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Watch out with the text effects in PowerPoint or Keynote. A drop shadow, stroke line, and worst of all: a glow and a gradient fill can reduce the contrast of your test and make your text look dirty, especially on low-resolution screens which are often old VGA projectors in conference rooms. I prefer to keep things clean and crisp.
Seth Godin wrote an excellent blog post about pitching to a large corporate: the lowest possible price is not always the most important selling point. If you are a startup, it might result in the exact opposite effect: you just reinforced the image of the small, unprofessional, desperate, unreliable, financially instable company that is too high-risk to do business with.
If all the above are in fact true for your company, there are still some easy ways to camouflage it, and become a credible business partner to a large organization:
I am in the middle of writing a book using Apple iBook creator platform, and hopefully it will see the light of day soon. Sorting out ISBNs and US tax numbers is almost more difficult than writing the book itself.
Other people have written extensively about why bullet points are a bad idea, my book will be a highly pragmatic and practical guide that helps you put a slide deck together that gets you funded, lands you a sale or delivers your Board approval.
This iBook format is wonderful, I can use text, slideshows, images, and interestingly videos which makes it easy to put software advice inside using a simple screen cast (software explanations are hard and very boring to put in text). And best of all, I can update the book with new content pretty much like apps update on your iPad, which allows me to ship early and improve content over time.
So, ultimately my book will be an iPad app that is open at your desk when you are putting your slides together at home, or in the office. The content is not frozen yet, so please let me know if there are specific issues I should cover, and I will see if I can incorporate them in the flow.
Online, advertisers pay by the click. In the offline world, not yet. This slide was made using Photoshop’s vanishing point filter and some fat Futura Condensed Extra Bold
I sometimes get that reaction from a client. Very few slides, very simple graphics. Sometimes the most powerful stories can be pitched really sweet and short. No need to waste more words/time/slides. Consider yourself lucky.
If you are in the high tech sector you face the challenge of demonstrating your product in an investor or sales pitch meeting. If that meeting is short (an hour or less), my advice is not to show your product in a live demo, but use a series of carefully planned screen shots.
Murphy’s law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And it seems to apply especially to high tech demos. There are just so many variables that can go wrong: Internet connection, screens, the application itself.
If you are in the middle of a short pitch, any interruption will pop the momentum of your story. Ideally you want your pitch to be one focused burst of energy that gets the audience craving for more at the end. A hiccup because of WiFi password will definitely not get you there.
There is another problem with demos, not all application functionality is Interesting. Logging in, creating profiles, entering some data, all things you have to do, but they are not the piece of technology that will wow your investors or customers. And finally, a live computer screen is most of the time not readable when put on an overhead projector, most fonts are probably smaller than 12 points.
So, what to do instead. Prepare an interesting story, set it up beforehand in your application, take lots of screenshots and paste them in the right order in your presentation. Zoom in to those aspects of the screen that are interesting, crop out those window bars, ads, anything that you do not need. Circle what people,should be looking at. Put big bold explanation text boxes on the slides.
Most investor pitches I see claim year 5 revenues of $50m to $100m, so putting in just that piece of information is not going to convince investors, you just sound like everyone else. What you need to make believable is why you are going to hit that target. Showing an incredibly complicated Excel model (”look, we did our homework”) is not going to get you there either. So the top line number is not convincing, nor is the detailed model, what works? The napkin.
When a modeling economics, I usually go brought a cycle. Start with a very simple calculation that gets to a ballpark answer, and is easy to follow and verify. Then, go I to incredible detail in an Excel model, understanding why I do, or do not get close to my initial ballpark. After the rock solid model is finished and bug free, it is time to simplify down to the level, of that very first ballpark number.
Simplification is not simple. You need to pick which drivers of your business are the most important, you need to decide which factors to show, which ones to hide. Your challenge is to stay close to values that are linked to everyday reality, not accounting. Messages per user per month, price per message instead of $m depreciation.
With all this preparation, you are now able to let your potential investor write her own ballpark or napkin calculation of the company’s potential. You provide her with the basic framework, what are the 6 numbers you need to multiply in order to get to your $75m in year 5. She might not agree with all the numbers, but you gave her a framework to which to apply her own estimates. Getting the point estimate right is not important, agreeing on the order of magnitude, and the way how to get there, is.
I do a fair amount of presentation design work in the medical field and in every deck there is the challenge of explaining the technology to a layman. The medical profession uses elaborate, highly realistic, illustrations to visualize a condition or a procedure. I actually find the other approach much more effective: highly abstract, minimalist sketches that show only what needs to be shown, and eliminate everything else. The visual needs to explain what is going on, not what something looks like.
A nice and short video with tips for pitching your startup to investors on #startupstories. The lessons from entrepreneurs are useful, but pay special attention to what the investors have to say, they are your audience.
Spirals are a great way to visualize an endless repeating of something. Stock image sites are full of images of real staircases, rendered ones, or other images that have a spiral structure. You can use the visual as-is, or add text (maybe in circles that get smaller and smaller) to shows that something is going on forever, that something is repeatable.
Some people associate a diagram like this with a downward spiral. I do not see it that way, you?