If you ever have If you’ve played free-to-play video games on your phone, you may have seen an advertisement or two that includes mini-games and other content of variable quality and relevance.
That’s the space where Incymo works; it promises to use machine learning and other smart techniques to maximize ad revenue for game publishers, promising its users a 30% increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) from new users and a 10% increase for paying customers.
In a market of huge numbers, where every penny counts and every percent can have a huge impact on the game companies, those numbers caught the attention of Incymo’s investors.
We decided to take a closer look at the deck to see if we’d reached for our checkbooks or the big, red “pass” button.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own pitch decks here’s how to do it.
Table of Contents
Slides into this deck
Incymo AI’s deck only has 12 slides, so the company has to make every slide count. This includes:
- Cover slide
- Problem slide
- Solution slide
- Traction slide
- Customers slide
- Business model slide
- Market size slide
- Market trajectory slide
- Slide targets/targets
- Team slide
- “The Question” slide
- Road map slide
Three things to love
There’s a lot to love about Incymo’s slide deck. The design is fresh and incorporates many of the key aspects we expect to see in a pre-seed deck.
A huge market
[Slide 7] That’s a huge TAM. Image Credits: Incymo
No one will argue with Incymo that video game marketing is a big market, and the company gets some credit for showing off the different ways to calculate the TAM and SOM – top-down and bottom-up in this case.
The $72 billion a year TAM is wildly naive, bordering on absurd.
That said, the top-down calculation seems to be “every game on the Google Play and Apple App Store multiplied by the $4,000 we’d charge them per month multiplied by the number of months in the year.” It’s a bold calculation, and I understand how the company got to this point, but even if it were executed with 100% perfection, there will be a large number of games that can’t or won’t be customers.
The TAM of $72 billion a year is wildly naive, bordering on absurd. On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter: the deciding factor is whether the company has a large market, and I agree that it probably does. Nevertheless, any executive team that takes this approach when calculating a TAM shows that it is rather unsophisticated.
However, the bottom-down SOM is also quite artless. If I’m reading this slide correctly, the company is essentially saying, “We have 600 people in our sales pipeline, so our available market is to convert all of them at $4,000 a month.” That’s also unrealistic for a number of reasons: no company ever converts all of its leads, and this SOM seems to indicate a maximum of 600 customers going to the top of the funnel. A company that cannot replenish its leads over time is doomed to stagnation.
Look I believe 100% Incymo is in a big market and it can probably find enough customers to make this worth it but the slideshow is an opportunity to show your potential investors that you have the financial leverage in your company understands. These slides seem to indicate the opposite; not a great look.
Traction is king
[Slide 4] Traction beats everything else. Image Credits: Incymo
I like the strong traction head – it’s one of the things investors care about more than anything else. I wish the company showed its traction through metrics other than “number of customers” and “more customers in the process” – it would have been more powerful to show revenue or results, for example.
There’s a huge difference between signing up with big game studios that want to use your product across their entire portfolio of games and signing up with a skunkworks in the same game studio running a pilot and signing up with an indie developer. On one of the other slides, Incymo mentions that some game companies have an annual marketing budget of $20 million. Great, but it doesn’t connect the dots to say if it really is signed one of those companies.
The other thing I’m tripping over on this slide is the “15 more in the process”. That means very different things for different companies. Anyone who has done B2B sales knows that a healthy sales pipeline is the alpha and omega of a successful sales operation. Having someone “in the process” could mean anything – and without further qualification, it comes dangerously close to yet another vanity metric.
A somewhat clearly defined problem/pain point
[Slide 2] Got to like a clearly defined problem. Image Credits: Incymo
There is little doubt that mobile game marketing is relentless and extremely competitive. The difference between the No. 3 and No. 6 slots on the app charts is staggering, and many of these companies are spending eye-watering sums to work their way to the top.
I believe it 100% when the company says it has found that its target customers (game user acquisition marketers) spend a lot of time repeating ads that perform well. A sample size of 20 seems a bit on the small side for this slide, so I would have liked to see some more detailed numbers, but that doesn’t detract from the clarity of the problem statement. (Although the grammar leaves a bit to be desired.)
So. Those were some of the positive things we’ve found about this pitch deck, and you may have noticed we still have caveats. In a moment, we’re about to get a lot saltier and take a look at a few things that Incymo could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
belt in; it’s going to be quite a ride.
