SMI #024: Market Map Maker

A better way to put logos in your PowerPoint slides

Mar 1, 2022

Example of a market map — I cried one tear for the poor minion who scraped these logos

Opportunity in a Tweet:

Market maps are created by consultants, investment bankers, venture capitalists, and corporate biz dev employees on PowerPoint slides to visualize industry participants. This is the closest these people ever get to being artists. Building market maps is an incredibly manual and menial process, which requires crawling google for high quality logos and resizing them into boxes so one’s boss can point to them.

The Problem:

The number of times I’ve googled some permutation of the following is embarrassing:

“Salesforce logo no background”

“Sequoia private equity vector logo”

“VMware logo white”

I’d venture to guess I’ve spent at least two full work weeks of my life in the pursuit of high quality logos for what my wife calls my “work book reports”. Each time I jump into the fiery waters it’s like groundhogs day. Many of the logos I’ve searched for twenty times before, yet have been too lazy to create a folder of pre-vetted and cropped logos myself.

Season 4 Michael GIF by The Office — As Confucius once said, “If it’s not on a slide, it didn’t happen.”

What This Is:

A low-code, no-code design tool for finance wonks
Like Figma but with boxes and logos (simple!)
Ability to type in companies and get logos as outputs
Both a logo repository and image resizing tool
Ability to export to PowerPrint and Google slides

THE CAR INDUSTRY AT ITS ABSOLUTE FINEST: How can Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce have such different identities? — One of the few market maps where the goal isn’t necessarily to be in the top right

What This Isn’t:

An outsourcing service for creating PowerPoints….
Quick detour - A company I worked for hired this “heavy weight” from McKinsey. He talked that big talk. In fact, I remember he used the word “paradigm” on his first day. But the plot THICKENS! On day 3 he sent a slide that looked like a first grade finger painting. Apparently he had outsourced all his slide making to India for the last four years and it never came up in the interview process. Yikes!
A pitchbook replacement for company research
A tool for legit graphic artists

Thesis:

Finding logos is a waste of time

Market maps are an imperative component for most pitch decks and competitive analyses, but incredibly tedious to pull together
A crappy logo sticks out like a sore thumb on an otherwise awesome presentation
Sidenote - Over the years I’ve noticed that most hedge funds have super shitty logos - like shockingly bad for the amount of money they manage. I’m talking grainy 4 pixel smudges with off-white backgrounds despite $50B AUM

Banks and consulting firms are willing to pay for productivity and research tools

Banks throw money at problems that can be solved with software
During my first year at a PE shop, I was depressed to discover they were actually paying more for the tools I used than my salary. I added up Pitchbook, Bloomberg, CapIQ, Preqin and a few others and came to the realization that the robots will indeed soon replace us

Visualizing data and markets is not a new problem and isn't going away

People have been visualizing markets since the dawn of PowerPoint; Steve Jobs and Walt Disney were famous for drawing an industry on dinner table cloths.

Share Steal My Idea

Back of the Napkin Market Sizing

Kinda Biased Competitive Landscape

How It Makes Money

Why This Might Fail

May be a vitamin, not a painkiller

A vitamin is a nice to have while a painkiller is something you’ll pay any price to make a problem go away
Rock beats Scissors and it’s harder to get budget allocated for vitamins over painkillers
In other words - companies may not care if analysts are miserable scraping the web for logos

Copywrite infringement

Companies could sue you for using their logos? IDK if this is true but saving them down to a repository without permission could cause problems if you are making money off it

Logos could change

Nothing like a good rebranding to wipe the data privacy sins of the past away, right, Meta?

To Get the Ball Rolling, Sisyphus Says

Pick one industry to sell to and go after it full steam (i.e., venture capital firms)
Offer a free 30 day trial to analysts (product led growth)
Once it expires the analysts will probably expense it
If enough analysts expense it, then the product led growth kicks in and you can sell to the larger org (bottoms up, top down)