Strategy
We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck ecommerce platform Fabric used to raise $9.5 million in funding. The cofounder and CEO break it down and give their advice for entrepreneurs to perfect their pitch.
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- Ecommerce platform Fabric gave Business Insider an exclusive look at the pitch deck the startup used to raise $9.5 million in seed funding.
- Cofounder and CRO Ryan Bartley and CEO Faisal Masud walked us through each slide and gave their best tips for pitching investors.
- Bartley advised founders to know their market inside and out and keep their funding rounds brief and efficient so as not to distract from the business.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
When small businesses set up their online presence, they typically go to the ecommerce giants like Amazon and Shopify. But one startup believes the mid-size and enterprise businesses are held back by the heavyweights, claiming the technology is antiquated and isn’t keeping pace with business owners’ needs.
Fabric, an ecommerce platform founded in 2017, raised a $9.5 million round in seed funding this fall led by Redpoint Ventures. The company’s executives have more than 20 years of experience in ecommerce at billion-dollar companies like Amazon, Google, eBay, and Staples.
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“It was born out of the frustration that we had as operators and product builders — the software in the industry to manage commerce is old,” cofounder and CRO Ryan Bartley told Business Insider.
“We’ve been operators, technologists, and also business owners,” CEO Faisal Masud said, “a lot of those platforms such as Shopify, are born out of the technology needs, not necessarily the business needs that the marketers, merchandisers, and folks on the ground are looking for.”
They shared their pitch deck exclusively with Business Insider and walked us through each slide, what questions investors often ask, and their best pitching tips for other entrepreneurs.
Courtesy of Fabric
Courtesy of Fabric
The first slide of their pitch speaks to the leadership team’s credibility, listing companies they’ve worked for to prove their experience and understanding of the industry.
Bartley said investors are looking for founders who have the expertise to scale their companies. If you don’t have the resume to back you up, you’ll need to talk to current customers and potential customers to ensure you’re offering the right solution.
“There’s no easy path around it. Get the experience, go and do the hard work and understand the domain,” he said.
Courtesy of Fabric
Bartley said he modeled Fabric’s pitch deck on research and studies he found from Harvard and MIT, down to what slides matter most, how they should be ordered, and how long investors spend looking at them.
One of the top elements to show investors: numbers that prove his company is more than some ideas written on a napkin. The $750 million represents the amount of revenue flowing through Fabric’s marketplace, to show its size and scale compared to companies like Alibaba and Amazon.
Courtesy of Fabric
The next slide breaks down Fabric’s customer base into four verticals. Bartley said the platform isn’t designed for small businesses, nor is it competing with Shopify. Rather, it’s seeking mid-market and enterprise clients in need of larger-scale solutions.
Courtesy of Fabric
The next slide focuses on storytelling to help investors understand how Fabric’s founders see the world and hope to change it. “You’re investing in a business in a category that is big and important to the world,” Bartley said.
Courtesy of Fabric
Next is a timeline to show investors where Fabric fits among past and current technologies and where the founders see it going in the future. It also visualizes the current constraints of the commerce industry that the startup wants to fix.
“What exists in the world was built 15 years ago, pre-mobile and pre-cloud. And so you can imagine trying to have a shopping experience on a platform that was built before even the iPhone came out,” Bartley said.
Courtesy of Fabric
The next slide sets up how Fabric is designed to solve the aforementioned problems and the basic principles of commerce. “Investors are really good at understanding financials and understanding the market, but when it comes to specific domains, not a lot of people understand how digital commerce actually works,” Bartley said.
Courtesy of Fabric
Slides eight and nine are simple and straightforward to really focus on the company’s differentiators. This is where Bartley tells investors more about how they plan to transition the market quickly.
Courtesy of Fabric
Courtesy of Fabric
The tenth slide tells more financials and compares what currently exists in the market, versus what Fabric believes should exist.
“We wanted to make sure they understand we’re not just building a large sizable business solving a customer problem, but we also have a business plan that will drive a large profitable company, which is important to investors,” Bartley said.
Courtesy of Fabric
Using a customer testimonial in the next slide shows how the product can change a business owner’s situation, in this case an increase in conversion and revenue according to ABC Carpet and Home CEO Aaron Rose.
Bartley said that the previous slides demonstrate very abstract ideas, but investors also want to know that a company can concretely solve a problem. Case studies can show the level and depth of that solution and how it’s working in the real world.
Courtesy of Fabric
The twelfth slide explains three main pain points for customers making expensive transitions to new platforms and how Fabric aims to significantly cut that cost down.
“Speed is money, cost is money, but also the actual growth that the platform provides ultimately yields better profitability for the company as well,” Masud said.
Courtesy of Fabric
The final slide gives a simple timeline for how quickly customers can get set up and fully transition their business to using Fabric. Bartley said the transition with other platforms can be a multi-year and multi-million dollar process. For an investor looking for a payback, it’s important to see how Fabric plans to grow and scale through its competitive advantage of speeding up that process.
“We want to explain to them that we’re on a path and on a trajectory that’s much quicker than what you would historically expect in this market,” Bartley said.
Courtesy of Fabric
Finally, Bartley suggests founders be efficient in their funding rounds to avoid distracting their attention from the business. He said Fabric kept their latest round to just over a month. “Set it up as a process. Align all the investors and let them know what you’re doing and what you’re looking for,” he said.