SlideMagic Blog

Unfortunately, in 2013 most investors are still male. Coming in with a cute deck (curly flower background, pastel colours, retro-chique font, etc.) is not going to get you points. Even if your product itself has to be cute (a cosmetics line for teenage girls for example) you can still separate things in your investor deck. Use more macho graphics for the serious business stuff, leaving the cute graphics for the product show case pages.

During a project briefing I usually take the role of the potential investor and start to ask questions that are not necessarily related to the page we are on. You try to understand the company, tick off the boxes that are obvious and are left with a few questions that are not clear. A good investor presentation should anticipate the investor’s thought process and provide the answers right at the moment they are needed, but hey, we are still at the briefing phase so no need to be perfect yet.

So, in a one on one meeting (where you can accomodate a slightly more chaotic story flow), when the investor asks you a question, answer it. Skipping/ignoring it and continuing to go down the list of product benefits (we are flexible, scalable, and deliver ROI) does not neutralize that nagging worry in the investor’s mind. Answering is probably not that difficult for you, acquiring the patience to listen is.

Many of the spam email messages I receive start with a wobbly story about an ever changing world of social media confusion and making it very hard to understand what the spammer actually wants.

Good headhunters start their call well, with “I am a headhunter” which saves critical time that can be spent on pitching what they want.

Some startup pitches to venture capitalists are all about trying to explain a completely new revolutionary idea. Big bold images, stunning visuals, clever analogies, all needed to get the investor to understand and feel what you are talking about.

The other day, I designed one that goes completely in the other direction. An eCommerce startup with a very specific niche audience that is totally neglected by online offerings. It takes 2 seconds to explain that.

But the interesting part is to explain the VC how the magic of the numbers work. Seasoned investors in Internet businesses have seen hundreds of startups and can probably benchmark in their heads how your company stacks up in terms of LTV, CAC, conversion rates, basket size, repeat purchases, cohort developments.

To the outsider, the presentation might look a bit boring (pages with numbers), but it is the substance that is required for the discussion. To spice it up a bit, use custom fonts (watch out with compatibility) and a slightly bolder color scheme than you normally would use. Also make sure that you show the link between all those numbers: simply pulling numbers from Excel in random order will not sound and look very coherent.

A question that came in yesterday:

Jan, I have a question about presentations to investment bankers/analysts. One of my clients getting ready to go on a road show says their investment banking consultants have told them to present what I would call (ala Garth Reynolds) a “slideument” that will also serve as a leave-behind. The consultants claim this is the way it’s always done and if they don’t do it this way, their audience will disregard them. Your thoughts?

Yes, in financial services people are used to very text-heavy slideuments for fund raising and IPO roadshows. And in most cases, people will print out the full 200 page deck for each participant in the meeting room.

Now, in finance presentations you need a few pages that are dense (financial statements for example). But there is no reason why the general lessons for presentation design do not apply in finance. In the end, investors are people, and it is harder to convince people to do something (invest) with a boring presentation.

And I have seen it work myself. After the initial resistance, people were actually very impressed with a different style fund raising presentation (and proved it by wiring money).

So what to do? My advice would be to take both approaches. A fund raising roadshow is a big deal and usually people have enough time/resources allocated to it to prepare both a visual, and a dense deck. Present the visual presentation, and selectively jump to appendix charts if you have to. Let the audience read the appendix in their own time.

A few days ago there was Kickstarter, and now Mailchimp has put its annual overview online. I like these blends of web design and presentation design.

From a form perspective, the presentation is clever. Widen and narrow the screen and see what happens, as you make the window narrower, first the infographics move closer to each other, then the design switches from a 2 column to a 1 column layout.

From a content perspective, there is some work to be done. Data is not rounded up and makes it hard to read, and some of the information presentation is not terribly relevant to the viewer (pizzas served). Then, the objective of the site is to show that a lot of stuff is going on at Mailchimp, and with that in mind, they succeeded conveying the message.

P.S.: another cool annual report: Warby Parker(h/t Duarte)

Tom Tunguz claims that this is the origin of the elevator pitch:

The term elevator pitch originates from the very first demonstration of an elevator with a safety brake. At the time, elevators were hazardous, routinely plummeting down shafts when their hoisting ropes fell, destroying their payloads. In 1852, Elisha Otis invented a locking system that would catch and secure plunging elevator. Unable to drive much interest in his innovation, Otis organized a demonstration in New York City. He stood in the elevator as an assistant severed the hoisting ropes and the safety brake engaged. Otis’ innovation paved the way for humans to ride in elevators. Today, the Otis company’s products transport 7B people every three days.

If true, this is a more interesting tale than the story that I thought was the source: finding yourself next to your client CEO going up in the elevator and having 1 minute to sell your idea.

Forecasting the size of a market that does not exist is tricky and nobody will have the right answer. Googling will result in endless research agencies or investment banks or consulting firms throwing in yet another inconsistent number.

With new markets, it is often as important to convince/teach an investor how to think about the market sizing than getting her to accept the answer, the point estimate. So merely quoting a random number without having a clue how it was derived is not going to help you very much.

So here is an alternative approach: make your own and keep the analysis very transparent. Build a spreadsheet that start with hard facts (populations etc., and slowly, slowly, adds more uncertain numbers. Use different colours for numbers with different confidence levels (green for rock solid all the way down to red for I-made-this-up). Put the resulting market size in your presentation, and add the detailed calculation to the appendix of your presentation.

Now you are on top of your numbers and understand where they are coming from. It shows you know what you are talking about, and you can teach your potential investor how to make her own market estimate.

Rattling through 25 points about why your idea is great on page 1 of your deck is not convincing.

• You do not give the audience the ability to warm up, and first of all understand what it is you do
• You dilute the power of the arguments by spending too little time on each: big need, no competition, great team, we all heard them before
• You remind us of weak pitches where the lack of quality of the story is made up for by quantity: products with 25 benefits usually have no benefits

Instead, resist the temptation for detail and explain roughly what you do on page 1, plus the most important differentiator. Then follow with a presentation that is short enough for the audience to focus on your key points.

Every startup pitch has a hockey stick chart that shows its financial path to glory. As a result, investors will not believe it by simply looking at it. You need to explain what she has to believe in order for the end point to be true. What are the 7 numbers you need to multiply in order to reach that $50m in year 5? If she believes in 4 of the 7, and she buys into your methodology to calculate the potential, then you she might connect the year five dot with the 0 today.