SlideMagic Blog

The Internet is full of IT market forecasts with highly precise predictions of product sales 5 years from now. Will citing a piece of research convince an investor? No. A $1b market forecast in 2021 does mean that the investor should open up the check book and invest in your startup with zero sales.

How to use these market forecasts? Here are some thoughts:

• Always approach market sizing from multiple angles. A top down market research estimate is one source. Trying combining it with a bottom up analysis, look at how the IT budget of one company could change and extrapolate that to the entire market.
• While forecasts by market research companies might be highly speculative, their quantification of today’s market is probably reasonably accurate. Established firms have been around for many years, gathered input from many sources, including sanity checks such as adding up the turnover of all the suppliers in an industry. Your company is unlikely to be the size of IBM in 2 years.
• IT as a whole does not grow that fast anymore, single digit % growth every year. What fluctuates are sub segments inside the overall IT spend. When you are sizing your market, think about which IT spend category are you going to cannibalize?
• Market research is a useful source of “boxes” in which a VC can put you. “Where do you sit?” is probably a question you get often. While the numbers might not be 100% correct, market research gives a shared vocabulary about how to think about a market, and whether things are roughly big or small.
• Related to this, while VCs might not believe the point forecasts of market research reports, the junior analyst at the VC firms is likely going to use them as a starting point in due diligence. It is good to be prepared and go through the same process as she will.
• When selecting which market research firm to use as a source, think about not only whether they produce data that exactly matches the category you are in, but also look at the breadth of their overall coverage. A firm that covers a lot of ground will provide a nice broad, consistent definition of the world of IT.

Here are some slide make over suggestions for messy PowerPoint presentations that do not require any changes to content. They fix basic graphical hygiene:

• Make sure all slides use the same slide master template: titles, page numbers, logos (if you want to use them), all sit in the same place
• Find/replace fonts: make sure all fonts in a deck are the same
• Create a frame of guides in the master slide and make sure all slide content fits inside the frame on each slide
• Apply a consistent color scheme to all the slides
• Eliminate italics
• Make sure that characters in the same box, paragraph have the same font size (huge differences are OK, but very small size differences do not look good)
• Un-stretch photos with the wrong aspect ratio
• Align and distribute slide elements where ever you can
• Play with line breaks and font size to avoid orphan words on a second line
• Remove multiple, overlapping “confidential” labels and page numbers from pages
• Draw a shape, set proper colors and fonts, and make it the default shape, delete the shape, repeat for a text box and a line

That was presentation make-over V0.1, the content might be bad, the layouts could be poor, but it will look organized.

If you have been working in my presentation app SlideMagic, you will have noticed that is almost impossible to make the mistakes I am correcting in the above.

Often, presenters get stuck on page 1. The long list of bullet points which are supposed to summarize the story becomes speaker notes to deliver the entire presentation verbally without the visuals.

Well, that is great right? A captivating story standing on its own with out the need for slides. Things are usually not that perfect. Instead of a captivating story, the presenters reads out the summary bullets, adds some “uhms”, hints a bit at the key points but stays at a generic level, saying that the real story will follow. After 15 minutes, the actual presentation starts, which the audience has already heard, more or less. And then, when the presenter reaches the final summary slide, the whole things gets repeated again in 10 minutes.

When presenting live, it is best to consider your first slide a teaser slide, not a summary slide. Hint at what is about to come, but resist the temptation to spend too much time on it. Instead, run the presentation using the visuals.

For presentation documents that are meant for reading a summery page is appropriate (not a teaser page), and in that case I would actually add more text in a smaller font for someone to get the full essence of a story in 1 page, just in case she does not click through to the end.

Production of documents and reports inside corporations is a hugely inefficient process, because of a number of reasons:

• Using the face-to-face meeting format to discuss small text edits
• Do zero preparation for such a meeting, and start reading analyzing the text with the junior analyst in front of you
• Because of this lack of preparation, completely upend the start of the presentation because critical bits are missing, without reading things to the end
• Having too many people involved: lots of captains on the ship giving contradicting input
• Refusal of senior managers to make tiny text edits directly into the text themselves

I remember this from my early days as a junior analyst at McKinsey. Fight 1 hour of traffic to drive to a meeting with a senior client and/or partner. Listen to small talk, get send out to make paper copies, multiple people making edits to slides with pens, make copies again, back into the car, in the office at your desk failing to read the hand writing, going back and forth via fax machines until you get it right. Technology has moved on a bit, but document editing is still pretty much the same today.

