There is about 250.000 hair and beauty professionals working in the UK, and Glambook wants to be the sharing economy platform that takes care of them.
The company recently raised $2.5 million at a valuation of $12 million, and I managed to let me share its pitch deck with you to see how the company weaved its story to its investors.
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.
Slides in this deck
Glambook increased its investment with a 19-slide deck and they agreed to share it with us in full:
- cover slip
- problem slide
- “Not solved for a reason” – chancedia
- Solution slide
- Value proposition slide
- “People love our product” – product validation slide
- market slide
- Addressable Market Slide
- Traction slider
- “Why Now” – Timing Slide
- Positioning Slider
- Business model dia
- Go-to-market slide
- Road map slide
- Slide with social impact
- team slide
- “Here’s Our Story” – the “why us” slide
- Overview slide
- Contact slide
Three things to love
For an early stage business, Glambook has a lot to offer – it’s seeing meaningful traction and operating in an interesting market. The biggest challenge the company has to overcome is convincing investors that this is a market that is indeed crying out for a tech makeover. And it does a damn good job.
Here are three things that work particularly well:
Tractiooooooooooooon
[Slide 9] Traction: When you have it, giggle all the way to the couch. Image Credits: glam book
Is your team terrible? Is your product waste? Is your market a niche? I’m not saying any of these apply to Glambook, but in general it doesn’t matter if you have a grip.
You can answer almost any question with, “Maybe it’s stupid, but look at the numbers. It works!” Really, the question becomes why it works and whether you can make it work, even on a large scale.
For a relatively small round of $2.5 million, having 20,000 customers in 38 countries is impressive. (Although I also note that the key traction metrics – how sticky is it? How many orders are facilitated? How much revenue is generated? – are missing.)
The story Glambook is selling here is that “Things are changing, and we’re right there as it is,” which is the perfect place to be as an early stage startup.
More importantly, saying that subscription sales are happening without mentioning monthly or yearly recurring revenue figures isn’t great storytelling. I am impressed with the number of countries and the number of professionals on this slide, but I also want to know the number of customers and the value of the subscriptions. If I don’t include those numbers, I immediately get suspicious.
However, those are aside. The company shows real, measurable, important figures. The takeaway here is that if your business has these, you’ll be proud to show them off. Why? VCs invest in inherently risky companies. Any traction — and any advancement — goes a long way in showing that the company is at least partially at risk.
Like I said, if you got a grip, you do it something right, and that something can probably grow into a good company somehow.
A rising tide
[Slide 10] A rising tide cancels all boats. Image Credits: glam book
Glambook uses this slide to tell the story of an evolving market. In 2019, 54% of hairdressing and hairdressing professionals were self-employed and by 2020 that had grown to 60%.
I would have liked a chart that would pull this data further back into the past for a longer period of time so that I could see more of a trend, but there is no doubt something powerful is going on in this market. The story Glambook is selling here is that “Things are changing, and we’re right there as they are,” which is the perfect place for an early-stage startup.
If you can weave macroeconomics and major societal changes into your pitch and show how it benefits you, you may have a winner.
This slide is called ‘Why Now’, but I think it goes hand in hand with another slide entitled ‘Not resolved for a reason’. I’ll talk more about that later, but suffice it to say that with this card game, the company flags some of its biggest challenges without providing a 100% satisfactory answer.
“This market is bigger than you might think”
[Slide 7] A huge opportunity. Image Credits: glam book
As a VC, you will often pitch companies in industries and markets that you are not that familiar with. In this case I had to sit there for a while.
Beauticians, hairdressers and hairdressers – is that really a market big enough to build a business empire around? The UK has about 67 million people, so if those numbers are right, there are about 1,400 people per hair and beauty company. That should mean that around 4% of the UK population works as beauticians, hairdressers and hairdressers.
Just like a tummy check, that sounds a bit high to me, but a quick Google search results in the article citing the company on this slide, which seems to confirm those numbers. That’s exciting, not least because a few searches don’t identify a clear market leader in this area either. Could Glambook become that market leader?
The field here is somewhat unfocused: Glambook is a Berlin-based company that uses a lot of stats in the UK, while also saying it has customers in 38 countries (I’ll get to that in a moment). The key part of this particular slide illustrates that there is a huge market ripe for disruption.
As an investor, that’s the kind of thing that makes me lean forward and pay extra attention.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Glambook could have improved or done differently, along with the full pitch deck!