This free eBook goes over the 10 slides every startup pitch deck has to include, based on what we learned from analyzing 500+ pitch decks, including those from Airbnb, Uber and Spotify.
Everything you need to raise funding for your startup, including 3,500+ investors, 7 tools, 18 templates and 3 learning resources.
Buy It For $97 $297 →
Kong articulates technical pain points that resonate directly with its developer audience, focusing on lengthy development times, reliability concerns, and scalability limitations. This approach immediately establishes credibility by showing a deep understanding of the target user's daily struggles. The choice to frame the problem around core engineering metrics like efficiency and reliability is highly effective for a technical product.
Our Tip: Frame the problem in terms of its direct impact on your target user's key metrics, such as time, cost, or risk.
The pitch deck presents a solution that directly mirrors the stated problems by promising to shorten development time, increase reliability, and offer infinite expandability. This one-to-one mapping creates a clear and compelling narrative of problem-solution fit. The value proposition of managing a vast number of APIs with high reliability positions Kong as a powerful, essential infrastructure tool.
Our Tip: Present your solution as the direct antidote to the pain points you just established, making the value proposition self-evident.
While the deck does not explicitly list competitors, Kong's positioning is communicated through its strategic emphasis on reliability and scalability. This implies a competitive strategy focused on outperforming others on core technical capabilities rather than just features. By highlighting the ability to manage "thousands or millions of connections," they position themselves as the enterprise-grade solution for complex systems.
Our Tip: Position your company by emphasizing the one or two key dimensions where you are demonstrably better than any alternative.
The deck highlights Trent Oswald as a "Full Stack Developer at Mashape," the company that originally created Kong. This is a subtle but powerful way to build technical credibility, showing the product was built by practitioners who understand the problem space intimately. Mentioning the specific role and originating company provides concrete evidence of relevant, hands-on experience.
Our Tip: Showcase team members' specific, relevant past experiences to prove you have the right expertise to solve the problem.
Kong's pitch deck is a masterclass in speaking to a technical audience by focusing every section on what engineers value most: efficiency, reliability, and scalability. They build trust not with marketing fluff, but with a deep, demonstrated understanding of the user's technical pain points. To apply this, ensure your problem, solution, and team slides all reinforce your technical authority and prove you live in your user's world.
The deck creates a powerful one-to-one mapping between the problems it identifies and the solutions it offers. This direct problem-solution alignment makes Kong feel less like a product choice and more like the inevitable conclusion. Structure your own deck to present your solution as the direct antidote to the pain points you establish, leaving no doubt about your value.
