How to improve your pitch deck #6 – Beauty App

SeedLegals CEO Anthony Rose sits down with founder Kim Frater and chief technology officer Paul Ingram of The Beauty App, a free online booking system for hair salons and beauty therapists.

The Beauty App helps hairdressers and others deal with the problem of last-minute cancellations, pushing out notifications as to when appointments become available to local customers for drop-ins.

Frater says: “We identified a gap in the beauty and wellness industry about how to deal with cancellations and last-minute availability and notifying potential customers in time.”

Ingram adds: “Everybody works across mobile channels such as email, text messaging, Facebook … the key for The Beauty App are modern applications that are really scale-able, really interoperable and, at the end of the day, works for everybody with simplicity.”

For Rose, a slide deck is always a story: what is the problem you’re looking to solve? How are you going to solve it? How are you going to help others? How are you doing in terms of traction? Who is the team?

Says Rose: “The Beauty App seems like a perfect Software as a Service [SaaS] business but the story is struggling to come through because of quite complicated graphics and messaging.”

“Seeing our pitch deck through Anthony’s eyes has been a really valuable lesson,” sums up Frater. “We ourselves know the detail back to front and we’re so close to it, we don’t really see it anymore. It’s about picking out real headlines.”

The Beauty App is raising £1.65m in exchange for 25 per cent of the company

Look and feel

• Make sure your slide deck reflects your potential customer – any investor is going to be channeling how they view your pitch deck through that buyer
• Don’t cram too much information in. Let your proposition breathe
• Show us what the product looks like

Messaging and proposition

• Every slide deck should follow this formula: the dream, the problem which needs solving, how you’re going to solve it, who the competition is, size of the market, who the team are and how much you’re looking to raise
• If you’re raising money right now, you should reflect the reality of Covid-19
• End with a call to action

Valuation and financials

• The average amount of time that an investor looks at a slide deck is three minutes
• Use simple messaging, bright graphics and a powerful story
• Don’t force the investor to work too hard, so use illustrations
• Don’t put in too many financial projects, which may see you having to justify why you didn’t hit estimates further down the line

Further reading

How to improve your pitch deck #5 – Love Ocean