SlideMagic Blog

Google is full of free investor presentation advice and presentation layouts. The problem with all of these is that they are generic and not specific to your situation. So blindly filling out a presentation template is unlikely going to give you the best pitch.

Here is another way to craft your pitch. Think of an investor you respect, and even better, an investor whose reasoning you sort of understand resulting from conversations and or blog posts. Now, jot down an imaginary conversation that could have taken place if you find yourself next to her in the check in line for a flight. The most important part of the exercise is to anticipate the likely questions are face expressions you are going to encounter: “Really, what is it about?” “Hmm, that is a sort of [x] for [y] right?” “But are any of your users actually sticking around?” “What do people pay today for this?” “But you have no machine learning expert on your team” “Yes, I know that online video consumes a lot of bandwidth, but what does it have to do with you”

 Now take you notes from this conversation and use it to craft the flow of your investor pitch. Then, go back to the standard investor presentation templates and use them as a check list to see whether you haven’t forgotten anything important.

Why is the business school, standard, investor presentation structure not always the right one?

• Investors might already know a lot about a market, a technical vertical segment, so there is no need to do the 101
• Investors might actually know nothing about a particular market, and you will have educate them before getting to the actual pitch
• There are “elephant in the room” questions screaming to be answered first, even if they allow show up on page 25 of your template
• Visual or verbal analogies might require a story sequencing that clashes completely with a standard investor pitch template
• If you have 500 pages and/or 3 hours of material there is no alternative but to structure things orderly. (“Hey, where were we again?”)  In 10 to 20 minutes, you have a bit more creative freedom to shuffle things around
• Standard presentation structures might not work in a conversational pitch style, if you start rattling down your Harvard-approved pitch the investor already gets worried: “Huh oh, we are going to get this one for the next 10 minutes” and you are likely to be interrupted with a question that invites a dialogue.

System architecture charts can be incredibly complex, and I need to include them sales/investor presentation for almost every client that I work with. They serve an important purpose: 1) demonstrate that you know what you are doing on an emotional level, 2) ability to answer detailed technology questions on a factual level.

As I dig into these puzzles, I discover that in most cases the diagram is very complex, but the underlying system architecture is not. Most diagrams are created with some kind of drawing tool. Their main purpose is system specification, make sure that people are designing the right system. They are not meant at all for communication. (In that respect things are similar to Excel: a great tool for analysis, a poor tool for communication).

The solution is to disconnect from the diagramming app and start sketching your system architecture again, purely for the purpose of communication.

• Grid, grid, grid. Line up all the boxes properly, space things out. Keep boxes the same size/shape as much as possible
• Eliminate as many overlapping connectors as you can. Try again, again, again, again, and one more time. Overlap spaghetti is a sign that you have not really understood how to explain your architecture.
• After you eliminated your overlaps, you should be left with a grouping of boxes that is more or less logical. If there is a sequential process, there is a high chance that your boxes line up according to it. If things are related, they are probably located next to each other. In the previous steps, you looked purely for overlapping connectors, now go over your diagram again and think about function.
• Next, use color to group things together. The great thing about color is that it can make a connection between objects which are not necessarily sitting next to each other on the page
• Omit, collapse boxes that are not that important (this would have disastrous consequences if we did this in the system design diagram)
• Think hard about what text, titles to use in the boxes, cut words where you can, use rectangular instead of circular shapes to fit more text if needed. Go for a smaller font size, but don’t fill the entire box with text to make your composition look calmer.

I started importing my blog into Medium a few months ago, but the process is not going smoothly. I keep up with my blog in a “write it and forget it” way, without the elaborate SEO/social media follower strategy, so reformatting and editing the same post on multiple platforms is not the best way to spend my time. I will see how it goes, but might stop the conversion all together. It is best to keep following this site.

New startups are in need of all kinds of marketing collateral: pitch decks for investors and/or potential customers, product brochures, and a web site. I think that in the beginning, people are aiming too high with the web site: super effects, video backgrounds, sparkle, and glitter.

But the experienced investor or corporate purchaser sees through the facade immediately, this is a brand new startup with hardly any customers and 6 months of VC funding left. Instead, you can build a web presence that show yes, that you are young, but that you are serious and know what you are doing.

• There is actually some sort of web page on your URL, not an “under construction”
• Use squarespace, Wix, or another template engine for a modern look and feel, with at least a premium enough version that it does not say “proudly built with Wix” at the bottom.
• Make sure your branding is consistent: accent color (you don’t need a lot of it), and a simple logo (does not have to be a master piece)
• No gmail or hotmail email addresses
• Your LinkedIn profile actually says that you are the CEO of this company, and not a marketing consultant from 2004 to present
• The company has an address that when entered in Google street view does not point to a residential street
• When the site has a “news” section, or a blog, it should contain fresh articles, if not, just don’t put it on.
• The web site should actually describe what the company is doing, without buzzword overload

I opened some old presentations on my hard drive and started thinking about how my work has evolved over the past years. Here are some observations:

