Gone are the days when you needed a developer to build an app for a relatively easy task. Low-code and no-code development allows you to dramatically increase the speed of building and bringing simple (and sometimes not-so-simple) applications to market. I swear, half my life is being run by Zapier right now: Book a meeting with me, and all sorts of things automatically happen in the background to ensure our meeting is on the correct calendars, gets transcribed, and video of the the call is stored and tagged with your company name.
However, the ease of building low-code and no-code applications has its pros and cons: In order to work, they need access to some pretty sensitive data. If someone wants to access my data, they could try to hack my email or they could hack one of the many automations linked to my email accounts. When more and more applications run on essentially the same underlying architecture and code, they become a very tempting target for hackers and other malicious people.
Get into Nokod Securitythat offers to monitor no-code and low-code applications to detect security vulnerabilities and mitigate breaches.
The company recently raised $8 million from Acrew Capital, Meron Capital, and Flint Capital, and the team was kind enough to share the (lightly edited) deck they used so we could get a sneak peek under the hood.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you’d like to submit yours, this is how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
The company has left the 21-Slide deck intact except for a few parts.
- deck slide
- team slide
- Examples of applications without code
- “Who uses apps without code”
- Macro trend: the Low-Code/No Code trend
- Slide Threats and Attacks
- problem slide
- Threats and Attacks Slide
- Attack Vector Slide
- mission slide
- solution slide
- architecture slide
- SIZE slide 1
- SIZE slide 2
- TAM slide 3
- Go-To-Market Slide
- competition slide
- validation slide
- (Redacted) Validation Conclusions Slide
- timeline slide
- contact slide
three things to love
Nokod’s deck has a lot of great stuff in it, as well as a few things that had me quite confused. As always, I’ll address my concerns and the OldManYellsAtCloud.gif comments in a moment. For now, let’s look at the slides that got me excited.
Give me a T! Give me an E!
Okay, I’m not going to spell TEAM in the subheading, but this is an example of a company that knows its strengths. In an early-stage company, a founding team that has an unfair advantage is a direct superpower. Nokod has all the bases covered on that front:
(Slide 2) Extraordinary founding team. image credits: Nokod
The two co-founders have started and exited companies in the cybersecurity space before. That’s a great way to grab an investor’s attention. Relevant experience and successful outings scream “unfair advantage.” Even after reading this slide, I was not surprised that this company successfully raised money.
Aside from the obvious, this slide shows that the founding team understands what’s important in a pitch deck: if you have incredible traction, lead with it. If you don’t, highlight your experienced team.
well articulated problem
(Slide 9) An elegant outline of the problem at hand. image credits: Nokod.
A good fundraising story will have a good explanation of what the problem is and why it might be worth solving. Not everything on this list is well explained. Namely: Do you know, without googling, what PII is, or indeed why the collection and storage of PII might be a bad thing?
The company could have taken the effort to explain the impact of some of these issues and why no-code and no-code applications are particularly vulnerable in these situations, but I get the broad message: the cost of adopting low-code and no-code code. -code is that people may not always know exactly what is going on, and if something does happen, it can be difficult to figure out exactly where the ne’er-do-wells got into a system.
A better marketing slide than most
(Slide 16) Let’s sell this. Image Credits: Nokod
This go-to-market slide has a clear profile of the customer: how they can be reached, what the business model is, and where they are located geographically.
Developing a cohesive go-to-market strategy can be surprisingly difficult. It’s what I end up discussing with my pitch coaching clients most often. Having a vague “build it and they’ll come” theory works when you’re focused on the product, but if you’re raising money to acquire customers, you can’t just shrug and say, “We’ll figure it out.” leave when we get there. you are not get there. It’s raising money to run, so are there.
This go-to-market slide has a clear profile of the customer: how they can be reached, what the business model is, where they are located geographically, and even who is the decision maker within the business. I’m not sure how many midsize companies have a CISO or director of application security. I suspect that many times, these decisions fall to a CTO rather than a dedicated and clearly defined security role.
Still, as an investor, I can look at this and see the outline of a plan. My next question would be: “Okay, tell me about your process. How do you actually get a sale? The story should be consistent and outline a good sales funnel, something like: “Leads come from X, we reach the decision maker through A, B and C, and then we close the deal 25% of the time . But we suspect we can increase that percentage if we do Y and Z.” An answer like that will satisfy me, and doubly so if the company already has paying customers and can point to the sales process it used.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things that Nokod could have improved or done differently, along with his full introduction!
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