A year ago, Mike Butcher reported that Faye hopes to do for travel insurance what Lemonade did for general insurance, and that’s as good a summary of what Faye does as anything. The company was kind enough to share its (slightly redacted) pitch deck with me so I could look under the hood to see the story it was weaving to close its $10 million.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own pitch decks here’s how to do it.
Table of Contents
Slides into this deck
Faye upped his Series A round with a 19-slide deck, a few of which have been lightly redacted to protect sensitive data from prying eyes:
- Cover slide
- Summary slide
- Team slide
- Problem slide
- Market size slide
- Insurance market overview slide
- Product overview slide
- Product features slide 1
- Product features slide 2
- Product features slide 3
- Product features slide 4
- Go-to-market slide
- Shifting financial growth metrics
- Customer growth metrics are shifting
- Customer validation slide 1
- Competitive landscape slide
- The Ask slide
- Customer validation slide 2
- Closing slide with mission statement
Three things to love
Let’s get this out of the way right away: this really is an excellent pitch deck. I’m going to add it to my rotation of decks that are great examples of how to distill a potentially complex story into an easy-to-follow one.
I love a good summary slide
As I mentioned in my post about summary slides, the combination of the cover and summary slides sets the context for the rest of the conversation. Faye did a great job showing how a good concise slide can set the pace.
[Slide 2] Set the pace. Image Credits: Faye
The company lists traction ($M in sales) and market penetration (available in 48 states), along with market size and market growth. These four numbers paint a picture that presents quite an attractive investment opportunity.
Taking all numbers at face value, the next step in the story is to convince investors that this is the right team to enter this market.
Which brings us to slide 3, the company’s team slide. Unfortunately, it’s not that great, so we’ll talk about it in the “What can be improved” section later in this article. For now, let’s move on to another slide that made a great contribution to Faye’s story.
Great stories on the market sized slide
[Slide 5] What a great way to use market size to your advantage. Image Credits: Faye
Again, there is redacted data here.
Aside from Faye numbers, this is a rare example of a market-sized slide that also provides the rest of the context. I thought it was very well done.
Showing that the market size is (presumably) huge, then saying essentially, “But the TAM could be bigger by expanding the service offering and international rollout,” is very smart. It shows that there is a great opportunity available right now and the opportunity can continue to grow.
The data points on the left are also excellent as they contextualize the company in the larger market.
This slide teaches us that you can tell an elaborate story without obscuring the message. I imagine the voiceover for this slide would be something like this:
The market we’re targeting is currently $xx and could be as large as $yy once we fully address it. What’s really however, the exciting thing here is that the market is easily disrupted. There is little innovation, no recognized consumer brands, those that are active have low market penetration and the entire market is growing at 10% year over year.
The story ties everything together and portrays travel insurance as a very interesting opportunity.
Comparison between markets
Faye focuses on travel insurance and uses some neighboring markets (auto and home insurance) as comparisons to show that travel insurance offers a better opportunity. Again, the numbers here have been redacted, but as far as storytelling goes, this is a really good approximation:
[Slide 6] Insurance galore. Image Credits: Faye
My guess is that the company added this slide to reassure investors discouraged by other insurtech plays. Assuming the numbers are good, this is a really inspired way to position the market – and Faye in it. Well played indeed.
In the rest of this teardown, we take a look at three things Faye could have improved or done differently, along with the full pitch deck!
Three things that can be improved
I already mentioned that the team slide could use a little love, so let’s start there.
