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This video of a TED talk parody was uploaded a couple of months ago and I missed somehow. Yes, it is a parody, but in the between the lines (the content is non-existent) it actually shows how body language, pausing and pacing can give you a better stage presence.
WebSummit was full of them. Apparently, there are 5 PR people for every journalist on earth. Each journalists in the tech world receives about 200 emails, pitches, stories per day. I listened to a panel with PR people and journalists discussing thing with each other. Here are my impressions partly driven by what they said, partly what I read between the lines.
Your product is actually not that interesting to them. Two hundred products per day, lots of copy cats (“Uber for X”). I actually think journalists don’t have time, take the time to understand a technology, and hence don’t find it interesting and/or write about it. It takes me a good 45 minutes to understand a company well, a journalist does not have that time, the reader does not have that time, and most journalists don’t have an engineering background.
Big milestones are actually not that interesting anymore. Everyone raises $100m at a $1b valuation.
Other aspects of “your story” (becomes a buzzword) are more interesting. Did you come from an unusual background, does your company have some sort of social, environmental purpose (primary, or a side effect).
Do you actually need to be in a major Silicon Valley tech publication? If your target customers are in those circles, then yes. Maybe if you need to those “featured in” logos on your web page to strengthen your pitch to SV investors, yes. But otherwise, maybe spend your time and effort somewhere else.
“Social media” is becoming crowded and busy as well. With so many people creating noise, it actually boils down to a product that people want to use and talk about to their friends. Not so much social media, more building a great product.
In one of the panels at WebSummit, a participant made a number of mistakes:
That was 2 minutes (be brief on panels) of a panel full of tech geeks who know this story (know your audience) with a hard to achieve advice: make your startup story as good as the One Dollar Shave Club video (the video, not the product).
When you start to mention a stale case example, and show that you are going to spend time explaining it, the audience knows what will follow in the next 5 minutes and you lost them. (The as an audience arriving at the bottom of a bullet point chart reading before you even finished reading out bullet point one aloud.
If you were not the first YouTube viewer who noticed the One Dollar Shave Club video an hour before you speak, use a more personal, original, case example. It is a great video though…
I set through a panel with partners from incubator/investor Y Combinator today here at WebSummit in Lisbon. The topic was about which advice is useful, which not, partly in the context of fund raising. Startup CEOs get bombarded with advice, while almost all advice sounds credible, not all the people who are given you advice (prompted, or unprompted) know what they are talking about.
As panels go, there was a lot of “noise” but these guys had a few pretty good points. Advice from these type of people might help you:
Keep it in mind when someone critiques or praises your slides.
One client told me the other day that a later-stage investor was interested in investing in his company, and the main interaction was with a relatively junior analyst who kept on asking questions about the numbers in the business plan, rather than probing the quality of the technology.
This can mean 2 things:
Option 2 is probably more likely. Although they keep on asking for numbers, does not mean that the overall story and context is not important.
I use visuals for presentations in 2 ways. One is the obvious use: put visuals on slides (duh). The other one is actually to design the story of the presentation.
Very often, pitches are about why something is better, why existing solutions don’t work, why the market is focussed on yesterday’s problems. I create a diagram for myself to create some sort of map where I can put all the elements, comparisons, and movements of a story. It starts simple, then gets really messy and complicated, then gets simplified again.
With that little piece of paper I go back to the slides of the presentation, and it is highly unlikely that my sketch visual and the visuals in the presentation have any similarity.
Image from WikiPedia
We put in a number of improvements to the user interface of my presentation design app SlideMagic.
Templates, regular decks, duplicating, importing, etc. was all a bit confusing. We made a number of improvements to make the workflow more intuitive.
The account, support, and logout links that used to sit at the bottom left of the screen have been moved up. These buttons caused issues on smaller screens, especially tablets. As a result, SlideMagic is now running pretty well on iPad. I am not a big believer in designing slides on a small screen/tablet, because you need a decent canvas to focus and be creative. But, it can be handy to have the option to make smaller edits on a mobile device and that is now going pretty well with SlideMagic.
Let me know if you have any more feedback on SlideMagic here in the comments or by sending a message to jan at slidemagic dot com.
Another good video by VC Mark Suster about how to speak when invited on a panel:
I would also add that pitch competitions are a form of entertainment. A pitch for such an event is completely different from a pitch to the partner group of a VC.
And most of the time, pitch competitions are far more entertaining than panels. In a pitch competition, the presenter is on the line, sharp. People in panels usually do not prepare and can hide behind the others on stage, making them a lot less interesting to watch.
Some people naturally sound convincing. They have charisma, they find it easy to tell their story, they are confident, they can wing the presentation, they say that they consider themselves good presenters. They sound convincing, but do they convince?
Many of the people who fall in this category are not very good at reading body language. Maybe the buyer or investor on the other side of the table is (slightly) introvert and does not push back that much. Maybe if the same type of question comes back for the third time (after 2x the same sort of answer), the answer was not very clear. Maybe there is a difference between a great meeting with great energy, and a decision to buy/invest.
As a presentation designer, I have built up another type of self confidence: not being ashamed to ask again if something is not clear, even if it is the fifth time. If I don’t get it, the presentation I am going to design will also not get there. Investors and buyers won’t be as patient as presentation designers
Image from WikiPedia
It is hard to forecast the size of a market that exists today in a few years. It is impossible to predict the size of a market for a product that does not even exist. Startups working on new products deal with this issue in every investor presentation.
My suggested solution: come at it from different directions to give a potential investor confidence that there is something there.
In most cases your “made up” numbers which are backed up by a transparent and logical analysis will be more useful than point estimates lifted from out-of-date, out-of-context research reports.
Image from WikiPedia
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