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.
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Ngrok clearly articulates a technical but widespread problem: the difficulty and insecurity of testing local web services. They effectively frame the pain points around development delays and security risks, which directly translate to business costs. This approach immediately establishes the need for their solution in a way that even non-technical investors can grasp the business implications.
Our Tip: Frame the problem in terms of its business impact, such as lost time or money, to make it resonate with investors.
The pitch deck presents the solution as a simple tool that creates secure tunnels, directly addressing the previously stated pain points. Ngrok’s value proposition is powerfully reinforced by positioning itself as the "de-facto standard," a claim backed by organic recommendations from major tech companies. This combination of a simple solution and strong social proof makes their value proposition highly credible and compelling.
Our Tip: Clearly connect your solution's features to the specific pain points you identified and use external validation to substantiate your value proposition.
Ngrok presents impressive traction with over 5.4 million accounts and 30,000 paying customers, demonstrating strong product-market fit and a successful freemium model. They wisely pair these hard metrics with powerful social proof, citing "numerous organic recommendations from major tech companies." This dual approach provides quantitative validation of their user base and qualitative validation of their industry reputation.
Our Tip: Showcase both quantitative metrics like user growth and qualitative evidence like customer testimonials or industry endorsements to build a comprehensive case for your traction.
The team slide effectively builds credibility by highlighting relevant, high-caliber experience at successful tech companies like Twilio, JBoss, and MongoDB. Founder Alan Shreve's background developing SMS products at Twilio provides a direct and compelling narrative for why he was uniquely positioned to identify and solve the problem Ngrok addresses. This "founder-market fit" is a critical signal that investors look for.
Our Tip: Present your team's experience not just as a list of credentials, but as a story that explains why they are the perfect people to solve this specific problem.
Ngrok masterfully distills a complex technical solution into a clear business proposition by focusing on the "why" over the "how." They frame the problem and solution in terms of tangible business impacts like development delays and security risks, making the value instantly clear to any investor. Apply this by connecting every feature of your product directly to a pain point that costs your customer time or money.
The deck’s power comes from weaving together different forms of proof—quantitative traction, qualitative social proof, and founder-market fit—into a single, compelling story. This multi-layered approach creates a sense of inevitability and de-risks the investment in the eyes of a VC. Instead of presenting data in silos, construct a narrative that shows how your team's unique experience led to a solution that the market is already validating.
