Pitch Deck Teardown: Faye’s $10M Series A deck

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 (lightly redacted) pitch deck with me so I could take a look under the hood to see the narrative it wove to close its $10 million.

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Slides in this deck

Faye raised its Series A round with a 19-slide deck, a few of which have been lightly redacted to shield sensitive data from curious 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
Financial growth metrics slide
Customer growth metrics slide
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 off the bat: This is a truly 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 narrative.

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 with showing how a good, concise slide can set the pace.

[Slide 2] Setting the pace. Image Credits: Faye

The company mentions traction ($M in sales) and market penetration (available in 48 states), along with the market size and market growth rate. These four figures paint a picture that presents a pretty compelling investment opportunity.

If we take all of the numbers at face value, the next step of the story is to convince investors that this is the right team to take on this market.

Which takes us to slide 3, the company’s team slide. Unfortunately, it isn’t that great, so we’ll talk about it in the “What could be improved” section later in this article. For now, let’s skip to another slide that did a great job of adding to Faye’s story.

The Team Slide is the most important slide in a startup pitch deck

Great storytelling on the market-size slide

[Slide 5] What a great way to use market sizing to your benefit. Image Credits: Faye

Again, there’s redacted data here.

Faye numbers aside, this is a rare example of a market-sizing slide that also provides the rest of the context. I thought it was done really well.

Showing that the market size is (presumably) huge, and then essentially saying, “But the TAM could be bigger by growing the service offering and international roll-out,” is very shrewd. It shows that there’s a great opportunity available right now and that the opportunity could grow further.

The data points on the left are excellent, too, as they contextualize the business in the greater market.

This slide teaches us that you can tell a comprehensive story without muddling the message. I imagine the voice-over for this slide would be something along these lines:

The market we are going after is $xx right now, and could be as big as $yy once we have fully addressed it. What’s truly exciting here, however, is that the market is easily disrupted. There is little innovation, no recognized consumer brands, the brands that do operate have low market penetration, and the entire market is growing 10% year-on-year.

The narrative ties it all together, painting travel insurance as a very interesting opportunity.

Intermarket comparison

Faye is targeting travel insurance, using some adjacent markets (car and home insurance) as comparisons to show that travel insurance is a better opportunity. Again, the numbers here are redacted, but as far as storytelling goes, this is a really good approach:

[Slide 6] Insurtech galore. Image Credits: Faye

I suspect the company added this slide to assuage investors who have been discouraged by other insurtech plays. Assuming that the numbers are good, this is a truly inspired way of positioning the market — and Faye within it. Well played indeed.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Faye could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!