SlideMagic Blog

When I meet with a startup for an investor presentation, I am usually the first external “marketing person” they meet with. (Understandable, no investors, no money, no marketing budget). Some CEOs are nervous about the daunting task (and cash expense) of getting all those marketing materials ready as the company expands beyond product development. Sales presentation, investor presentation, one pager, leaflets, website, introduction video, etc. etc. (“Do you do those as well?”)

My advice: take things one step at a time. An investor presentation is a good place to start, since any investor presentation needs to include some sort of customer sales presentation as well. (Investors need to be sold of the product).

The company/product story is often not completely set in early stage startups. So, freezing the spec and commission a lot of money to all kinds of designers might cause problems down the road. A presentation is actually a useful format to play around with visual concepts. Graphical execution might not be the best, but things can look decent enough and are easy to change.

After you feel that the presentation starts to work, you can consider upping the investment in the design of other marketing material. But here, I would do things gradually as well.

When working with video and video producers/designers, make sure you have a version of the footage that does not include text (in a specific font, containing a positioning that could go out of date) and logos (that could be changed later on). Video footage can be useful for a long time.

I went through a big cleanup of my office the other day and encountered many of the gadgets I have reviewed on this blog over the past years. Unfortunately, they did not become regular productivity tools (at least most of them). Wacom tablets, Wacom Inkling, lots of different iPad styli. Now looking back at these. Part of the problem is the hardware, but the other part might just be that free hand drawing is not the most convenient interface to design presentations.

An update on the Apple Pencil. I think the pencil hardware is sorted, but there is still a software issue. My note taking app needs to be open in a meeting all the time, with the screen on, it does not survive a long meeting.

Maybe 2017 will be the solution.

Image by Creative Tools on Flickr.

In the beginning, you know you have your killer slides to get you through the meeting. The more you give the pitch, the more confident you get with delivering your story and the slides actually become less important.

A special case of this is salesforces. When you design a sales deck for a large group of people who will deliver the pitch without you being present, your presentation is actually a sales training deck.

Image via WikiPedia

PowerPoint is used for many things in today’s corporations:

• Quickly write documents for internal use
• Maintain the competitor intelligence database
• A tool to draw the system architecture diagram
• Organize your thoughts, make a work plan
• Brainstorm ideas live in a group
• Logo / design concept prototype
• A UI spec (that’s how I used for SlideMagic)
• Big stand up presentation to outsiders - big audience
• Big stand up presentation to insiders - big audience
• Big stand up presentation to outsiders - conference room
• Big stand up presentation to insiders - conference room
• One-on-one “coffee chat”
• Document for reading for outsiders
• Document for reading for insider

To name a few. We get problems when we confuse the application and the target audience. A project status update on the overhead of the big annual industry conference, pretty pictures without explanations when you want your budget approved by the CEO.

Three ways to show understanding of an industry in 10 minutes:

1. Construct a 90 minute lecture trying to cover everything, and squeeze it into 10 minutes
2. A very detailed deep dive in one aspect of the industry, showing an insight that nobody has ever heard anywhere else
3. Do this deep dive on a random subject that is brought up by your potential investor or client.

1 won’t work, 2 is better, 3 is best

Or maybe: “they understood it”. When you don’t get questions about a certain issue in your presentation does not mean that you should pull that part of the story. It is most likely that the audience understands your point and is ready to move on.

If it works, then there is no reason to spend a lot of time/slides on something. But leaving that part of the story out, creates a deck with only your contentious issues left without the glue that stitches everything together.

Image via WikiPedia

This is an interesting representation from the investor perspective by Jason Lemkin why he does (not) want to fund you. Some are relevant to presentations (my words):

• Integrity: gaming metrics, locker room jokes
• Exit strategy slide shows that you are not committed (not sure all investors will agree)
• Pooh-poohing competition (better to show that you understand them, rather than hiding their existence)
• Looooong industry background sections before getting to the point, the first decision point at minute 5, if you survived that one, the second one comes in at minute 20
• Document formats that are hard to open

Image via WikiPedia

The traditional approach is to hand the designer a blank slide and say “we need a fresh PowerPoint template”. You will get a slide back full of supporting graphics, logos, page numbers which shows that the designer added some value.

Here is the better approach: give an actual slide with content and ask her to improve that, including the template. The likely result is a well-designed slide. Now delete all the content and see what you are left with. It is likely to be an empty page… Here is your new PowerPoint template.

Oh, and the most important part of the template design project is not the template (i.e, the blank page). It is to make sure that the standard colors and fonts are programmed correctly. That’s a programmer’s job, not a designer’s job.

In my presentation design app SlideMagic, things are easier. Upload your logo, use the color picker to select your accent color based on the logo, and you are all set.

Image by john.schultz on Flickr

There is an overlap and there are differences.

Overlap. At the core of both an investor and a sales presentation is some story that said what it is you actually do, and why this is such a great solution that you should buy it. Useful for a customer, but also useful for an investor. The latter will ask: “will someone want to buy this?”, but more importantly: “can this person sell in a convincing way?” This overlapping part of the presentation is the core company story.

Sales presentation only: add things that are specific to the potential client’s problem/situation. Add a censored competitive positioning (don’t bend the truth, but don’t volunteer weaknesses either). Add the administrative details about exact pricing, installation, etc. etc.

Investor presentation only: add a (more) candid competitive positioning, market sizing, profitability, pipeline, team bio, etc.

So, the investor presentation is the broadest in coverage. In terms of number of slides (hours at the computer), each of the above components could be equal in size. In terms of time invested though, the first part, the core sales presentation is the hardest to get right, it is the fundamental story of your company/product.

Bonus, a quick Venn diagram in SlideMagic style (make decent looking simple slides quickly) below. You can clone slides I used in the blog to your own SlideMagic account via this link.

Back at McKinsey, doing recruiting interviews was an integral part of a consultant’s job. I interviewed hundreds of candidates, mostly back at my business school (INSEAD). When interviewers ask a question, they are most of the times not trying to figure out whether you can produce the 100% right answer. Instead you want to check out:

• How a person is thinking and reasoning
• Whether something that is claimed is actually true or not, by forcing the conversation into some sort of depth/details
• What the integrity of the person in question is, is she lying/talking her way out of things or willing to admit that she does not know
• How it is to work with someone.

Potential investors or customer will do the same. If you copy some fancy charts, or put in some buzzwords / hollow statements, a few questions will quickly lay bare your actual understanding of a situation.

“[Approach A] is much better than [Approach B]” “Really, I did not know that?, can you give me a few examples of companies that tried Approach B and failed recently?”

Solution one, don’t put the charts in. Solution two, read up and do your homework and form your own opinion.