About a year ago, I tore down a pitch deck by Mi Terro, founded by Robert Luo. Guess who’s back with another company? Luo has raised $1.5 million for Tanbii from a Hong Kong family office.
In general, I would be suspicious of a founder raising money for a second startup less than a year after they got funded for another. I’m eager to see how that’s been addressed in the Tanbii deck.
As for Mi Terro? It’s still going: “Mi Terro is doing amazingly well. We gained a lot of great traction and plan to raise another round later this year,” Luo told me in an email.
Of course, this puts me in an exciting situation: I get to look back at what I said could be improved in Mi Terro’s pitch deck (market sizing, traction, and the absence of a competition slide) last year and see how the founder has addressed these issues for his new company.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
- Cover slide
- Problem slide
- Solution slide
- Product slide “Web 5.0 Metaverse”
- Value proposition slide
- How it works slide
- How Tanbii connects virtual and reality slide
- Product features slide
- Target audience slide
- Future vision slide (“Personal Carbon Credits”)
- Market size (TAM/SAM/SOM)
- Partnerships slide
- Competitive landscape slide
- Go to market slide (“University Ambassador Program”)
- Roadmap and Business Model slide
- Team slide
- Advisory board
- Contact and Closing slide
Three things to love
Right out of the box, I love that the company’s founder is staying in the same industry (carbon reduction) as his previous company. It makes it easy to accept the narrative that while building one company, he saw an opportunity for another.
Bold problem statement
On slide 2, the company comes out of the gate with a clear problem: consumer carbon emissions.
[Slide 2] Problem slide. Image Credits: Tanbii
Most people agree that reducing CO2 is a good idea, even though it seems many of us are feeling pretty powerless, which is the problem space Tanbii is buzzing into.
A hell of an advisory board
[Slide 17] That’s a hell of an advisory board. Image Credits: Tanbii
I’m often pretty skeptical of advisory boards, and if I were considering investing, I’d pick up the phone and contact some of these folks to see how closely they are working with Tanbii. I’m not saying this is the case here, but I’ve often had reference calls with advisory board members who go, “Wait, who?” and have literally no idea who the founder is or what the company does. So if you put someone on a slide, make sure they know and are prepared to receive a call out of the blue.
A quick LinkedIn search shows that Bulteel lists being an adviser to Mi Terro, but none of the other advisers advertise their association with Tanbii. I also discovered that there were a bunch of little mistakes on this slide: “Davids” should be “David” and “Warshauser” should be “Warshauer.” The next step would definitely be a call or two to find out what’s going on here.
Assuming that’s all in order, yes, this is a hell of an advisory board.
Hello, competitors
I gave the founder grief for the lack of a competition slide in the previous deck. Luckily, Tanbii’s deck has one!
[Slide 13] Competitors! Image Credits: Tanbii
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Tanbii could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
Three things that could be improved
I know that Tanbii is an early-stage company, so I’m aware that some of the commentary below may come off as a little too harsh. Nonetheless, the founder is experienced, both as an entrepreneur and as a recipient of a pitch deck teardown, and they bravely lobbed their deck back on the chopping block anyway. I feel like I don’t have to hold back.
So, dear readers, I shan’t.
The truth is, there’s a lot I found to be challenging about this deck. The three slides I’ve chosen are not the worst, but they are the ones I found most surprising. At first glance, I thought the first two slides here (target market and market size) were great. But when I looked a little closer, I found that they didn’t pass muster.
To be fair, founders often struggle to cover the target market and market size in their decks, so I’m grateful I get to talk about it here.
This target audience slide is unhelpful
Tanbii is targeting Gen Z with its products, claiming that this demographic is full of people who prefer “green” brands and have a ton of buying power and that 81% of the world’s 2.6 billion Gen Zers are gamers:
[Slide 9] Clear target audience. Image Credit: Tanbii
However, every one of my brain cells is screaming about these numbers. Apart from the overall population of Gen Zers (2.6 billion), no number here passes even the simplest sniff test.
Claiming that the 2.6 billion people who comprise Gen Z command a buying power of $143 billion would suggest that the average Gen Zer has access to $55 of buying power. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem particularly impressive in this context.
The slide also seems to suggest that 81% of the population are “gamers” and spend 7.2 hours per week playing games. Some studies seem to suggest that that’s accurate for the U.S., at least, but the World Bank seems to think that, globally, 9.3% of people live in “extreme poverty,” earning less than $1.90 per day. Tanbii’s numbers suggest, then, that almost every person who doesn’t live in extreme poverty is a gamer.
I’m confused what story this slide is trying to tell. Yes, the target audience includes a large number of people, but the rest of the numbers make it hard to support this company.
A huge market, yes, but not the way Tanbii thinks
[Slide 11] That’s a hella big market! Image Credits: Tanbii
To calculate a company’s TAM, you have to ask: If it were able to take on the entire market, how big could its market possibly be? Tanbii only goes after the personal carbon market, and so its TAM should probably be limited to that. Conveniently, that’s listed on this slide, but unfortunately, it shows that the TAM is actually only 1% of what Tanbii says it is.
The company also suggests it will gobble up 80% of the global market share, which seems rather ambitious, especially since it doesn’t have a tangible plan for how it is going to get there, at least not on this deck.
Finally, Tanbii falls into the trap of listing its gross market value: What this company sells is a tool, not carbon credits. In other words, the TAM should not be the value of all carbon traded, but the value of all tools used for trading carbon. Therefore, the SOM (serviceable obtainable market) is likely off by several orders of magnitude.
The slides do have to make sense . . .
I think some of the slides in this deck are either videos (that didn’t play because the deck was submitted as a PDF) or they just don’t make sense for some other reason. Take a look at Slides 6 and 7, specifically — you can’t just say “how it works” and then not explain how something works!
[Slide 7] Well that clears things up. Image Credits: Tanbii
[Slide 6] Erm . . . Image Credits: Tanbii
The full pitch deck
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