Jarmyn Enterprise Space Pitch practice

malcolmjarmyn

Greetings,
i am devoloping a pitch deck for the first of my projects. This is for a new propulsioins system for launch vehicles and other craft.

Troy

Great work taking the first step mate!

You’ll need to change the permissions so we can see the document you’ve linked. Looking forward to seeing what you’ve got!

malcolmjarmyn

my new pitch

malcolmjarmyn

The pitch deck is on hold at the moment, my team of volunteers have been busy working on the project. First planned engine testing is in December. If I can afford it.

Troy

Hi @malcolmjarmyn ! Your document isn’t public so we can’t see it. 🙂

malcolmjarmyn

my latest pitch

Troy

This is a huge improvement, mate. Great work!

The top 3 things (not an exhaustive list):

This is more polished than before, but I’m not getting a sense of your team’s credibility or what progress has actually been made. Have you manufactured working prototype parts or have any of your team developed rockets before? What makes your team the best in the world for bringing this to life?
I still can’t see any indication that you have a business model in mind, or a deep understanding/theory about your market
Your financial slide at the end looks entirely made up. Are you really saying you’ll have $1m+ in expenses next year (2021)? Where will you get this money?

allandias

Troy
Hi Troy, thank you for the questions, as the Chief Engineer in our team I feel I can clarify some of your concerns in what is actually my expertise.

In my honest opinion I feel like the first set of questions is not something we would expect to hear in an environment of novelty and innovation (both our company proposing a novel concept, and your platform expecting novel concepts). You asked about our team’s credibility as if expecting a team made up of seasoned senior engineers from big companies and government space agencies, when these are precisely the ones who kept space tech unchanged for so long. Yes our team is made up of young people (both in age and in experience), much like yourself, and in no way that translates as lack of credibility when it comes with qualification, expertise and passion. We are aware we may not be ‘the best in the world’, but we are the ones who had the idea, who have developed it to where it is now, and we are the ones who are doing what we feel is best. Hardly the best in the world are the ones who bring about innovation in the large scale.

Before elaborating further I should reiterate that at the moment our company is operating in a very tight budget, and most of our team is contributing voluntarily to the research and development.
If you notice in the section where we elaborate about our progress, our project is in the middle of preliminary design, so manufacturing a prototype at the moment is not only not recommended, but a waste of resources, especially considering our aforementioned financial basis of operations. We have a long list of analyses and simulations that have been performed on the technology we have developed so far, and results are positive and promising. What we do not have is a rocket engine ready for flight.

Being in engineering operations I cannot exactly elaborate on our market strategy, but I can tell from contact with prospective customers that the demand for what we are developing is high, not only from the amount of customers who would like to use our vehicle, but also on how eager they feel about having a vehicle like ours at their disposal.

Finally, our financial slide is made up. It is an estimated forecast of the funds we would be using if we wanted to conduct operations normally, had we had access to use said funds. As I said, we’re operating at a tight budget and mostly voluntarily, so evidently we will not have $1m+ in expenses in 2021 if our situation doesn’t change. That slide has only the purpose of showing prospective investors on what we would be spending their money, which is where we would be expecting to get this money.

malcolmjarmyn

Hi Troy,
We have submitted an application for the start up program, We have new members on the team, Hope you enjoy the pitch,
thank you for all your help Troy, I appreciate every bit of help I get.
regards
Malcolm

Troy

Great to hear from you, allandias!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking these questions in judgement, at all. I’m asking because you’ll need to develop good answers to them. The best thing I can do is to be brutally honest in my advice. The last thing I want is for you to be deterred, but your time is valuable so I want to help you find your path as rapidly as possible.

If you had a team of seasoned engineers of course that would certainly raise credibility! 😂 But if you don’t have access to those, you will need to prove to the world, over time, that you’re on track to be more capable than other teams already building and launching rockets across the globe. Even if you could point to a history of being a part of a rocketry society, having prototyped basic rocket motors at home, or some kind of entry-level practical experience, that would be helpful.

For someone to give you money for something like this, you’re going to need to prove you can become the best team in the world. Wishful thinking fueled by only passion is not going to move the needle - start building and experimenting and learning about the launch market in much more depth. Without any of this, there’s nothing for you to pitch yet. There are a lot of people who would love to be handed money to play with rocket tech, and I love that there are some fancy pics in your deck now, but you need to start to develop real substance now - you’ll need to answer why someone with money should hand it over to you. That’s the whole game. 🙂

These questions I asked above will be answered as part of your journey. As you build your credibility by doing the right small things with the little resources you do have, you’ll be more likely to get extra bits of support - whether money or other resources - to get you to the next stage. No one expects you to know it all now. Your mission is to develop a strategy to keep moving forward and upward.

The biggest questions you should be trying to address are:

Who are you solving a problem for and what are they willing to pay for it? Be precise and honest.
Do you really need to start with SSTO? I can’t see how it will help you, especially with no clear answer to 1 yet. How is that going to help with affordable launch prices? Why a 50kg payload? Without knowing much at all about your customers (at least, you should know more than I do) you can’t know what you need to design for.

I appreciate that you’ve got a financial slide, but I’d take it out. It doesn’t convince me that you’ve thought about a budget in a useful way. If your budget is $100 today, spend it and show the world what you can do with that $100. Small, cheap experiments to incrementally build credibility are critical.

You might be a team of volunteers today, but if you want to be taken seriously then you’re going to have to find a way to become a team of capable rocket engineers and launch sector salespeople. Use that passion of yours to come up with a way to do this. 🙂

allandias

Troy thanks for your reply, reading it I’m glad to see that we’re actually on the same page after all.
You can keep following our updates and our progress in our platforms, and maybe (in the near future) we can resume these talks when you find what we have to offer a bit more attractive!
This is our LinkedIn profile, where we always try to post our progress in a way that appeals to the public, feel free to check it out!

Troy

No worries, allandias!

We’re just about to announce a new program that I think you will find useful, so I’ll be in touch very soon. I’d love to find a way to actively help. 🙂

edmond

Just read the pitch. An expendable SSTO, jeez.

But I’d say developing 400kN methalox engine is a valuable proposition in itself. A small reusable two-stage to orbit can be done with that (kind of mini-Starship). That will beat most of the competition on launch market price-wise, including Rocket Labs. But also needs roughly $100M in funding and best rocket engineers money can buy. Maybe 5 years from scratch to full power ground stand test?

P.S. My advice (without being overly negative) - redesign the message around the engine and explain how that is something both valuable to potential customers and also something that not everyone can offer.