booking.
On the other hand, Orbitz and
Hotels(dot)com are online, but
significantly more expensive.
Original 2009 version
Make sure that you define the
two core differentiators for your
product, and setup the chart so it always shows up on
the top right corner. Steve Jobs’ iPhone introduction is
probably the best example you can find of a similar chart.
https://youtu.be/9hUIxyE2Ns8