Turning waste into usable products is my jam, so when the Mi Terro team told me what they were working on, I knew I had to write about it.
Mi Terro takes agricultural waste and processes it into proteins that can be used as a plastic replacement, fed as food to animals and much more. Back in March, the company successfully raised a $1.5 million seed round, and today, I’m back to show you the deck that made that fundraise possible.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
- Cover slide
- “PVA problems” — problem slide
- “First gen solution” — solution slide
- “Market size” — market slide
- “Protein Thermoplastic” — product side
- “Applications” — product slide
- “Material Comparison” — product slide
- “Awards” — traction slide
- “Clients & Partners” — market validation slide
- Case study slide
- Team slide
- Road map slide
- Second Gen. Innovation — product road map slide
- Sustainability slide
- “Drink more beer, reduce more microplastic” — closing slide
Three things to love
What I love about the whole deck is that it tells such a beautifully simple story. The company summarizes its mission on the closing slide: “Drink more beer, reduce more microplastic.” I love the sustainability story and the obviousness of it all. If the company can indeed do what it says, and make it commercially scaleable, as an investor, I’d get quite excited.
A clear problem statement
I can’t express how much I love a good problem slide when it’s used as an opener for a pitch deck. It lets you open the door to a really fruitful conversation, especially if you manage to get an investor to go: “Holy cow, that’s a big problem,” and then immediately offer a solution to it.
I love that Mi Terro’s problem slide both shows the macro-level problem on the left, and then contextualizes it with “PVA wrapped dishwater and laundry pods.” It takes an abstract problem and makes it very real — especially to those of us who have been known to use a Tide pod from time to time. I also love how this chart illustrates the tremendous scale of the issue as part of the problem itself.
Now, there are things I would improve about this slide: Numbers over a thousand should have thousand-separators (1,000, not 1000) for ease of readability. And overall, it’s a little tricky to read the slide, as the punchline is actually on the bottom right: 75% of PVA stays in soil and waterways.
Bringing it to life with examples
As an environmentalist, I don’t mind things made out of plastic all that much as long as they are built to last. Would it be great if we never used plastics again? Maybe. But if you buy a plastic chair and use it for five or six days every summer for 10 years straight, well, at least the plastic had a good life while it was being used, and maybe it can be reused or recycled afterward.
What I hate with the passion of a thousand suns, though, is single-use plastics. Packaging is the biggest culprit here: bottles, labels, takeout containers, etc. We use a lot of single-use plastics for all sorts of things, and Mi Terro’s goal is to replace much of that with biodegradable, upcycled waste materials.
This page of the deck really brings that to life for me, and I love seeing the company’s proof-of-concept products. In many of those categories, I can think of three or four things that I see every day, and from there it’s a short step to realizing how different the world would be if Mi Terro was successful. Beautiful.
There’s almost no text at all on this slide, and it does a lot of heavy lifting. I love that, and I want to see more of that in slide decks. Show, don’t tell, and if you can make an impactful point by making your product come to life, that’s even better.
Show the long game
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sustainability slide on a pitch deck before, but this one gives us a clear glimpse of Mi Terro’s vision. I have little doubt that this will be a fantastically successful company in time, but look at those big, beefy goals! Mi Terro’s founders are clearly thinking long term (the slide is planning nine years out from the fundraise!), and this slide shows both huge potential and fierce ambition.
You know what investors really like? Huge potential and fierce ambition.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Mi Terro could have improved or done differently, as well as the full pitch deck!
Three things that could be improved
Traction is king, and Mi Terro essentially has none. That’s the biggest challenge with this deck, and it’s a hard one to get around — if you haven’t got traction, you haven’t got traction. But you’ve got to dream big to make up for it, and that’s where Mi Terro actually does really well (as we saw above).
Let’s pick a few more nits:
Don’t let the SOM go down on me
This market slide bothers me for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that it says the TAM is $130 billion. But a few quick Google searches seem to put that number at around $40 billion per year, which left me wondering where that $128.8 billion number came from. If Mi Terro were pitching to me, they’d have to defend that number.
That aside, the drop from almost $130 billion to $5 billion for a global market is worrying, and if a founder told me they’re going to take 20% of any market, I’d call bullshit. I wouldn’t say that word, of course, I’d say, “Prove it,” but with the same fervor as if I’d spat “bullshit” across the table.
There’s another problem: Obtaining 20% of a $5 billion global market will require a tremendous amount of marketing, not to mention operations in dozens of countries. It’ll require a huge global presence and would be a logistical and operational nightmare.
While this slide deck does have a “road map” on it, which, if you squint, could look like an operating plan, I don’t really know how the company is going to get from where it is to where it wants to be. That would set off alarm bells for me and leave me wondering if I was dealing with an inexperienced founder.
None of this is unfixable, but it leaves a lot of questions on the table. And the biggest one is…
You’ve got the vision, but have you got the chops?
Mi Terro is an impressive company with a huge vision. I believe that. But I’m uncertain if the company can pull it off, and there are a few slides that make me worry they may not be able to.
The deck is pretty sparse overall, and there aren’t a lot of hard facts or deep information. Slide 8 shows “Awards” (which doesn’t really mean much for a startup these days), and Slide 9 shows “Clients and Partners,” but if you’re going to put Budweiser, Google, Unilever and Proctor & Gamble on a slide, you’d best add some context.
If you’re about to do all packaging for Unilever, that’s very different from saying, “We sent some samples to P&G and we’re waiting to hear back.” Without context, these two slides hurt the startup more than they help. I get the impression that this is meant to stand in for traction, but it doesn’t work — at least, it doesn’t work without additional context.
I want to know who the partners are, who the clients are and what the difference is for starters.
Where is the competition slide?!
Bioplastics are rad, and I love what Mi Terro is doing. But the company is pitching this without a competition slide. That makes me twitchy because there’s definitely going to be competition. Not listing your competitors means I have to do the research myself. I will anyway, even if there is a competition slide, so I did.
Five minutes with Google and just TechCrunch helped me find bioplastics companies that are making plastics out of fermented sugars, CO2 in the air, organic waste, wheat straw, food waste, camelina sativa, starch, seaweed, bees (!), microbes, sugars and sugar beets.
Now, I did zero research into all of these competitors beyond finding them, skimming the articles and linking them, but that is precisely what I would do if Mi Terro had pitched to me. And I’d ask them, “What makes Mi Terro so special that the dozens — maybe hundreds — of competitors will be beaten by your technology?”
Basically, you never get away with not having a competitor slide. So make it count.
The full pitch deck
If you want your own pitch deck teardown featured on TC+, here’s more information. Also, check out all our Pitch Deck Teardowns and other pitching advice.
Comment