Pitch Deck Teardown: Queerie’s $300K pre-seed platform | TechCrunch

Queerie is a dating app specifically for LGBTQIA+ people. This is a very early-stage company that has only raised $300,000—a round size that typically falls into the “friends and family” category.

Dating is a competitive field with a lot of M&A activity happening over the years, so I was eager to take a closer look.

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Slides in this deck

Queerie shared its full, unedited, 13-slide pitch with TechCrunch.

1. coverslip
2. Cover Slides Part 2
3. task slides
4. question slides
5. Solution Slides
6. Market size slideshow
7. How slideshow works
8. Traction slide
9. Competition Slideshow
10. Team slides
11. Funding Request and Usage Slides
12. 6 years (!) financial status
13. Contact slide

There are a few things to love about Queerie’s pitch deck

My first impression of Queerie’s deck was that it was fresh and interesting. The use of language and graphics is clean, simple, and engaging. A great starting point for consumer brands!

Lead with mission

If you strive to make the world a better place, you perhaps Attract investors who are aligned with your mission. So why not detail your mission front and center? This is a powerful storytelling technique that is executed well on the Quererie platform.

talk about a tough issue

[Slide 4] This is certainly a problem worth solving. Image Source: Quarry

This slideshow of issues gave me pause: it reminds us that isolation and mental health challenges are prevalent in queer spaces in many places.

The company markets itself as a dating app rather than a loneliness solution. Whether investors will buy it and whether the app is the right solution to the problem the company identified are separate questions. But certainly, the problem Querie outlines is one worth solving.

Four things Querie could improve

I really want Querie to exist, so it pains me to see the company promoted in a way that makes it essentially unfundable.

Is this the right team?

I see at least one dating app being promoted every month, and it makes sense: Dating and finding the right partner is an important part of many people’s lives, and it seems like such an easy thing to do. better one More than is currently the case.As a result, many startup founders have a lot of Experience in the Dating World.

[Slide 10] Hello, Quitis. Image Source: Quarry

But where are the women? For a company that is building an “inclusive design platform,” this seems like an oversight.

There are some interesting experiences here, but most people seem to be pretty much the same also A veteran of the startup. I know this is something rarely worth complaining about, but one of the CTOs has been a site reliability engineer at Google for 18 years. This is a very specialized job, and while scaling an application like Queerie is going to be important, I find myself wondering how much overlap there is between scaling Google’s infrastructure and scaling a website like Queerie.

Overall, from reading the team’s LinkedIn profile and what’s on this slide, I find myself concluding that they might be able to build a very good, well-functioning app with a good user experience, but It wasn’t enough to build a successful company. There was a huge gap in sales and marketing, and the team as a whole didn’t have much startup experience. I think the team would be more credible if this slide could add a seasoned marketer with experience in consumer marketing applications.

This just describes a dating app

I really don’t understand what this slide is trying to achieve:

[Slide 7] Yes, it’s a dating app. Image Source: Quarry

This slide is a bit of a waste. It doesn’t show any of Queerie’s secrets to succeeding where other companies have failed; there’s nothing new or innovative here.

The slides in your pitch deck should help investors decide to invest. If someone reads a slide and sees that it might be neutral (or even negative), it’s best to exclude it.

This is not traction

[Slide 8] This doesn’t really show appeal. Image Source: Quarry

The company says it has a “closed version of the mobile app,” but the 13-slide slide doesn’t include a single screenshot of the app. The company says it has 95 beta testers, which is great, but it’s not really “traction.” Traction is how these beta testers interact with the platform. Do they pay? What are the DAU/MAU (Daily/Monthly Active Users) statistics?

I’m writing this on March 31st, which is the last day of Q1 2024, so I’m confused why the company said it surveyed 3,000 people in Q2 2024? The company also said it planned to “grow strongly” through the third quarter, but later said it would launch the app in June of the second quarter. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a little confusing.

Fundamentally it’s not a startup scale

The slide deck describes how quickly the company hopes to grow, but it also raises some red flags.

[Slide 12] This is not a new startup. Image Source: Quarry

After the first year, the company only plans to spend $40,000 per year on application development. That’s without even finding a half-decent part-time developer. For a tech startup, this is a terrible oversight: Does the company not plan to continue developing its app?

Growth here is too slow. The company said it will acquire 1,000 users in the first half of 2024, but will reach 20,000 monthly active users by the end of the year. Then suddenly the growth drops to “just” doubling in 2025, and then doubles again in 2026. For a fast-growing, early-stage startup, these numbers are terrible. Startups typically want to grow 10% per week in their early stages. If you start with 1,000 users and grow at 10% week-on-week for a year, your number of users should be around 130,000:

Based on 1,000 users, 10% weekly growth is shown below. Image Source: TechCrunch/Hajjcamps

To make matters worse, however, Queerie projects revenue of just under $10 million in 2029, based on six years of current financial data. This is pretty discouraging and suggests the founders don’t have particularly aggressive growth plans. Its own data shows it only expects about 15% of its customers to pay $8 a month.

Elsewhere on the deck, the company said that “as we raise more capital, our mobile app will allow us to expand to more cities,” which is great, but the financial overview doesn’t show that the business is doing more. multiple rounds of financing, so it’s unclear when or how much the company plans to raise.

In short, this slide shows that Queerie could be a reasonably successful lifestyle business, but I worry that no investors will want to take it on as an investment; it’s so unambitious and shows that the company’s founders don’t Know what to expect Some of them are startup founders.

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