When I start to work with a new client there is usually a small adjustment process, especially when we are on different continents. Am I a junior analyst who needs paragraph by paragraph instructions? He is 7 hours ahead, but hey, I am the client and get to set the meetings. Better schedule frequent update calls to make sure he stays motivated to press on.

Back at my days at McKinsey I was taught that every item in a list should start with a an “action verb”: “Agree next steps”, “Build customer list”, “Sell unwanted subsidiary”. I am no longer sticking to this principle:

• In many case you need to invent a verb that just add words and line breaks to a text box without adding meaning. If the viewer will understand it without the verb, it is OK.
• Worse: this search for action verbs is a major cause of consulting speak with repetitive use of similar verbs: highlight, identify, uncover, map, etc. etc.

An investor is heavily influenced by the successes and failures of past deals. There might be no scientific evidence that “you can’t make money in healthcare diagnostics”, “ad tech is dead”, “companies founded in Italy are hard to scale”, “that sounds like IT management, and that is a feature rather than a market” but the investor, with sample size n=1, is a true believer.

In the first few seconds of an interaction with an investor, they will try to put you in a box of something they understand and/or have invested in in the past. Help them do it, and say that you will clarify later why “mobile social network” is not exactly what you are doing.

If the dialogue with the investor continues, pay careful attention to of the cough comments about past experiences where she burnt her fingers on something that sounds similar. These reservations go really deep, an investor won’t trip over the same stone twice. Understand the concern, and really explain why your situation is different. If you don’t know the answer right away, get back to her later after you have collected the facts.

I sit in many meetings where a startup leadership team tries to figure out a company strategy or product positioning. Everyone is talking similar but different things and it is impossible to bring things to a conclusion.

The first step in these situations is actually to establish what the options are. If you don’t know what you are trying to decide about, it is pretty hard to make a decision!

The traditional management theory approach is to draw up some table with the options, and write down what is the difference between them on certain dimensions. This requires some on the spot puzzling to get the column headings of the table right.

Another approach is to try to define the strategy in a simple sentence. Now, when people start writing company strategies in sentences you tend to get woolly, fluffy, statements full of buzzwords. So, the challenge here is to avoid doing that. This is an internal work meeting, not the vision statement on your web site. They key is to catch the essence of the strategy in as little words as possible, including possible uncertainties. For example: “We are trying to acquire as many users as we can with all means (including free product), collect their data, and use/sell that data somehow in the future.”

This allows the team to have a good discussion about the options. The discussion will flow even better if you can find catchy 1-word labels for each of the strategic options.

After the meeting, a volunteer can take all that away, turn it into a proper trade off table and/or word them in the proper way for the next meeting.

If you are not a Photoshop master, here is a crude way to cut out an object out of an image in PowerPoint:

1. Take an image
2. Draw a freeform shape over it
3. Remove the image
4. Fill the shape with the original image
5. Select crop, and then “fill”, then scale up the cropped image until the shape is filled with just the bit that you intended
6. I added the original image back in the background

I watched an opera a few days ago in Tel Aviv, where the singers were performing behind a perforated projection screen, and in front of another regulator projection screen, which created a very interesting stage backdrop. Here is an idea for a presentation set up: put the presenter literally inside the slide.

In the image below, you can see the 2 screens. The battlefield background is a regular projection, the barrels in front are semi transparent. I googled for another demonstration of this stage setup:

Be careful with sending PowerPoint presentations that could have left overs of confidential information hidden inside that you do not want outsiders to see:

• Comments in the speaker notes field at the bottom of the slides (“Let’s don’t tell our investors yet, about the disappointing Q1 results, we will do that in 2 weeks”). When you use an old presentation to “copy-save” it as the master of a new one, comments get copied across as well.
• Regular comments on slides that have not been removed
• Information, comments, analysis, that sits in the Excel engine of data charts, when someone clicks “edit data”, the full Excel sheet opens
• Also, even if you remove the data labels or axes from a data chart, the data still remains visible when hovering over it with a mouse.

It is best to share your presentation as a PDF file, but even then watch out with information that becomes visible when hovering over with your mouse (data points, file names of images, etc.)

Image via WikiPedia