if ever played free video games on your phone, you may have seen one or two ads, including mini-games and other content of varying quality and relevance.
That is the space where incymo Opera; promises to harness machine learning and other intelligence to maximize ad revenue for game publishers, promising its users a 30% increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) from new users and a 10% increase for customers They pay.
In a market of big numbers, where every penny counts and every percentage can have a tremendous impact on game companies, those numbers caught the attention of Incymo investors.
We decided to take a closer look at its cover to see if we would have reached for our checkbooks or the big red “approve” button.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you’d like to submit yours, this is how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
Incymo AI’s deck has only 12 slides, so the company needs to make every slide count. This is what is included:
- deck slide
- problem slide
- solution slide
- traction slip
- customer slide
- Business model slide
- Market Size Slide
- Market Trajectory Slide
- Goals/Objectives Slide
- team slide
- Slide “The question”
- roadmap slide
three things to love
There’s a lot to love about Incymo’s slide deck. The design is new and includes many of the key aspects that we would expect to see in a pre-seeding deck.
a huge market
[Slide 7] That is a huge TAM. Image Credits: incymo
No one is going to argue with Incymo that game marketing is a big market, and the company gets partial credit for showing the various ways to calculate TAM and SOM, in this case, top-down and bottom-up.
The $72 billion per year TAM is grossly naive, bordering on the absurd.
With that being said, the top-down calculation appears to be “every game on the Google Play and Apple App Store, times the $4,000 we would charge them per month, times the number of months in the year.” It’s a bold calculation, and I can see how the company got there, but even if it were to run with 100% perfection, there will be a lot of games that can’t or won’t be clients.
The $72 billion per year TAM is grossly naive, bordering on the absurd. For one thing, it doesn’t really matter: the deciding factor is whether the company has a big market, and I agree that it probably does. However, any executive team that is taking this approach to calculating a TAM shows that their hand is rather unsophisticated.
However, the bottom-up SOM is also pretty unsophisticated. If I’m reading this slide right, the company basically says, “We have 600 people in our sales pipeline, so our reachable market is to convert all of them at $4,000 per month.” That’s also not realistic for a number of reasons: No company converts all of their leads, and this SOM seems to indicate that there are a maximum of 600 customers at the top of the funnel. A business that can’t recharge its leads over time is doomed to stagnation.
Look, I 100% believe that Incymo is in a big market and can probably find enough customers to make it worthwhile, but the slide deck is an opportunity to show your potential investors that you Understand the financial levers in your business. These slides seem to indicate otherwise; a not so good look.
traction is king
[Slide 4] Traction trumps everything else. Image Credits: incymo
I love the strong traction headline – it’s one of the things investors care about more than anything else. I wish the company would show traction by metrics other than “number of customers” and “more customers in the pipeline”; it would have been more powerful to show income or results, for example.
There’s a big difference between signing up with major game studios who want to use your product across their entire portfolio of games and signing up with a skunkworks at the same game studio that’s running a pilot and hiring an indie developer. On one of the other slides, Incymo mentions that some of the game companies have annual marketing budgets of $20 million. Impressive, but you don’t connect the dots to say if you’ve really signed one of those companies.
The other thing I stumble upon on this slide is “15 more in the works.” That means very different things for different companies. Anyone who has ever done B2B sales knows that a healthy sales pipeline is the alpha and omega of a successful sales operation. Having someone “in the process” could mean anything, and without closer qualification, it’s dangerously close to it. another vanity metric.
A somewhat clearly defined problem/pain point
[Slide 2] I have to love a clearly defined problem. Image Credits: incymo
There is no question that mobile game marketing is fierce and highly competitive. The difference between the no. 3 and no. 6 slots on the app charts is huge, and many of these companies are spending incredible amounts of money to fight their way to the top.
I 100% believe it when the company says it found that its target customers (gaming user acquisition marketers) spend a lot of time iterating on ads that work well. A sample size of 20 seems a bit low for this slide, so I’d love to have seen some slightly fuller numbers, but that doesn’t reduce the clarity of the problem statement. (Though the grammar leaves a thing or two to be desired.)
So those were some of the positive things we found about this pitch deck, and you may have noticed that we still add caveats. In just a moment, we’re about to get a whole lot saltier and look at some things that Incymo could have improved or done differently, along with their full launchpad!
strap on; it’s going to be quite a journey.