• Starting points of presentations (the briefing decks I see) have gotten a lot better. Garr Reynolds, Apple product launches, TED talks, etc. etc., and maybe most importantly a younger post-overhead project generation is joining the workforce, raising the bar in presentation design
• The audience has evolved as well. People know the general drill of a startup pitch, the Internet or a smartphone is not as strange as it was in the early 2000s. People have the courage to cut a bad presentation short.
• Back in 2003, I was probably one of the very presentation designers in the world, now there are thousands.
• Given the above, my work is moving on a bit. While I still do the proper upgrading of the look & feel of a presentation, it is completely not the most important thing I do anymore. Actually, my graphics and visual concepts are getting simpler, and simpler, maybe even regressing to what I did a few years back.
• Orchestrating the flow of a pitch is still important, but as pitches get shorter and shorter, and everyone has pretty much settled on a classical investment pitch are start to focus more and more and the pacing of the story. People skip over important things too quickly, while spending far too much time on the obvious, and finally sometimes they do not even touch on a very fundamental missing step in their arguments.
• My favorite design work are the “puzzles”: diagrams that need to show very complex trade-offs, technology infrastructures, or relationships of multiple factors impacting each other. In the end, these diagrams look very simple, but they can take a relatively long time to construct, burning through endless amount of scrap paper in the process.

See below how you can shape arrows in PowerPoint. Most people don’t really pay attention to the way their arrows look, but it can make a huge difference to the professional look of a chart. This is even more important when you need multiple arrows on a chart, make sure their proportions are all the same.

You can change the shape of an arrow in PowerPoint by dragging the little yellow dots that I have circled in the image.

TechCrunch posted a list of contestants at the latest  Y Combinator demo day, and you can learn from the one-liners that describe the company. A few words capture the essence of a pitch and instantly makes it clear what the company does, and even more importantly, teases you to find out more about a potentially interesting idea.

No buzzwords, filler words, no hype. See how the headlines use concepts that we already know, often brands of established companies. This is a quick memory short cut for a story that would have taken 30 minutes to explain to someone in 1995 who never heard of Palantir.

Voodoo Manufacturing – A robotic 3D printing factory Volt Health – An electrical stimulation medical device Terark – Making databases faster Wright Electric – Boeing for electric airplanes Speak – AI english tutor NanoNets – A machine learning API Scribe – Automating sales development representatives Breaker – Making podcasts a real business Bitrise – Automated build/test/deploy for mobile apps Fibo – Mobile work tracking for construction teams Paragon One – Career coaching from real professionals Tress – A social community for black women’s hairstyles Bicycle AI – Automated AI customer support Vize Software – Self-Serve Palantir Simple Habit – Netflix for meditation Snappr – On-demand pro photographers IQBoxy – Software that replaces human bookkeepers Beek – Book review site for Latin America Bulk MRO – Industrial supplies for India Soomgo – Thumbtack for South Korea Cartcam – Shopping app for the Snapchat generation Peer5 – P2P Serverless CDN Pit.ai – Automatically mining trading strategies SmartAlto – Software suite for commercial real estate XIX.ai – Predictive assistant that anticipates your needs Zestful – Employee activities as a subscription service Arthena – Art investing for everyone Mednet – Stack Overflow for oncologists Penny – A mobile personal finance coach Moneytis – The cheapest way to send money abroad Hogaru – Cleaning for SMBs in Latin America Bulletin – WeWork for retail space Sycamore – Onboarding drivers for on-demand jobs Aella Credit – Consumer and low-income lending platform Tolemi – Software to help cities find distressed properties Niles – Conversational wiki for business Upcall – Outbound calls as a service KidPass – One pass for “amazing activities for kids” Lively – Modern healthcare savings account (HSA) Indigo Fair – Amazon for local retailers Collectly – Stripe for medical debt collection Tetra – Automatic notes for business meetings FloydHub – Heroku for deep learning ACLU – A non-profit you might know

“I know you are busy, but this is really urgent, I we are on a very tight budget: do something really quick, it does not have to be great, pretty, beautiful”

A warning to all freelance designers don’t fall into this trap.:

• Your client says it does not want quality, but will for sure be disappointed when she receives the work. Secretly she hoped that you would not stick to the bargain and put in the extra hours to come up with a decent product
• Your basic, not so good, quick work, will still go out there, it will be passed on, other people will see it, and the poor quality will boomerang back to you.
• You have crossed the “I am a quick fixer for hire” mental threshold. The mindset of the freelancer should always be, how can I be more valuable, and as a result charge more for my work, rather than less. It should be a one-way door, never go back.
• If you accept this short term work,  you might have to drop a potentially interesting client a few days later because of it. Opportunity cost of time.
• Clients who are willing to compromise quality are probably not the best clients to work for.

Another often used argument is “we will do the design, you just focus on the story”. Things go quiet when you actually send over a deck full of boxes and placeholders that is ready to go into the design process.

Presentations go stale over time. Watch your slides. You might not see it, the audience will.

• PowerPoint 2010 fonts, colors
• Out of date logos (of your company, but also customers, competitors, partners)
• Inconsistent formatting between pages
• Analogies to over-used, old, example companies ($1 dollar shave club, MySpace, etc. etc.)
• Growing slides: company history, company events, customer logo overviews, every year another column gets added and the others get squeezed

But what I most often see is that the founder still pitches her deck the same way she got her seed funding (with success). A few years on, the company has moved on, and the investor concerns have moved on. Yes, the technology is still great, but you don’t need to convince anyone that that is the case. But what about that traction with customers?

A lazy post today. Loic Lemeur did all the work with these 18 points great speakers do.