Middle Eastern B2B Marketplace

$3M seed raise for a Middle Eastern B2B marketplace

The opportunity

Our client, a Middle Eastern B2B marketplace, experienced rapid growth by building a proprietary solution that facilitated the matching of prominent chocolate wholesalers with potential business customers, including corporations, restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels.

Despite the marketplace’s impressive initial success, the company faced the challenge of limited resources and hence an inability to rapidly scale and secure leadership in the market. Realizing the need for additional funding, the client initially attempted to secure a minor seed investment round by leveraging their own pitch deck to reach out to friends and family, as well as a few select funds. Unfortunately, their efforts were met with a complete lack of response, prompting them to seek Waveup guidance.

Key client challenges

  • The deck lacked a clear, attractive investment narrative. The final PowerPoint file contained over 30 slides with excessive text, standardized headings, and large volumes of useless data spanning SWOT analysis, Porter’s 5 forces, irrelevant industry stats, among others.
  • The presentation felt outdated, lacked visual appeal, and required significant effort to digest. The slides were merely descriptive without really presenting a strong argument on why one might want to invest in the business.
  • Most significantly, the pitch deck failed to provide investors with operational insights and relevant performance data. Numbers and stats used did not present the historical performance in the right way and simply failed to impress the audience.

It was clear the deck needed a complete overhaul to be successful

OUR APPROACH

Redefine the business opportunity

  • To establish a compelling narrative, we had to first redefine the core problem and opportunity at hand. Specifically, we focused on the significant challenges that B2B trade presents, including complexity and inefficiency, lengthy vendor search times, disconnected management channels, and numerous intermediary parties, supporting the problem at hand with relevant statistics and visualizations.
  • We have also completely overhauled the presentation of the solution; transitioning from a basic product feature description to a more comprehensive dive-in on the actual value proposition of the platform and practical use cases.

OUR APPROACH

Showcase traction early

  • The client’s initial traction slide was limited to showcasing logos of several Arabic food brands. It was clear the traction presented needed to be much more impressive – but the client was not sure what data or information to showcase.
  • We had to work together with the client’s team to first establish the right KPIs and then analyze historical performance, available data, and trends to distill the right information from a myriad of different sources and operational files.
  • Our approach entailed calculating key metrics such as gross merchandising volume, diving in on the month-over-month growth dynamics, customer economics, and evolution of metrics like LTV, CAC, the rule of 40%, etc.
  • To further bolster the presentation, we delved deeper into operational stats, utilizing CRM and proprietary sources to identify metrics that would impress potential investors. Our findings revealed significant growth in the number of repeat clients, average order value, amount of cities covered, and delivery distances.
  • Through our collaborative efforts, we were able to develop highly impactful traction slides that showcased the client’s impressive growth and solidified investors’ belief in the viability of the business long-term and the team’s ability to execute going forward. 

OUR APPROACH

Present strong market opportunity

  • We studied the addressable market presented and realized one of the reasons the deck failed to generate interest was a tiny SOM (serviceable obtainable market) of $10M.
  • Together with the client, we worked on changing the positioning of the business as well as recalculating the potential addressable audience, resulting in the revised opportunity of over $2B that was significantly more attractive for the investor.
  • Additionally, we have also studied the key market trends and competitive dynamics, creating strong argumentative slides that showed the momentum to invest was now.
    We also helped the client to better define their industry positioning and long-term competitive advantage, presenting a compelling investment case for the investors.

OUR APPROACH

Rewrite the execution strategy

  • One of the core issues of the initial deck was a lack of a solid, thorough execution plan for market leadership. The client company lacked focus, attempting to target multiple directions and markets simultaneously, leading to skepticism from potential investors.
  • Working together with the client’s team, we created a blueprint for the future vision and go-to-market tactics; effectively identifying the core focus markets for the initial expansion and creating a believable, staged expansion plan.
  • We also helped to crystalize the client’s business model in a compelling way, highlighting a 10x Gross Profit advantage over the competition and attractive unit economics.
  • By adopting this more focused and intentional approach, the client was able to gain greater investor confidence and showcase a clear path for future sustainable growth.

OUR APPROACH

Reimagine the visual look & feel

  • The client’s original branding had some great elements but the actual pitch deck looked inconsistent and outdated.
  • We recognized the need to modernize the branding and create a more cohesive and visually appealing presentation to convey the client’s potential to investors. By building a new look & feel we were able to create a beautiful, sleek, and modern presentation that showcased the client’s potential to build an awesome consumer brand.
  • The new pitch deck looked clean and professional, conveying a sense of attention to detail and understanding of current market trends, which helped to impress potential investors and secure funding for the client.

Immediate impact

20 slide deck that was stunning in
terms of content and visuals, done
in less than 2 weeks

12x

increase in investor response rate

$3M

seed round secured

Wamda

featured in the Top MENA outlet