What do you have to do to raise millions for your startup? You can cover the basics of a pitch but for an amazing presentation, it takes more than showing facts, trends or the numbers. Mixpanel has raised $65M with an $865M valuation. The round comes entirely from previous investor Andreessen Horowitz.
Mixpanel was incubated by Y Combinator and launched in 2009. The company helps businesses grow by helping them understand how their users behave and use their products by tracking actions people take rather than page views.
Mix panel has made public their pitch deck that led to their $65M round on their company blog. In a statement on the blog, Suhail said:
“This is not perfect for all companies; you may need something totally different if you’re at a different stage or running a different type of company. We think this is a deck that you can use to answer most questions investors will ask you (in SaaS) and is set up to help you articulate a story to investors that’s compelling.
If I had to wager, the thing that is truly most important to investors (who will all tell you it’s “vision” or “team”) is how personally interested they are in your space and idea–after all, they have to think about how they spend their time, too. Even with the best deck, you will still need to be great at selling your idea as to why it’s so exciting and interesting–it just takes practice.”
A great pitch may not be the secret to raising milions of dollars. Considering that they raise their new round from their previous investor, they are doing something right which takes more than a pitch to pull off. If you can solve a really compelling problem that gets people to consistently pay you for it, at some point investors will be interested to be a part of it.
The trick to getting profitable… solve problems for people who will pay you money. Mixpanel has been around for a while but still they needed to get their metrics right to raise new funds.
On customer retention, co-founder/CEO Suhail Doshi told Anthony Ha of TechCrunch:
“We measure ourselves very harshly on customer retention. For the past 5 years we’ve offered month to month subscriptions and work with a ton startups. That segment will have the highest churn naturally. As we get larger and get more annual subs, work with larger customers, and build out a larger customer success team we will see that churn rate go down. You have to be ok with a higher rate of churn when you’re trying to dominate a market and you go bottom up instead top down. We have a ton of customers who have been with us for over a year: big and small.”
Here is the pitch deck that made a difference for the company to raise their funds.