SlideMagic Blog

The company positioning can be ambiguous, especially for startups. Things are constantly moving. The environment is changing. The team is learning. Users give feedback. So, Board documents show options, subtle adjustments (“we are going to be a bit more B2B”).

Investor presentations can contain some of that ambiguity. “Some” shows that you are not holding on to a sinking ship, open to change, constantly re-evaluating. Total indecision will of course show the opposite.

In customer presentations however, things should be crystal clear and sharp. A customer presentation can only have one positioning, one company story. The decision to get to a position can be hard, the execution into a sales presentation is straightforward: pick your story and pitch it without ambiguity. Changing your positioning, means overhauling your customer presentation completely, not adding a few charts.

Image via WikiPedia

In The Netherlands the old Teletext system is still up and running online. Now ported to the web and mobile apps, the 1970s clunky graphics are still there. Its designs fits 2017 actually very well:

• Simple but consistently applied fonts and colors create a recognizable visual identity and make things clutter, distraction free and clear
• Text space limits are really credible, so content writers need to make sure that everything fits in. The result: well-written headlines, and clear paragraphs.
• A 3-digit menu system that is remarkably effective to get to what you want to know quickly.

Today’s presentations and web sites can learn a lot from that old UI.

It takes some time for a startup to get traction with major clients. Putting a logo grid slide in your pitch deck can say a number of things, and a smart investor will figure it out in 2 minutes:

• These major global brands have put our solution on their mission-critical systems
• These are companies you have never heard of, but believe they have all paid $500k for our product and are processing 500m transactions through it
• These 15 major clients are using our product, but nobody is paying for it
• We have done 3 really successful pilots with these local companies and they can testify that our technology is flawless
• My uncle knows someone at this global brand and he has started a dialogue with them about using the product.
• “That small logo with the Hebrew letters down there in the corner? Good question. That is the Israeli military that has deployed our firewall software on all their servers”
• Apple, Google, Facebook, Porsche? Yes, we spotted these domains in incoming traffic to our landing page for our SAAS product.

A logo list on its own is not enough to tell your story.

Now that we are on the subject of logos. It can be tricky to create a nice logo grid where all the images line up correctly. My presentation design app SlideMagic makes doing that very easy. It is not possible, not to line up the logos correctly…

Many of my clients are concerned about confidentiality when we start working for the first time together. Especially after I ask them for the company financials, cap table, and product development timeline, all essential ingredients for an investor presentation.

Some clients require signing an NDA. Unlike VCs, I sign them if they are capped in time, and do not contain non-competes. But many clients, actually don’t bother. Here is why your secrets might be safer with a 1-person freelance organization than a larger company:

• The cost of a data breach is much higher. Even the slightest hint of an ethical issue will put me out of business. For big companies, it is a legal issue that can be dealt with in dollars. But, this is hardly ever going to be an existential issue.
• One person firms are better at controlling information flow than large companies with lots of different departments, with lots of different subcontractors in lots of different locations.
• Good freelancers probably have a 100% full work pipeline, and select work based on the interest or creative challenge rather than a need to fill the empty capacity of a bank of designers waiting for work downstairs. As soon as a prospective client really gets interested (wink, wink) in knowing more about the specifics of the work you did for a competitor, it is a good sign to walk out of the room.
• A free lancer works directly with the client, so the eye-to-eye handshake is a personal contract signed with your consciousness. You are not wondering whether you violate a contract, but whether you are breaking someone’s trust.

Most competitive analyses I see are plots of logos on some sort of 2x2 with the company in question sitting firmly and lonely in the top right corner. You have to think about whether this is the right framework to use though for your specific situation though.

The 2x2 is the sister of the Venn diagram. All other competitors have 1 of 2 things, and you have both, the best of both worlds.

But, maybe in your industry there are 3, or 4 things that matter, not 2. In that case use a simple feature table. Or, maybe it boils down to just 1 thing: a bar chart with cost per hour can do the trick.

