Pitch Deck Teardown: Smalls’ $19M Series B deck

Smalls has raised a total of $34 million for its cat food subscription business. But in a competitive pet food market, how does the company set itself from its competition?

The cat food industry is an extremely competitive market, with numerous brands and products vying for the attention of cat owners. The industry is characterized by constant innovation, but largely on the marketing side, rather than on product. So where does a company like Smalls fit in? How does it know that it can continue growing? Let’s find out!

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Slides in this deck

Smalls raised with a 24-slide deck, which it shared in full with us with some minor edits: “Information redacted includes specific details to the company’s valuation and current revenue,” a representative from the company told me but said that no slides were completely omitted.

1. Cover slide
2. Market slide
3. Problem slide
4. Mission slide (“We are here to make 9 lives 10”)
5. Competition slide
6. Product slide
7. How it works slide
8. Why Now interstitial slide
9. Business metrics slide
10.  Milestones slide
11.  Team slide
12.  Use of Funds slide
13.  Performance interstitial slide
14.  CAC slide
15.  Go to market/growth channels slide
16.  Value Prop slide
17.  Churn analysis slide
18.  LTV slide
19.  Future Plans interstitial slide
20.  “From cat food brand to cat brand” — Market extension slide part 1
21.  Market extension slide part 2
22.  LTV extension slide
23.  The Ask and target milestones slide
24.  Thank you slide

Three things to love

A bunch of really great things stood out to me in this pitch deck, and I’m not just saying that because it includes adorable cat photos.

We get it, cats are picky eaters

Smalls lays out why it has a purrfect fan base. Its remarkable spread of formulations (with hilarious names like fish, bird and other bird) and textures (smooth, ground) mean there’s something in there for everyone. It couldn’t have been logistically easy to end up with 14 different SKUs that need to be manufactured and kept in stock, but here’s a company that understands that animals don’t always eat what they don’t like, especially finicky cats. Having all of these formulations already in-market represents a moat of sorts; it isn’t easy, which may just prove helpful in keeping competitors at bay.

The way Smalls gets pet owners hooked is through its seamless ordering flow:

Solid metrics

I love a good metrics slide, and while the company blocked out a lot of its actual numbers, what’s fascinating here is the growth chart on the right and which metrics the company cares about. Even without knowing the precise numbers, you can tell a lot about a company from what it considers its KPIs.

It’s great that 86% of revenue is recurring revenue, and doubling revenue over the past six months is incredibly encouraging. It’s obvious that the Smalls team has found a furmula (see what I did there?) for success. Tracking CAC, profit per box, LTV, AOV and ARR are the key metrics you’d expect from any subscription business, and in this case, the business is experiencing extreme growth.

It’s a little curious that it’s raising $12.5 million specifically (why not $12 million or $13 million or $15 million?), and with the benefit of hindsight, it raised $19 million in this round anyway. It’s not uncommon for companies to discover opportunities for more aggressive growth or bigger market expansions in the investment process, and it’s possible that’s why it took more funds.

Fresh funding gives cat food brand Smalls avenue into retail for the first time

Impressive top-of-funnel

The company has diversified its acquisition channels, which is a great way of de-risking:

That less than 33% of its acquisitions comes from a single channel is indicative of a business that hasn’t put all of its kittens in one basket. What this slide tells me is that Smalls has a robust and relatively sophisticated take on growth — exactly what an investor would want to see before pouring a giant chunky sachet of sauce-covered dollar bills into Smalls’ bowl.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Smalls could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

Three things that could be improved

There are a couple of doozies in this deck that I really wasn’t expecting.

Narrative flow

I’ve been doing pitch coaching long enough that I can usually pitch a company’s story passably well if I get a deck sent to me. That isn’t entirely true with this deck, and I’m left confused: Why are the slides in this order?

The company uses a couple of interstitial slides (i.e., title slides halfway through the deck), but they don’t fully make sense. Slide 8 reads “Why Now.” Slide 19 reads “Future Plans.” But the slides that follow those interstitial slides aren’t just about the “why now” and “future plans.”

After the Why Now slide, for example, the company goes on to talk about business metrics, milestones and the team. None of those really answer “why now.” In fact, Smalls doesn’t really talk about future opportunities at all; a large portion of its narrative is focused on the status quo and the “how we got here.” I understand the temptation, but your investors are there for your company’s future, and it makes sense to talk a lot more about the future you see for this market and industry.

How are you going to grow?

At a Series B-sized round, it’s all about growth, but this deck seems pretty divorced of actual plans for how that growth is going to happen. It has a bunch of historical information and suggests in a somewhat hand-wavy manner that it is going from “cat food” to “all things cat,” but without really laying out the product lines, marketing channels or brand extensions it will execute on to make that happen. As an investor, that makes me nervous; I want to see a clear plan!

Look, if you have 100,000 people subscribing to your monthly box of cat food, it makes sense to broaden what customers buy from you. As Smalls points out, food is only 35% of the market, so there are many more opportunities. That said, this slide is the only hint at what the company is going to do next, which is vague to the point of being pointless. What are these other services? How will the company differentiate in a landscape where litter, toys, treats and consumables are commodity goods?

It might have been better to include a much more specific plan for what the brand extensions are, including product images and gross margins on these products.

That’s not a use of funds slide

This slide needs to be a lot more specific: What are the goals, where do you start, where do you go next? I’d also have loved to see a simplified financial slide to back this up; what’s the R&D cost of rolling out investment into marketing, brand and exploration of omnichannel approaches?

In fact, what’s missing is the “go to market” slide; it has a “how we went to market” breakdown, and perhaps the argument is, “Hey, we know how to do this, just trust us,” but as an investor, I’d love to be taken along on the vision.

The full pitch deck

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