SlideMagic Blog

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.

When an investor asks a question, many pitching entrepreneurs, don’t finish listening to the question, interrupt the investor, say she is completely wrong, and then unload a torrent of words, facts, and slides to squash the issue now and forever. (Israeli entrepreneurs often display this temperament)

Before unleashing, count to 10:

• Is this really a fundamental deal breaker for the investor, or maybe an opening into a conversation about your company? Is she trying to attack, or actually be helpful in a constructive way?
• Does the investor have the credibility to ask the question (i.e., could she actually be right)? Listen carefully what she bases her question on.
• If you don’t know, or if she made a good point, you might be better off acknowledging it. The presentation is a test case about how you are as a person to work with on a day to day basis. Explosive reactions to feedback does not give you points.
• If the investor is wrong, and you have good evidence to show it, answer the question politely, showing people they are ignorant, possibly in front of her colleagues is not very good for your relationship.
• If the question is very fundamental, you are unlikely to win the argument within the 30 minute time frame of a pitch. Better to leave that debate for later.

In all of this the opposite can also happen. A quiet, introvert investor might just ask a quiet question, looking worried, then might ask it again later in the meeting, and maybe again “are you sure”? This could be the tell-tale sign of a deal breaker issue that sounds like a casual conversation. Still, pounding the investor on the head in reply might not be the best solution, but this is one you need to squash somehow, either in the meeting or via follow up.

This quote applies to telephone sales people, but it is relevant to presentations as well.

When a presentation is still fresh, the presenter clings on to her slides which contains the flow of her presentation. Good presenters get away from stage 0 (reading the slides aloud) and can fake spontaneity by really knowing them by heart. The next level up though is feeling so free and immersed in them that you can almost leave them out al together.

A bit like a guitarist, play the song, memorize the scale and improvise, and in the end, just flow with the music.

There are endless types of data charts out there: lines, bars, scatters, pies. Which one to pick depends on the type of data you have, and what message you want to convey. Here is a new handy tool that can make life easier for you: chart chooser.

A box of handy cards that guide you step-by-step through a selection process. Excel templates are an optional add-on that could be useful, some of these diagrams are tricky to recreate.

Many early stage startups that need an investor presentation do not have a proper logo and graphical identity yet. Is this a bottleneck for a presentation?

Not really. I do not believe that you need to put your logo prominently on every page of your presentation. Hence, it is not very important in presentation design. The most important design element for a presentation is color. The color scheme will decide how your slides look.

So, pick a color scheme you think is appropriate for your business. It can be done very quickly. Every investor will forgive you if you decide to change it later. In the early days, you can simply use a text logo without any design to show your project’s name. If you are not sure, a temporary project name can be a better solution than a poorly chosen brand name. That brand you chose late at night while brainstorming with the founding team might work great for you, but could be less optimal for your target audience.

Obviously if you are launching in the market than logo, identity and picking the right color becomes (a lot) more important.