SlideMagic Blog

Some startups have a technology platform that can be used in multiple markets, and often the startup is not completely clear (yet) about how to prioritise them. In a first 20-minute investor pitch this creates a highly confusing story; an investor can only take in so much information in 20 minutes and probably will not buy that a 5 person startup can conquer all these markets (she is probably right). Here is a potential solution:

In the first 20 minute cold pitch:

• Set up your platform business situation
• Pitch 1 (maybe 2) markets properly (the most promising ones)
• Hint at further upside in the other markets (1 quick slide)

If that went well, elaborate more in follow-on meetings about the other opportunities and provide a discussion framework about possible prioritisation, and you can even ask the potential investor for advice.

Do not try to spring all 10 stories in the first 20 minutes, you will fail.

Prices for celebrity and news photos are incredibly high (check some of them on Getty Images). Why? Because the licensing options are set for high-volume print runs or web sites. Usually, presentations are different. The audience is relatively small (rarely above 100) and most presentations are a one-off event. So, producers of news and celebrity images are missing out on the presentation design market.

Enter a new web site: slideshots.com. It is a database of AFP images with EUR 2 licensing options for use in presentations. A great alternative for over-sued and cheesy stock images. And the license looks pretty flexible, even for use online on platforms such as SlideShare.

PowerPoint does weird things with URLs and email addresses. When you type in either, it turns them automatically into a hotlink (sometimes useful), but applies a highly ugly formatting (a bright color with underlined text). A slide is not a web page where links compete for your attention, make sure to tone down the formatting or remove the hyperlink all together.

There are two ways to center a data chart on a slide: center the entire chart image including labels and legends, or center just the chart area, ignoring the labels. I prefer the latter.

A frightening, dramatic, stressful image can greatly enhance your message. But I would not use it on the cover page of your presentation. That page usually sits on the projector for a long time while the audience is walking in and you do not want to destroy their mood before your talk started. Use the stressful slide at a key moment inside your deck instead, it could even be one page 2, just not on page 1.

There are 2 benefits to using simple slides with little content and one focussed message:

1. They are much more effective than busy complex slides (most of us believe this by now)
2. They are a lot easier to design than busy complex slides (very few realize this)

Once you decide to adopt 1, your slide design skills have quadrupled instantly because of argument 2.

It has hard to grasp the magnitude of something with cold statistics. For example, this waterfall that I recently visited in Iceland drops 60m, but it is hard to imagine, unless you pay attention to the tiny people standing next to it.

Another example is this TED video by Ramesh Raskar, about photographing light traveling through an empty Coke bottle at a few trillion frames per second. At 3:50 the key statistic comes out: it would take a bullet fired from a gun 1 year to travel through the bottle if it was slowed down as the same rate as the light beam.

Do the same in your presentations. Tell stories with analogies to make it easier for people to understand big (or small) numbers.

Off topic: when photographing landscapes I usually resist the temptation of making that completely clean shot without any evidence of human presence in it. That small house, car, or person adds that critical sense of size to an object. When making a shot of a long-distance view, keep something close to the camera in the composition (a tree branch or something) to maintain the sense of distance.

Probably one of the few areas where visuals do not contribute to more effective communication is on restaurant menus. When I stand outside a place and see a menu with an image of a greasy hamburger on a laminated piece of paper I decide to move on, because I have eaten in too many bad restaurants that use food photography on their menu. My brain has hardwired the relationship: food image on menu -> bad food.

The greasy hamburger image effect also applies to slides. The second you put your first one on the screen, people compare that visual to the 1,000s of other presentation slides they have seen. If it is a list of bullet points, you have lost your audience before you uttered your first sentence.

(P.S. I think typography is a big opportunity for bad restaurants: cut down on the images, replace the laminated menus with pictures for nice heavy paper with freshly printed menus (new every day) using lots of white space and a chique font, and business will boom in your tourist trap. But hey, if you are willing to put in this amount of effort into your business, why not start improving the food…)

It takes some skill to time the right amount of energy for your presentation. Presenting after a very heavy lunch will be difficult. Presenting on an empty stomach is the other extreme. I usually eat a granola bar around 30 minutes before I have to go on stage, to make sure that I am all fired up to go with a fresh shot of energy. Granola bars have a good sugar kick, but also provide some substance that is missing in many processed food snacks and candy.

If you are pitching to a big corporate, it is important to understand how their decision making process works. For example: going behind someone‘back and talk to her superior could back fire.

Big corporates can be big bureaucracies, but not all departments work like this. It could be that the junior team member you just skipped sits next to her boss who is forwarding the email she just received from you straight back at her. They do exist inside big corporates, proper functioning teams with an open work culture.

Some people who are very high up in the corporate hierarchy might actually not have that much decision power. It depends on the type of business. For example, someone can be global marketing manager of a big soft drinks brand, and have a lot of responsibilities. However, it could be that most tactical decisions are actually taken at the country level, in the local subsidiaries in wich the parent holds a minority stake. In short, understand how your big corporate target works before planning your pitch strategy.