If you are struggling to find the right graph, you can try the following. Write down the list of competitors, and jot down in very short words, why they are inferior. Take a new piece of paper and group competitors that are similar together. Try to find common descriptors (not real time, not location-specific etc. etc.). Draw a first table. Re-draw the table with competitor rows (groups) and descriptor columns so that the “Y” and “N” marks form cohesive blocks. Group descriptors together if they are the same. Repeat this process a number of times. Then make the descriptors positive and invert the “Y” and "N"s if you have to.

You can do this on whiteboards, with yellow stickers, but I somehow prefer to blast through a lot of paper while doing this.

The standard slide insertion templates of my presentation app SlideMagic contain a lot of frameworks for competitive analysis: yes, a 2x2 or a 3x3, but also tables and even a Venn-like diagram (a slightly boxy one).

I just added the PowerPoint conversions of the new SlideMagic insert templates to the Google Drive (link here).

A warning though: you get the templates in PowerPoint, but that is not the big deal of SlideMagic, the hard part is to change/adapt these layouts to your specific situation. And doing that in SlideMagic is super easy, and a big pain in PowerPoint.

Image from WikiPedia

Here is the secret to coming up with a pretty good slide layout for any situation:

1. Give up on your ambition to make a highly sophisticated composition, instead treat every slide, every slide as a basic 2 dimensional grid.
2. Identify what the one, (yes one), idea is that your slide should communicate and figure out what the “visual verb” of the point is: I am listing things, comparing things, showing a trend, showcasing things, showing a transition, mapping a process.
3. Count your grid elements: I have 3 things to list (3x1), want to show 5 team members with a photo and a name (5x2), need to forecast across 10 years (10x1), compare 3 options across 5 dimensions (3x5)
4. Decide the emphasis of each grid cell: a text/title box, smaller text, an image, a data column, a data bar, etc.
5. Lay out your grid and rewrite, cut, polish your text until everything fits in nicely. If there are issues with fitting text in cells, go back to counting grid elements (maybe you can combine/split things), or reconsider the emphasis you have chosen.

My presentation app SlideMagic makes the above steps incredibly easy. The slide layouts that are suggested to you when you want to insert a slide probably cover 90% of concepts you will ever need.

Art: Mondriaan, Broadway Boogie Woogie

You had that magical slide sequence a few years ago that you used to pitch your product. But as you got more confident with your story, and more importantly, as you got bored with hearing yourself say the same thing over, and over again, you start cutting things down to your current page that collapses the whole thing in just 1 slide with 3 words that can be presented in 5 seconds.

But your audience is likely to still be at the level you were 3 years ago… What would happen if Disney strips the magic out of their stories and just presents you the generic dry plot line?

Image via WikiPedia

From multiple VCs I have heard this scenario:

Highly confident entrepreneur walks in the conference room, sits casually next to the VC rather opposite the table, leans back relaxed in the chair, rocking back and forth, savoring his coffee, suggests to do a different style of pitch, life is too short for boring pitch decks, let’s just have a more intimate and informal chat about the tech world at large and the entrepreneur’s specific venture in particular, the entrepreneur-investor relationship is all about dialogue, conversation, and exchange of ideas…

“Multiple VCs”, means 2 VCs, and both of them were women. (No, it was not the same entrepreneur).

This approach might be a bit too informal to work. Have your traditional pitch deck ready, and make things less formal if you sense the right dynamic in the meeting.

If you have to say for the 3rd time in a presentation “be patient, we will get to that in slide 42”, it might be time to switch to the topic of page 42, even if you only got to slide 5.

Your persistence gave you points as CEO for not giving up easily, but you also lost some because of lack of flexibility as a person to work with and give feedback to. Or worse, the investor think that you will continue to drive down the planned road even if circumstances have changed and require a change of plan.

Afterwards, think again about the order of your slides, maybe slide 42 needs to come up earlier. Maybe it addresses an “elephant in the room”, big question. For example it is unusual to put the competition analysis on slide 1 of your presentation, but for example, If you are planning to build a website where people can search the internet, you might have to.

Obviously, going of script works only in small settings, switching the flow of a major keynote address in front of 100s of people is a bit harder to do.