Treblle — The Million Dollar Pitch Deck

Deck context

About this deck

The 17-slide deck Treblle used to raise its seed round, published in full on the company's own blog by founder and CEO Vedran Cindric. Treblle is a Croatian API observability platform; the deck covers the API problem, the product, early traction, competitive positioning, SaaS pricing and a 1.5-2 million EUR ask. Author edits are disclosed: Cindric struck out client and customer logos before publishing to avoid NDA issues, so several logo marks appear scribbled over on slides 3 and 10. This seed presentation from 2021 contains 17 slides and records $0 in funding. Its sequence moves through cover, team, team, problem, and later supporting sections. The outline below pairs every slide with its extracted text so researchers can study how the argument develops, not only how the pages look.

Key facts

Presentation structure

Slide-by-slide outline

1. 01

   Treblle — Stay in Tune With Your APIsCover

   treblle. Stay in tune with your APIs.

2. 02

   The Founding Team and Ten Years Working TogetherTeam

   Vedran Cindric — Full-stack developer, 15 years of experience. Darko Blazevic — Designer, 15 years of experience. Tea Sakic — iOS developer, 5 years of experience. For the past 10 years we've worked together in our development and design company called Flip.

3. 03

   Flip, the Agency the Team Came FromTeam

   Flip is a kick-ass web development company from Croatia that creates awesome websites and mobile apps. Founded 2011. Clients 100+. Projects 100+. Avg project budget 50 000 - 100 000 EUR. Primary markets USA, Norway, Dubai. (Client logos were struck out by the author before publication.)

4. 04

   What Everyone Uses Every Day Without Knowing ItProblem

   What do YOU USE EVERYDAY but don't know it? Application programming interfaces (APIs) are used to communicate and transfer information back and forth between a client (website, app, IoT, watch, phone, car, game, tv...) and a database.

5. 05

   Working With APIs Is Complicated, Frustrating and ConfusingProblem

   Working with APIs is oftentimes complicated, frustrating and confusing. In every stage of the API lifecycle a lot of time is spent on doing things like: administration, writing documentation, providing support, debugging, monitoring or measuring. Solving these problems is complex, time consuming and expensive. Every team, startup, small or large company is facing these problems on a daily basis. There are 25 Million developers around the world and according to a research by Evans Data Corporation from 2019, that number will grow to 40 Million by 2030.

6. 06

   The Cost of the API Problem, in NumbersMarket

   Global cost of software development is 1.25T USD per year. 312B USD from that is spent on discovering and fixing problems, writing docs, monitoring, providing support... (University of Cambridge, 2013). 400B API calls are made each month (TechCrunch, 2018). 66% of developers expect to use more APIs in 2020 than 2019 (RapidAPI developer survey, 2019). REST APIs have existed for 20+ years and their popularity is growing around 30% year over year. Current products in the space are focused only on tracking code errors or manually writing pretty documentation.

7. 07

   One Package, Installed on Any API in Under Two MinutesSolution

   Treblle is a package that can be installed on any API using one of the supported platforms: PHP, Rails, .NET, Python, Laravel. Out of the box Treblle gives you: Real-time API monitoring. Logging and error tracking. Automatically generated documentation. API analytics, testing tools and a quality score of your API. Setting up Treblle is super easy and takes less than 2 minutes for an average developer.

8. 08

   What Treblle Understands About an APIProduct

   Treblle is very good at understanding your APIs: detect the location of your users; provide device and app details; detect authentication; mask sensitive data before leaving your API; measure load times and response sizes; detect problems and anomalies; group similar endpoints together; detect the API version; detect and transform dynamic URL parts.

9. 09

   The Product in Use — Dashboard, Request Detail and API ScoreProduct

   Product screenshots of the Treblle web app: a project dashboard showing requests with status code, device, location and load time; a request detail view with request and response payloads and a summary panel; and an API score view showing Performance, Security, Quality and Total scores.

10. 10

    Real Customers Using Treblle Every DayTraction

    Real customers are using Treblle on real projects EVERY DAY. 30 real-life projects in the past 9 months. 2 million API requests processed. 60 diverse beta users worldwide. Named customers shown: DwellSnap, GOLFR., autopix, QUADRANT2, MOV, h. (Several customer logos were struck out by the author before publication.)

11. 11

    Why Existing Tools Fall ShortCompetition

    Treblle vs. others. The way APIs are developed and used is changing. APIs not only process data but also control your experience. APIs are used by diverse teams with different skill levels. Existing tools and services simply don't offer what developers need. Teams work remotely in different timezones. APIs send more and more data back and forth.

12. 12

    Feature Comparison Against Gateways, Bug Trackers and Doc ToolsCompetition

    Comparison of Treblle against API Gateways (MuleSoft, Azure, AWS), Bug Trackers (Bugsnag, Sentry, Rollbar) and Documentation and testing tools (Postman, Swagger, RapidAPI) across: real-time monitoring; automatically generated documentation; one-click testing; error tracking; API analytics; quality scoring; detection of devices, apps, locations; iOS and Android apps; focused on real-life workflows. All of these services combined still don't do what Treblle does.

13. 13

    How Treblle Makes Money and Goes to MarketBusiness model

    SaaS business model. Pricing packages from $9 to thousands of dollars. Volume based pricing: the number of API requests processed plus retention period. Focus on growth and developer adoption first then enterprise market. Bottom up go to market strategy targeting developers first. Community based marketing with a focus on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn. We have a lot of experience as developers so we know what works and we can produce valuable content.

14. 14

    Pricing Tiers From Free to EnterpriseBusiness model

    Pricing examples. Free: all features, 10K requests, 7 day log retention — Free. Small: all features, 200K requests, 30 day log retention — $50/mo. Medium: all features, 1M requests, 45 day log retention — $200/mo. Large: all features, 5M requests, 60 day log retention — $500/mo. Enterprise: all features, custom requests, 90 day log retention — Custom.

15. 15

    The Ask — Raising 1.5 to 2 Million EURAsk

    Investment opportunity. We are looking to raise 1.5 - 2 million EUR.

16. 16

    Two-Year Post-Funding Milestone PlanMilestones

    Post-funding milestones. Year 1: 0-3 months — prepare the product for launch and hire a full-stack developer. Year 1: 3-6 months — launch the product and hire a Chief marketing officer. Year 1: 6-9 months — bring in a Customer success manager and onboard new users. Year 1: 9-12 months — hire a sales manager and focus on boosting sales. Year 2: 0-3 months — expand our product features and hire a front-end developer. Year 2: 3-6 months — push sales more with the features created in the past 3 months, expand the team with a new back-end developer. Year 2: 6-9 months — add a new round of features that will add 10x value to our current product. Year 2: 9-12 months — generate more sales based on the new features and continue to make our customers life easier.

17. 17

    Closing Slide and Founder ContactAsk

    Thank you! Vedran Cindric, founder and CEO. Contact details were included on the original published slide.

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