Pitch Deck Teardown: Card Blanch’s $460K deck for its angel round

Card Blanch claims to have a new take on the concept and closed just shy of half a million dollars with a very elegant deck. There are a few parts of the slide deck that the company rarely does well. Alright, let's dive in!

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Slides in this deck

The team tells us that the deck is exactly the same as pitched without redactions.

1. Cover slide
2. Problem slide
3. Market size slide
4. Solution slide
5. Product slide
6. “How it works” slide
7. Competition slide
8. Revenue model slide
9. Market opportunity slide
10.  “Next steps” — the ask slide
11.  “Your whole wallet in one card” — value prop slide
12.  “Complete spending analytic in one place”— summary slide

Three things to love

One of the best-designed decks I have ever seen is at Card Blanch. Take a look at the highlights.

Well, that’s a big enough market

There is a large market size.

I don’t think anyone was going to argue against the number of cards in circulation and use in the U.S., and perhaps I’d have liked to have seen more of a “what’s the market we are going after?” type of approach, but as far as market-size slides go, this is hard to argue with.

The average American wouldn't carry six cards with them all the time because they have different advantages. The data is presented in a clean and simple way. The "text flows behind the person" design is very nice.

You can get away with a market slide if your market is large. This is likely a very mature market. There isn't much growth to be had in this industry. To stand out, you have to give a huge customer benefit. Is Card Blanch capable of pulling that off?

Awesome “ask” slide

This is a good slide for asking. We added it to our article to focus on that slide.

OK, so this is not a complete slam dunk as an “ask” slide, but at least it has a specific amount of money that’s being raised, and it has a number of goals that will be delivered in the next stretch of the company’s existence.

I would like the slide to use specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time based goals. Product development will never be finalized; go-to-market will never be complete; "aggressive" doesn't mean anything without numbers attached, etc. It is rare that I see slides like this one, so I thought I would celebrate it.

So easy to understand

Good product-driven stories were presented in this slide. The image is called Card Blanch.

If your would-be investors are going through your deck to see if you’re trying to defraud them, that’s not a great first impression.

The story of Card Blanch is told through designs. The full story of how the product works, paying with the right card in the right place to maximize card benefits, fits into four elegantScreenshots The rest is included in slide 12.

The creators can give a voice over of how it all works. Is it possible that will work?

There is no mention of how much is built and how much is mock-ups in the pitch deck. In a world where investors are trying to determine how much risk is in a startup, an update about what has been done so far would be helpful.

The fundraising stages are not about dollar values — they’re about risk

We will look at three things Card Blanch could have done differently, along with its full pitch deck.