SlideMagic Blog

I enjoyed talking to Israeli and Palestinian MEET graduates last Thursday about pitching at demo days. Here are some of the things we talked about:

• Objective: get to the next meeting rather than landing the full investment which you will never be able to pull off in five minutes
• 101: bullet points are boring (everyone knows this by now) and buzzwords do not work
• Entertainment: marathon investor pitches wears out the audience. When you are the first up, you need to make sure people still remember you at the end of the day. When you are number twenty seven, you need to make sure everyone is still awake. Make sure your pitch is high on entertainment value, while staying professional at the same time
• Five minutes: you cannot solve the time limitation by cramming in more content (denser slides, speaking faster), so chop those slides that are not important for the purpose of your pitch (getting to the next meeting). Detailed financial forecasts, team bios, technology explanations, can all wait for later
• Carefully plan your app demo. Show what you want to show, do not spend time on boring log in screens. Tell what the audience is seeing, it might be obvious to you that things are beautiful and fast, the audience does not see it. If you can, avoid a live demo in a 5 minute pitch and instead go for fail-proof screen shots
• One story throughout. If possible tie everything (consumer problem, your solution, demo) to one consistent case study throughout the entire five minutes.
• Rehearse until you drop. Five minutes of content can be rehearsed until you know the content in and out. Spontaneous guitar solos sound spontaneous because the guitarist knows her scales  and melody lines so she can improvise them

I get this suggestion a lot from clients who are concerned with the amount of slides in their decks. I usually push back, collapsing two messages into one (more busy) slide does not shorten the presentation.

When writing (without tinkering font size or margins): time = page count, when presenting: time = story.

Investors are not always 100% rational people. The other day an investor shared one of his criteria with me. If an entrepreneur has been hit by 14 cases of pure bad luck he is convinced that it will happen again for attempt 15. “Some guys are just not lucky.”

I was asked to answer the question “What makes a compelling pitch deck?” on Quora, and here is what I replied:

You can write books about this, so without giving a table of contents (Google it) here are some thoughts:

• Something that explains what you actually do (yes, some decks don’t)
• Something that intrigues a potential investor enough to have another meeting with you
• Something that answers the big obvious elephant in the room questions (“What, that sounds like a page rank search engine”)
• Something that shows through language/visuals/style/in-between-the-lines that you are a decent, honest, professional person to work with

Before taking your pitch to your target investors it is important to practice your story for real. There are different guinea pigs available, recognise their strengths and weaknesses:

1. Your co-founder is blinded by the idea, just like you
2. Your parents probably do not really understand the concept but love everything you do
3. The speech coach really understands articulation, stance, and story flow, but will not spot that huge gaping hole in the business model
4. The friend of a friend of a friend who is an angel investor will suggest that you should make a comparison to that company featured in TechCrunch 2 months ago
5. The friend of a friend who owes a favor and is a VC does not really have time to go into the idea and will suggest to beef up the competitive analysis a bit, unfortunately he does not invest in businesses that are this early, come back in 6 months…
6. The casual friend who wants to be friendly but does not know you very well, does not have the courage to say what she really thinks
7. The management consultant sees problems everywhere and will suggest more analysis and risk mitigation

Still, each of the above has valuable input, just put it in context.

Unfortunately, not many teams get together in one room for a team picture. The alternative team slide is a collage of headshots that are taken by different photographers at different times. How to make something decent out of it?

1. Make sure all images have exactly the same size
2. Crop all images so that the size of the head is more or less the same
3. Line up the eyes 1/3 from the top of each image
4. Go for a close up, losing some of the top of the face if required
5. Make the images black and white
6. Increase the brightness of selected images if require

From the archives: a 2008 post on the same subject.

If that is your message, you can write the sentence “There are 45 applications” with a cutely formated 45 on a background of a stunning image. The other solution is to write out the applications in 45 boxes that are nicely spaced out over the page. The latter solution is more cluttered, but actually makes the point in a more convincing way.

This Tweet is spot on:

Tired of seeing “pretty” slides that suck at communicating. — Roger Courville (@1080Group) April 8, 2013

Making pretty slides (beautiful picture, nice font) is not the same as making effective slides.

If there is a very important message in your story, there is no need to make it on every page in your presentation. Fifteen half-baked bullet points are not as powerful as one carefully crafted slide that drives your message home. Added side benefit: you can make your presentation even shorter!

I get this question sometimes. Almost all content on this blog are disguised client examples. Every morning I sit down, reflect on what happened yesterday, and extract from it a small piece of advice that could make you a better designer. The advantage of being in the trenches of presentation design day to day.