Exodus Orbitals Pitch Deck

dennis

Have a look:
https://www.slideshare.net/secret/tHANziTt6QXC4i

Troy

Hi @dennis . Welcome to Moonshot! Glad to have you here.

Here are some first-pass thoughts of mine. Take them with a grain of salt, as always. You might find it more valuable to take a video of you and your team giving the pitch also - the delivery is arguably more valuable than the deck alone.

I love the concept of Satellites-as-a-Service. A number of ways you can make this happen. In a way, EO data aggregation services are also ‘Satellite-as-a-Service’ so it will be interesting to see where you feel you’ll fit in the value chain and what the market opportunity is.
I personally prefer to see team slides later in the deck. An early stage investment will be based on the team, but I first want to see that the team have some convincing ideas first.
Build 2 decks. One for using in a presentation, and another for reference material later. The presentation deck should be kept clean and minimal (e.g. No hyperlinks to LinkedIn) and only key points on the slides - the slides should complement your delivery not duplicate or replace it.
Opportunity slide needs work, depends what comes next to make it impactful. Try to focus on the driving forces behind the trend, rather than the trend its self. This is a justification for whatever you’re about to tell me you’re doing, but we still don’t know what challenge you’re actually solving yet. Or it’s a market opportunity slide, in which case it’s too early in the deck and doesn’t communicate what future expectations might be.
Ok, problem slide is next, so that could work well with an improved opportunity slide. You want to tell a story, so telling it like, “tech miniaturisation and frequent launches to space have created a boom in demand for new satellites to do things from telecommunications to monitoring our environment and economy. The challenge is that it’s hard to build and launch satellites. We believe there’s an opportunity to enable businesses to build apps on satellites without having to worry about building or operating the satellites themselves - much like an app developer doesn’t need to reinvent the iPhone.”
SDR satellite slide can be simplified. The graphics are ok, but the box on the left is probably unnecessary. Technical questions: Lot’s of manufacturers are doing SDR satellites today, so what’s different about yours? Is this really different to what GOM Space are doing through accessable satellite hardware, or Kubos with easily programable RTOS software for cubesats?
The business model slide needs an overhaul. Show who your customers are and how your business becomes an engine for making more and more money. Academia and space enthusiasts are the default go to for space companies, and i’m yet to see that actually be a solid way to get a space company up and running - neither of those markets have money to pay to make this a sustainable business.
Building the infrastructure for this first requires huge upfront capital expenses. AWS was successful because Amazon had to build it for themselves, and then they realised they could sell off excess capacity. The idea behind satellites as a service isn’t novel in itsself - the execution is going to be novel, because it’s expensive and hard from a technological and marketing perspective. You need to put forward a good business case that you and your team are the best team to invest in, to build the infrastructure and sell a product that will generate a profit and a return for the investors in the next decade or so.
I’m guessing the applications slide will be for you to explain the kinds of customers you’ll have developing on top of the platform. I’d start this slide again, and think about how it works with the story you’re telling about the business model on the previous slide.
Competators slide is just text, and does nothing to convince me that you’re in a good position. The 2 axis competition chart is cliche, but does a great job as immediately communicating how your proposal compares to the alternative options available.
I think you’ve also skipped most of your most significant competitors, which is a red flag if I was looking to invest. It’s not just about who is offering satellites as a service, its about who is selling produts to solve the same problems for the same customers you will be. Anyone developing cubesat platforms like would be a competitor because it makes building cubesats easier. Anyone developing friendlier RTOS platforms also.
At this point I’ve also become aware that you haven’t mentioned anything about the capability of your proposed service. What kinds of orbits are you looking to service? How much computing power will you have? What kind of sensors? Bandwidth? Ground station access? Will you need a minimim constellation of 100 running for your service to function properly, or canyou start with 1 cubesat? etc.
Scaling up slide is a good start, but as above, it’s not clear what you’re scaling up from.
The slides show that you’ve got a vague concept, but it requires a lot more development to be something investable. I’d seriously think about what you can do now to start proving that you really have a solution and that you’re capable of building this better than anyone else. Is there something small you can do, like build a first prototype of the system to work on a cheap weather balloon first. Will someone pay for that? Can you prove that you can build a business before asking for money?
Timeline slide is a good opportuity to list some of your real and valuable milestones so far and create some of this credibility. Take out things like ‘ESA cooporation’ because it doesn’t really mean anything significant and it’s vague anyway.
It’s great that you’ve mentioned you have prototype software that has been developed! Why is this on the last slide though. THis should be mentioned close to the start. “There’s this problem, we think it can be solved in this way. In fact, we’ve build this part of the platform already. Here it is, check it out in action.”
I’m curious to know more about your progress so far. Please do share more below. If you’re planning to do a launch in December, I assume its actually quite far along. The earlier slides gave me the impression nothing had been built at all!
Financials and funding slide - I’d turn this into a market opportunity slide and start again. You don’t have a business yet, so no point producing any financial numbers of business growth. Show the opportunity and how you’re going to capture that.
You’re missing a very important slide - the closing slide. You need to say thanks, leave it there while the audience asks questions, and has your contact details for people to write down.
Another important aspect that is missing - I didn’t see you asking for anything. Is this an investor pitch? What money do you need and what for? Are you pitching to win a place in a program? If you’re pitching, be explicit about who you’re asking for what.

