SlideMagic Blog

The presentation needs to “transplant” your idea in the head of your investors or customers. They need to understand what the idea, and then be excited enough about it to buy or invest.

Paying a professional presentation designer to do your slide deck is not a guarantee to succeed. I see many presentations that might not be top notch, but which look professional enough and are clear enough to convey the idea. In those cases I am honest and say that the startup’s funds might be better spent elsewhere.

Remember: investors might not like you, investors might not like the idea, investors might not like the market segment, investments might not believe that it will work, there are thousands of potential reasons for “no”, and misunderstanding the story and/or the visual quality of the slides is just one of them.

I browsed through my recent client work and saw that the objective of most decks I design is to get interest as an email attachment. This is a significant change from a couple of years ago.

Remember, 90% of my client work is in the field of investor presentations (startups, VC funds who need to raise money themselves, and big corporates reporting to the analyst community).

The big hurdle for many in fund raising is getting through that initial noise and reach the stage of a quick phone call, or even a 30 minute one on one meeting. If this goes well, most clients are less concerned about the big stand up presentation in front of an investment committee.  (Well, after they have gone through my design process they are covered for that stage as well of course).

These send-ahead deck pretty much replace the dense 1-pagers that people used to email. What makes a good introduction presentation that you cannot explain in person?

• A professional look and feel. Comic sans, standard PowerPoint colors, and a list of bullet points with buzzwords on page one signals “oops, these guys are not ready yet”
• Clear explanation what you are actually doing, in what field, market do you operate (most people are surprisingly vague about this
• Some sense of stage of the company, traction (napkin, seed, series A, etc.)
• Then a condensed pitch of why what you are doing is a big deal.

Leave out super sensitive intellectual property information, confidential financials, partner discussions and/or some of the more “boring” slides with factual information about the company and its strategy. This deck is all about getting people excited about your company, it will not land you the investment.

Some funny cartoons here (click the link in the Tweet for more). Bullet point slides and data tables don’t communicate ideas and still take a lot of time to create. Happy and PowerPoint-free Thanksgiving for those who celebrate!

Image via Flickr, martha_chapa95, https://www.flickr.com/photos/56192190@N05/5203091533

Professions tend to have their own language. Academia, doctors, lawyers, politicians. You need to master the language in order to be part of the club. Once you are part of it, you filter the language and extract what it actually means.

Managers in corporations have such a language as well, it is called the presentation. The key messages are hidden in bullet points, consulting frameworks, and buzzwords. Junior managers learn the craft by spending hours creating the deck and iterating them, senior managers know how to read in between the lines and get to the issue that matters quickly (the 2nd part of the proposed budget on page 35).

We got rid of formal letters and replaced them with informal emails and messages. It is time make those presentations more to the point as well.

Part of the solution is more visual slides (imagers, less text). But the most important change is a cultural one: saying what we want to achieve in a short and to the point matter.

It is easy to create a pitch deck for a first-time investment fund that sounds and looks exactly like a pitch deck for a repeat fund. Introduction of the team, industry perspective on investment opportunities, unique deal flow, active involvement with portfolio companies, and the fund terms.

But, in the absence of a hard investment track record, it is very hard to raise that first fund. Seasoned investors are taking an educated risk when investing in you. They see instantly that they are dealing with a new fund. Here are some pointers in your pitch deck that can give them more confidence.

• A good, non-boring description of your experience, maybe mapped out across a timeline together with your partner showing that you have relevant experience, maybe not in the field of making investments, but still useful.
• Highlight the safety nets, partnerships you built, people that sit on your investment committee, and introduce their background as well
• Don’t relay on consulting industry frameworks to show that you know what’s going on in the industry. Instead, know the ins and outs of companies in the market, have a perspective on what fields are interesting to invest in, which not. Know competing / similar funds in the market
• Highlight other situations in your professional experience where you had to take an informed but risky decision, did it, and brought it to a good end

Yes, you admit that you are a first-time investor, but your institutional investor has figured this out already. Better be realistic and show why you deserve a chance to join the ranks of successful investors.

People roaming an exhibition floor spend 2 seconds looking at your small early-stage startup booth. Conference organizers usually create space for a huge logo and a tag line that is not very visible. It would be better to rebalance that.

People don’t yet know your brand or logo, so it won’t help to attract attention (“ooh, let’s check out the guys from [BRAND]”). Your objective is to turn the 2 seconds attention span into 10 seconds, which then hopefully is followed by a visit to the booth.

Below an example in a random Tweet I found. Not the fault of this startup, they just followed the format set by the conference.

Image via WikiPedia

CEOs are banning PowerPoint presentations from meetings to improve company culture:

Bad presentations are bad for company culture. And boring the audience is just one aspect of this. People forget the other ones:

• People waste incredible amounts of time editing footnotes in slides, time that could have been spent much better
• Presentations are used to keep subordinates busy and under pressure by requesting zillions of updates to the slide deck by 9AM
• Company management is now mainly suggested slide edits ("cut it to 5 slides’) in emails that go up and down the corporate hierarchy

Presentation documents have become the language that corporate management uses to agree on ideas, and it is a pretty inefficient one. It is time for a change. I don’t think completely banning visuals in meetings will solve the issue. A better alternative is to ask employees to use a super simple presentation tool to back up their pitch to colleagues and I am working on that.

Most people amass a huge library of PowerPoint and Keynote slides on their computers. File search as a tool to find presentations is collapsing under the load, and searching for a specific slide inside a presentation is impossible. Most people are now using their email program as a document archive (“where is that deck I sent Sally last week?”).

BitLasso’s Reveal is a new program that aims to solve this issue. After installation it builds a database of all your slides and makes them searchable by keywords. The first try is very impressive, you use a specific topic that you still remember from a long time ago, and pop: there are the slides!

Slides are grouped together if they are similar (with yellow highlighting the differences), you can group them by date, by title. It all works brilliantly.

As a graphic design nitpicker, I noticed that fonts are not rendered correctly. But, remember this is a search tool, not a presentation application.

For the average user, this tool works great. For me, a professional presentation designer who has an incredibly large slide library with presentation for many, many, clients there is still a problem. Common business search terms will return so many slides that it is still hard to find the one you need. This is not a problem of the software though, more a result of my profession.

One suggestion could be to allow the search results to be grouped by some sort of directory, or limit the search inside a specific directory, since most users will have a basic level of organization by project on their hard drive to focus the search.

Most business presentations present conclusions. You did a ton of analysis, and now you take people through the data and their implications, often using the same slides the team used to get to those conclusions. “Look, here is what we did!”

Now, take it one step further, and tell what needs to happen next and why pretty much in the same way as you would talk to someone informally at the water cooler. What needs to happen, and why. Make slides that support exactly that, and attach the “look, here is what we did!” pack as appendix to that document.

Image via Add Letters

Here is a story flow that I end up using often for investor pitches of my clients:

• Good idea
  • Once, there was a situation
  • Something changes/changed
  • This creates an opportunity/problem
  • It’s not easy to solve it
  • Enter [company]
  • It’s clever
  • It’s different from the competition and alternatives
• Good business
  • Market: lots of (potential) users
  • Market: lots of dollars
  • Profitable: Unit economics work, company economics work (when company reaches scale)
• Good startup business
  • Product/feature pipeline is doable
  • Sales & marketing strategy is doable
• Good company
  • Team knows what they are doing
  • Traction shows that things are gaining momentum
• Good deal (often not covered in a presentation)
  • Board configuration
  • Deal terms