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$28 million investment
Sharpist is a digital coaching platform that helps companies provide personalised leadership coaching to their employees.Our collaboration with Sharpist began through a recommendation following the work we did with the teams at SAP.iO in Berlin. At the time, Sharpist was preparing to raise a $5 million seed round and wanted a pitch deck that matched their ambitions. The founding team had limited experience building high-stakes investor presentations, so they approached us for help.
Process
We started from scratch. Hence, we had to build the story for the presentation first. However, we quickly found out that the slideshow for the live event was only part of the project. Turns out, we need to help them build a document too. One that will be sent to potential investors after their presentation is over.
Storytelling
Design
Animation
Final touches
Storytelling
Sharpist are one of these companies that truly understand the power a single presentation can have. No project ever starts with designing slides. It always begins with a simple Google Slides file — just notes and ideas. Before you say it, yes. We used Google Slides and not PowerPoint. It just allows for unmatched collaboration and that is of extreme importance to us and the founding team.
Every single word. Every single title or sentence. Every single slide. In every presentation we created. Each one of them was carefully thought through and was there for a reason — to maximise the chances of the company to close the round or win a new customer.
Design-wise, we are working with a very well-defined brand. Once the story for each presentation were finalised, our design team was next. Since G Suite was the main tool used by the team, especially for document-style presentations, we faced quite a few challenges. The biggest one was the incompatibility between PowerPoint and Google Slides. So why design in PowerPoint at all? Because of its superior feature set and the precise control it offers over every pixel — something that proved essential when visualising data, which we did a lot.
Animating the slideshows was done with the help of PowerPoint. Google Slides wasn't used for those presentations that had to be presented live or online.
As with every project only when we saw an opportunity to enhance the story further. However, the favourite transition of many presenters — Morph, came in to the rescue and helped us communicate the most important points in ways not possible before. And of course, a team like ours always pushes the limits of the technology. As a result, we were able to achieve things very few people, till this day, believe are possible in a standard PowerPoint deck.
Because every project was critical for the success of Sharpist, we used a 4-eye process to limit the chances of missing something. From the standard consistency checks to making sure every currency and every number is formatted in the same way, no detail is too small.We even relied on proprietary technologies to help us ensure that each presentation is as close to perfect as it can be.
The results
After the success of the initial $5 million round, we continued working together on several more presentations, including raising $23 million in their Series A round.
Our first encounter with 356labs was during our Seed round in 2019 when we successfully raised the first $5 million. We connected again for our Series A deck and in both situations what truly sat 356labs apart was their unwavering dedication to the project. In the end we not only received a top-notch presentation, we benefited from their expertise in content creation for pitch decks.
