SlideMagic Blog

A quick post written on my iPad while enjoying my vacation here in beautiful Vietnam. I make a lot of Instagram snaps and here is the way I edit photos in the application.

I do not use the pre-installed filters, they are random permutations of image adjustments that distort my photo too much. Instead I go in edit mode.

The most important adjustment to any image is its composition: use zoom in/out, move left right, make sure the horizon is straight with the left most edit function. Then, on to brightness and contrast. Move the sliders and see whether your image improves or not. Next, highlights and shadows. That’s it.

You see the functions I don’t touch: saturation, color overlays, structure, blur, etc. etc.

I have been touring the city of Rome for a few days with my son which was great fun. It is amazing to see how tourists gather around sights that guides and guide book say are famous or beautiful. I snapped the double helix Bramante staircase in the Vatican museum (picture below), my guide was surprised I wanted to see it and he had to look for it. You can see on the picture that not many other people were interested.

Each pitch has a weak spot to overcome. How to deal with it in your presentation?

• You can ignore it, sweep it under the carpet. You will have had a very pleasant meeting, but you are unlikely to land the deal
• You can mention it, and support a very shallow case why it is not an issue. (Vague analyst quote)
• Overcompensating, give 15 different possible analysis that triangulate to the most likely market size number. This just might scare your audience. If 50% of you time/charts are about this issue, this must really be a big deal.

Better: admit the issue is there (you scored some realism points in the process). Give an honest defence, but don’t burry the audience in analysis (yet). Wait with that for the 2nd meeting which might have that issue as its sole agenda point.

If you use colours correctly, there is actually no need to put your corporate logo very prominently on each page to remind the audience what company they are listening to. Colours will give the page the recognisable look & feel instantly.

Make sure you use the correct colours instead of PowerPoint’s default colour scheme. Your marketing department should have the brand guidelines with RGB codes, and if not, you can “steal” them from a logo image using a colour picker. Try saving them as a template in PowerPoint so you don’t have to go through this exercise for every presentation you start.

You actually do not need many colours for a page to look great. (My presentation design app SlideMagic only allows you to use one). It is important to think about the relative importance of colours. Which colours can you use often, or for large surfaces, and which ones are meant as accent colour only.

Throughout the presentation, try to use the same colour for the same concept. Everything to do with competitor A is always green. The results for the drug are blue, the control group is orange.

Colour can be a powerful tool to group things together on a slide. Especially if objects are far away from each other, using colour is a much better tool than trying to draw connecting lines.

Watch out with the colour red in financial results. Even a huge profit will look like a massive loss when set in bright red.

A light colour is a much better way to give a box contrast than drawing a dark line around it. I hardly ever use lines around shapes.

Like every year, I will be spending less time at the computer and more time with my family over the summer. Blog posts will be less frequent. I am publishing all my posts almost instantly and don’t use a large buffer of content (going against good social media practice). I hope all of you are having a good summer break.

Client 1:

• I want you to make it look great, like Steve Job’s slides
• Can I buy 15 slides from you, maybe 20?
• How many hours would 15 slides take you?
• I am actually a pretty good presenter, if I may say so. We just need the final 5% of extra punch.
• Can you already include 3 slides in your project proposal?
• I will put you in touch with Harry from corporate communications, he will be your main contact point throughout the project

Client 2:

Every time I pitch my company gets confused with this other technology. On the surface, they have a point, but we need to dive really deep into science to kill the issue, in 10 minutes. Can you help, I really need it.

Image from WikiPedia

I add them when they mean something. It is important to know whether the data is about 2015 or 2016 for example. On the other hand “description”, “item”, “option”, “date”, “comment”, “scenario” etc. are not always necessary. See if you can do without them

Below is a professional print ad for Audi, trying to convince us that its heritage of cars is still present in today’s models.

The concept is a very simple one. The way it is visualised is highly complex. To pull off something like the above requires a significant investment in a designer who knows what she is doing. Any attempt to DIY it will make your slide look amateurish.

But if you are not a global car brand with a million dollar advertising budget, you can still get that visual concept across.

• A simple time line of cars
• Overlapping circles with car images
• Shapes around the current car with images of vintage cars

You can relax the ambition level of the type of visualisation you want to use. You cannot compromise on the professionalism of your slide.

Image from WikiPedia

We deployed a new version of my presentation app SlideMagic that eliminated the TEMPLATES menus. It makes things even simpler. Templates are now more integrated in the workflow

• When you click INSERT SLIDE HERE, you get presented with a number of pre-designed layouts in addition to the 3x3 blank grid.
• In your file browser (the DECKS menu), you have access to a number of featured presentations at the top of the page. These are example presentations designed by me that you can duplicate.
• In the STORY mode, you can import individual slides or entire presentations (including featured presentations) into your own presentations

There are a few levels you can go through as a startup with a VC:

1. Basic fit. “Sorry, your mobile gaming app is not really a good fit with our biotech focus”
2. Does the idea make some sort of sense. If the VC thinks not, you are likely to get very generic feedback from the VC, “too early for us”. There are simply too many things wrong with it that the VC does not even get started to get into it.
3. No obvious hygiene issues. Difficult cap table. Unfriendly co-investors. Questionable IP. Lots and lots of follow-on investment required. VCs will usually give straight feedback, unless the issue is for example a really toxic CEO they don’t like, at which point they might say “too early for us”.
4. Then there are the real, gentle difficult questions. Is there really a market for this? Will the regulator agree? The VC really wants the answer to these to be “yes”, but needs backup to convince her partners.

Once you have reached stage 4, the VC will tell you what the issue is. And this is the main issue that needs to be cleared. All the other slides in your presentation have been bought into already. You can give a great presentation, but if you did not manage to convince the investor of the Big Question, then you are not going to land the investment. Trying to hide the elephant in the room is not an option.

The interests of the entrepreneur and the investor are aligned. You want the answer to be “yes”. A good VC might even hand over data sources, give access to people to talk to, to help you make the point. Hopefully it is the start of a long cooperation together.