Carbon credits (and trading them) are big business, but solving them could be unnecessarily complicated. Good coal Just raised a round price €5.25 million (roughly $5.5 million). make a hole in this market. Let’s take a look at the deck where the company brought home a bag of money.
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Slides in this deck
Goodcarbon has an 18-slide deck with repetitions; greater than half of a company’s presentation is a problems and solutions section. Eagle-eyed people will certainly realize that this implies there are a lot of things missing, but we’ll get to that. Below is a list of slides. The company says it has removed the query and use of funds slides, and some other slides have also been redacted. What’s left is still a pretty decent deck:
- Cover slide
- Problem slide: Global context
- Problem slide: Market context
- Problem slide: The need for carbon removal
- Problem slide: The price of carbon credits
- Problem slide: Carbon credits are hard to seek out
- Solutions slide: Building a carbon portfolio
- Solutions slide: Building carbon credit portfolios
- Solution slide: Sample portfolio designs
- Solution slide: How it really works, part 1
- Solutions slide: How it really works, part 2
- Customer slide
- Traction slide: revenue
- Traction slide: Customers
- Traction slide: Power supply
- Case study slide
- Team slide
- Closing slide
Three things I loved about Goodcarbon’s presentation
The purpose of the deck is to inform a compelling story that paints an image that says, “Oh my God, if you miss this investment, you’re really going to regret it for the rest of your life.” Goodcarbon does a good job on this front.
A big and growing market
Telling good stories about coal corporations is surprisingly complicated because it at all times involves some description of a future that everybody will see coming, even if no one knows it’s coming. Goodcarbon does a great job here:
Painting a picture of something big, inevitable and evolving is an easy technique to explain that you simply care about the size of the market to concentrate to. If you could find a technique to highlight this trend in your presentation, you are on the right track.
I really like a good portfolio approach
You know one thing VCs love? Wallets. They live and breathe spread risk portfolios inside their very own investment thesis, and if you possibly can persuade them that you simply are helping to cut back risk through a portfolio approach, you are often speaking the right language.
One of the biggest challenges with carbon offsetting is that it is not necessarily clear how secure these credits are. “Many of the carbon offsetting solutions currently offered are outdated, poor quality or difficult to confirm. They risk increasing global emissions fairly than reducing them, in accordance with a recent study S&P Global Report. So what to do when the risk is high? You spread risk across the board – if one a part of your portfolio goes bad, the rest will (hopefully) balance out.
The problem, after all, is that offsetting carbon emissions and buying credits is already quite complicated, so balancing the risks is even tougher. Goodcarbon doesn’t pay much attention to its business portfolio, but in my opinion this was one of the more revolutionary and creative points of its business. Great that you simply found room for this on board.
Social proof out of the wazoo
Goodcarbon has some traction, but it combines it with social proof: corporations that trust goodcarbon with their carbon strategy.
Social proof is a powerful tool in presentations. Goodcarbon could be advantageous without it, but it could actually’t hurt – and the company might just be priming the pump for some of the reference calls that undoubtedly happen between the first meeting and the investment.
Three things Goodcarbon could have improved
As I discussed above, the Goodcarbon deck is pretty decent, but it lacks a lot of knowledge. Some of them were intentionally unnoticed, but even so, this deck wouldn’t be effective if he was raising from an American institutional investor.
Missing information checklist
I submitted this deck using the AI deck review tool and received a fairly damning summary:
Yes, that is a lot of missing pieces to the puzzle.
- Competition slide: You need a competition slide.
- Launch slide: How are you going to succeed in your customers?
- Target customer: But first, who are your customers? Of course, this may probably be inferred from the remainder of the deck, but it doesn’t hurt to be clear. Good customer personas really help bring this together.
- Operational plan: I’m a big fan of an easy-to-read marketing strategy in addition to more detailed financial data. I’m guessing they weren’t included in this deck when the company submitted it to TechCrunch, but investors are financiers, so you may as well make sure you get ahead of this conversation.
- Business model: This deck doesn’t explain much about how Goodcarbon intends to make money.
- Pricing model: Or how much he charges for his services. Both are key points of the offer to know if it is a good investment.
- Unit economics: Unit economics (i.e. how the costs of providing services change as a company grows) are at the “advanced finance” end of the scale, but for such a complex company it might be a really good idea to incorporate .
- Moat: There are a terrifying variety of corporations trying to unravel this problem. The lack of a competition slide is one thing, but how does Goodcarbon view its business as defensive? Are there any patents? Is there technology? Is there the rest that sets it apart from the competition?
There are tons of great checklists for what to incorporate in a presentation (oh hey, here’s one I created earlier) and there isn’t any excuse for leaving anything out.
We must talk about this team slide
Take a look at the slide above and ask yourself: Is this the perfect team to run a carbon credit company? My gut says no, so when we get to that slide on the field, I’ll tell the team, “OK, so you have convinced me that this is a problem price solving. Explain to me why you are the right team for my $5.5 million.
For the record, the “correct” answer could be for the team to look at me like I used to be crazy and go back to the traction slide. “Look what we did, silly. We have proven ourselves.”
Still, this team slide could handle much heavier exercises.
If you wish that many slides to clarify a problem…
Honestly, there is not really a good product slide anywhere on the board. What does the product appear to be? What are the features and functionality? How much of it was actually built versus Figma’s creation? But I’m not going to offer this Goodcarbon too much thought. However, I’ll fry this for the following reason: the company spent over half of its budget on problem and solution slides.
Put yourself in investors’ shoes: Do you actually think they need five slides to persuade them that (a) this is a problem, (b) this is a problem with huge impact, and (c) this is a problem price solving?
The company could have removed almost a quarter of its presentation by summarizing the 10 problems and solutions in two or three slides, highlighting only things that may be latest or unusual in the way the company approaches the problem. The truth is that if an investor in this space clearly understands the issue and effects of climate change, they are going to not invest anyway. Don’t waste your breath or pixels attempting to persuade them otherwise; as an alternative just get to the point.
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