SlideMagic Blog

Every story has a few key messages. And a message is not something like “We are a highly flexible, customer-satisfying, and scalable platform, that delivers return on marketing investment.” Things need to be more specific.

For example, you have a company pitch that makes your startup sound like - yet another - social network to the ignorant outsider, and you are not. Rather than making this important point verbally, explaining around the slides, it is better to take the issue head-on: write “We are not a social network” at the top of the slide and design the most powerful visual you can think of to visualize it.

Maybe use 2 charts. One can be incredibly simple: 2 circles, one says ”Social network”, the other “Us”. Then in the next slide (using the same headline) provide factual evidence/explanation why you are not. And factual evidence is not the same as writing a long bullet point: “We are not a social network” (duplicating the headline). You need to list some sort of feature comparison between social networks and your application.

Entrepreneurs are often so deep into their own story that they leave the supporting visuals for some of the most fundamental points of their business idea out of the presentation. “Oh, why Amazon would not do this? Well, I have a great story to tell that I usually do verbally when displaying the agenda page.”

Stories are great, verbal explanations without visuals are great, BUT. My two arguments why it might be a good idea to back up your story with visuals (in particular relevant for an investor presentation):

1. You want people to remember your story, and a big bold visual might help anchor the idea in the mind of your audience. The visual does not necessarily have to explain the idea, it should just trigger the memory when you bring up that story of the banana peel back up 3 weeks later.
2. The argument for going further than a visual anchor point is that you often lose control of what happens to your file with slides after you have emailed it to an investor. It gets forwarded to partners in the firm, industry experts, etc. Just in case, it is a good idea that someone who did not sit in the room still can understand the idea behind your business.

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.

A VC complained a about a Prezi presentation today: a combination of motion sickness and impatience (using 30 slides to make a totally obvious point that could be made in 1).

There is nothing wrong with Prezi if it is used right:

• Use zooming effects to support your story: zoom in on a technical diagram for example, hop in and out of a time sequence, focus on parts of your product, highlight different areas of a map. Zooming for the sake of zooming is not helping anyone.
• If you are in a small meeting, leverage the non-linear navigation to have a good interactive discussion. Random story sequence shifts for a big audience makes everyone miss the plot.

Everyone knows that 30 slides with 1 message is better than 1 slide with 30 bullet points. However, obvious points can still be made in 1 slide. I see a lot of presentations on Slideshare that use one spectacular photograph after another to [click] make [click] a [click] totally [click] obvious point (especially social media and/or mobile cliches).

An executive summary that sits on top of a management consulting document is usually a page that summarises the recommendations, next steps, and decisions. It is meant for an insider, the executive reading it is likely to have a 90% understanding of what is inside the document. There is no need for graphics here, a few dry bullets with decisions will do the trick to remind everyone of what will happen next, and who will do it.

So, this is totally the opposite of the other use of an executive summary that I come across often: a short teaser to someone who has no understanding at all of what you want to achieve. Here, a dense text, or a dry list of bullets will do the opposite of attracting attention.

Feel free to step away from the habit of sending dense text pages to get people excited about your project. Instead, think of the time you want the recipient to spend on your document. Now, fill that time with the most visually pleasing and exciting way to present your case. Lower your expectations, you do not want to close a deal at this stage, you want a phone call, or a next meeting. Sending a short, visual presentation that can stand on its own without verbal explanation is a perfect reply to the request for an executive summary.

I see (and work on) a lot of presentations that investors use to raise their own money from high net worth individuals or institutional money managers.

Pitching an venture capital (VC) fund is harder than pitching a regular company. Companies are different by nature, different market, different product, different type of people. Investment funds on the other hand, or more or less the same when you listen to pitches “from a distance”, i.e., with the same level of attention that VCs would use themselves when opening the email inbox in the morning and page-downing some decks that hopeful startups have sent overnight.

Most VC/PE (private equity) pitches would talk about that there are lots of great companies out there that cannot get financing, that the team has a stellar track record, and that - unlike all other VCs - this fund will work hands on with their portfolio companies to create value (strategic help, contact network, access to more financing).

So when to the untrained ear all of these pitches sound the same, it is really important to bring out the distinctions. Bring hard data that show that your target companies cannot get financing. Discuss example deals and show why other investors would not be interested in them, and why you can turn them around. Beef up your track record with quantified exits (unlike most presentations, here the more detail, the better). And - sometimes - reconsider your investment strategy and make it very focused and specific, because believe me, you are not the only one out there pitching for money.

Listing pages and pages of market size numbers that are related to your industry are hard to digest for the novice (for example, a potential investor in your company). This number includes devices, that number is 2011 only, this number excludes Eastern Europe, that one is number of users, that one is in Euro, and this is the percentage growth, but the growth of the average basket size.

An investor who is seriously considering putting money in your company will try to piece this data together to come to some consistent picture. You might as well do the work for her with reasonable assumptions. Size up the 2011 market to 2013, add your estimate for Eastern Europe, convert everything to dollars, etc. etc.

Start with some sort of overall market estimate, compare it to something the investor can relate to, then start adding complexity, break things into pieces.

Obviously your estimate will biased and very optimistic, but your analysis has at least provided the investor with a framework of how to think about your market. Put all the raw data that you used in the appendix so that the investor can do her own homework when she returns back to her office.

VC Mark Suster reconfirmed how important in-between-the-lines-body-language is when pitching investors.

If I had to put a number on it I’d say 1 in 20 pitches – maybe 1 in 30 – are by an entrepreneur who comes across as truly passionate about her project. Y […]

The other 29 pitches consistent of many smart people who “think they have an angle on making a buck” which I know is an unfair over-characterization of the situation but you can genuinely tell when somebody isn’t “all in.” 

I am not sure about the 1 in 30 ratio, but I have seen similar dynamics when clients approach me to upgrade their investor presentation. When you are a professional manager-for-hire that makes a career in big firms, your affinity with the product is usually not that super important, you manage people and deliver the goods. When you are the CEO of a startup raising its first round, it matters a lot.

If the CEO herself cannot portray the required passion for the product, maybe it is wise to include the person on the team who can. I have seen many successful combinations of a CEO who is focussed on a execution and a “product guy” obsessed with the technology, but slightly disconnected from the harsh reality of budgets and timelines. Still, if you need to rely on this combination you definitely lost some points with VCs that you need to make up for in other areas.

This is a pretty informative deck about pitching investors for seed money by **Steve Schlafman**a VC at RRE.

Raising Seed Capital from Steve Schlafman

Thank you Paola Bonomo.