Overall, good start. I just braindumped my thoughts as I went through each slide, so don’t be daunted by the wall of text.

FYI, this structure is roughly what I follow when building a story pitch:

The Problem
The solution
Underlying magic (not your protected IP!)
Business model to generate profits
Getting customers
Other players and competitors
Your team, your experience and why you’re the ones to solve this market problem
The journey so far. Credibility to show that you’re passionate and smart about solving this.
Where to now? What’s next?
The deal - what do you need from the people listening?

That’s enough info for now. Let’s start there! 🙂

dennis

Thanks for feedback. We will definitely redo the slides as advised. We have a video pitch done as well, so I might repost the slides updated with video introduction again.

A litttle bit of intro about us:
We are a team of 7 people, most of us coming from the same university. We have started our company in June 2018 and tried to identify what kind of ideas can be put in space on a low budget and software-defined satellite came out as an end result. We got in touch with ESA team working on a similar concept and got our own software accepted for participation.

dennis

Also, let me summarize what we have actually achieved in a coherent story.

So, even before we started our company, around March 2018 we were looking for an opportunity to make something interesting in space on a lowest possible budget. We looked into smallsat launchers and satellite hardware but realized capital requirements are just too much for a student team, even for a cubesat-scale project.

So, by November 2018, having reviewed a list nanosatellite missions for 2018-2022, we decided to find something that wasn’t on that list - this was the “satellite-for-rent” idea, or so we thought at this time. Later on, we learned about ESA OPS-SAT mission and applied to participate and got accepted as experimenters.

Our core idea is very simple - we own the satellite hardware in orbit, while customers only need to upload their mission software to get control of our satellite (with certain restrictions). The customers will only need a web-browser and access to deploy repository to get the same level of access to space-based hardware as any current satellite operators and government space agencies. The benefit of our case can be seen with our own story. Until today, if anyone wanted to own a satellite in space, one had to deal with the following challenges:

At least $100,000 in cost for even the smallest cubesat
At least 12 months of time and a team of several people
Mountains of paperwork

For our ESA mission, we got our software to be deployed on the real satellite mission for only the following:

Under $5000 of budget
1.5 month of time, for one person
4 pages of paperwork in total

The process can be improved even further and this what our software experiment is all about. It is a software runtime and interpreter that allows to execute scripts for the satellite instruments and subsystems, uploaded from the ground. As and end goal we will make deployment of customer software on the satellites as easy as it is done for the web sites on the ground. All the required bits and pieces for that will be flight-tested in December 2019.
Theoretically, we can even immediately accept code submissions from any party in the world and let them control ESA satellite immediately after launch (not going to happen, but only due to safety/liability and not any technical reasons).

Nobody else has anything similar in terms of ease of use, low cost and potential for applications. Neither GomSpace, nor KubeOS offer direct hotline to satellites in space with the ability to run third-party mission software on demand from anyone on the ground. Lockheed Martin will not offer this kind of access for their sats. Loft Orbital doesn’t provide software-only satellite rental, requiring customers to provide their own hardware.

There are caveats of course. A lot of efforts going into ESA project is to prevent inadvertent termination of satellite mission due to customer errors. A robust mission envelope protection and client code isolation software is a must-have for any such platform. A downlink/uplink channel is a bottleneck, and this is where most of the capital costs will go into (scaling up ground station network). And a single satellite solution is a fragile and limited one, therefore commercial operations would benefit from the large constellation.

Useful applications for the rental model include all the current satellite ones, but with the advantage of undercutting the costs of development for said applications at least 3 orders of magnitude. Before our solution if you wanted a software in space, you would need to launch hardware as well. Now you only need to perform uplink command and do all the necessary development only on the ground. A single person with a laptop can do what previously required an entire space agency and this is exactly what happened in our case as our software started to be developed on July 1st, 2019 and passed the necessary validation tests on August 15, 2019.

Our vision is to give every software developer on Earth access to participation in space exploration, think of it as iOS or Android AppStore in space, where we own all of the store infrastructure.