SlideMagic Blog

People want to be helpful in giving feedback on your presentation, and often when you send a draft to an experienced executive she will say to cut it down to 8 slides. She sat in far too many boring meetings where eager young managers try to pitch ideas with endless and endless pages of bullet point slides. She probably has not read the content of your slides, and just looked at the page count.

We have discussed many times that a 50 page visual presentation can be presented in the same time as an 8 page bullet point deck, but there is something else here.

A bullet point deck can easily be compressed: reduce font size and combine 2 slides into 1. With carefully designed visual slides, this approach will not work. The moment you start cutting and combining, you are back in bullet point land.

Instead of agreeing page count, agree the time you have to present the story.

In presentations, clear and stunning are not the same thing. I have seen many stunning infographics that are not clear at all. And more importantly, it is perfectly possible to make a clear and convincing business presentations without stunning visual effects.

Especially in business presentations, people often want to go for stunning first, and commission expensive graphics design or video creation work. It is wiser to hold of with this until you have a simple presentation that 1) makes it clear what you want (touch the head) (believe me, I have seen many presentations that do not even pass this hurdle) and 2) convinces people to do something (touches the heart).

The audience does not see the difference between 4 consecutive slides with different images, or 1 slides with 4 consecutive image build up, so there is no point in trying to cut slides by consolidating 4 images into one. Four slides are easier to edit, and four separate slides are easier to email as PDF.

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has put 400,000 super high resolution images of their collection online, free to use. Great for use in presentations.

Aspect ratios, dots per inch, file formats and conversions, forgetting where you saved that file, these are all problems that are disrupting my creative workflow. More and more I just work with screen shots. If the image looks sharp on my big 27" monitor, I crop it as I want it, and use it in my presentation. It could have been a JPG, a PNG, a web page, a PDF document, a Keynote file, it does not matter. CMD-SHIFT-4- and “click”, done.

The presentation creation and sharing app Bunkr has not appeared on my radar screen until recently. The company raised EUR 1m in a recent fund raising round. In the not too distant future, I am becoming a player in the market myself, so I am watching developments with interest.

I clicked around a little bit in the application and here is my impression. Things I like:

• Snappy, fast, clean user interface
• Nice intelligent rulers to snap your objects against
• Social technology integration (Disqus comments on slides)
• Online image search integration (Google images, Flickr), but watch those usage rights
• Easy sharing and embedding
• Different objects for titles and paragraphs, not just a text box
• No bullet point template when you create a new slide

My main comment is, is that all PowerPoint alternatives in the market, still stick with the same fundamental approach to slide design and drawing on a computer screen that has been around since the 1980s. And that is the problem I am trying to solve 24/7, and it is not easy…

A venture capitalist needs to turn down people all the time. Sometimes decisions are scientific, most of the times they are not. Sometimes they are made after extensive deliberations, most of the time in the first minutes of meeting you. It can be that they do not like the sector, do not believe in the idea, do not like you, have a bad day, do not believe that you can pull it of, anything.

When you ask them for feedback, most of them will not tell you the real story. But, VCs want to be helpful. So, some of them will give constructive feedback about your business or the presentation. Some feedback is helpful, some less so. When they do suggest that you include 5 more breakdowns in the year 5 revenue forecast, they were nice to you in giving you a suggestion, but I very much doubt that if you had included those numbers in your first presentation, she would have changed her mind.

Filter feedback and try to drill down to the real issue.

The Internet is full of business plan/investor pitch outlines (here is a nice one from Sequoia). Use these guidelines as a check list to see whether you covered all the content that investors expect. But do not stick to them too literally. A rigid, generic, structure kills the spontaneity of your specific story. Do not simply copy the sections of the structure and use them as (boring) headlines for your slides, instead write headlines that mean something (The Solution is not very meaningful). The text book approach to TAM calculation might not exactly fit your specific market.

All advice (including the one you will find on this blog) is given to help you. In the end, it is you who makes the call what to use, and what not.

This is a nice way to show consolidation in an industry. You can digest the chart in 2 ways: on the podium you see the big picture of consolidating financial institutions, reading in close-up on the screen, you can see the details. The chart could have been better if the width of the arrows would represent the assets under management of the banks, some of these acquisitions were bigger than others.

[Off topic] There is a populist discussion going on in the comments of the original post. I did a lot of strategy work in banking mergers and there are different ways to look at the concentration in an industry. The top level player count is an easy statistic, but what is more relevant is the choice that customers (especially small businesses) have on the ground. How many different bank branches are within a 10km range at any point in the US? If there are 30 banks, but each concentrate on a specific state, then the market looks very competitive, but on the ground, customers face a monopoly. On the other, if all 4 banks are represented in most small villages, the market could be competitive.

The worst presentation briefing (and as a result most time-consuming presentation design project) is a long deck of slides full of bullet points that have been shortened (hey, we learned about being concise) to such an extend that they have turned into meaningless, generic prose.

The best presentation briefing (and start of a rapid presentation design project): the audio track of a 15 minute video of the actual presentation, the existing slides are not really needed.