SlideMagic Blog

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.

It is impossible to make a correct 5 year business forecast in an investor pitch. But your financial projection is not really a forecast, a prediction of the future, it is a picture made out of numbers. “If our company will be successful, this is what it could look like”.

Mistake number one is to make the projection ultra precise with 5 digits after the comma. It is just a guess, so a year 5 revenue number of $99,234,318 is not more credible than ~$100m.

But oversimplifying is not right either. The fact that you are for sure going to be wrong does not mean that you simply take 1% of a big market number to get to the year 5 scenario.

The trick is to make the words/visuals in your presentation consistent with your financial model. You are going to sell to millions of individual customers, drive the model that way. You rely on 5 big telco operators, put it in. SAAS company with recurring revenues? Model it. One-off perpetual licenses, use it as the basis of your model.

Teaching investors how the business works is more important than getting the point estimate right.

Wide 16:9 aspect ratios are great for movies as we can follow the car chase across the full width of the screen. For slide design however, they cause problem.

• Looooong titles across the screen are hard to read as the eye needs to move over a long distance
• A stretched rectangular design canvas limits the amount of compositions you can create.

Maybe it is time to experiment with an unconventional slide layout, where we put the slide title on the side of the design canvas.

In my presentation design app SlideMagic, I took a different approach. The app sticks to 4:3 slide aspect ratios, with a title in the traditional top position, but the user has the option to add a slide out panel on the right with a verbal explanation of the slide for those cases where the presenter cannot be there to explain an abstract visual.

Image from WikiPedia

It can be hard to figure what to talk about when you are invited to speak at a professional event as an entrepreneur, an investor, a designer, a CEO.

One option is to prepare a business school-grade lecture about your profession. Organised, structured, all the key points laid out, with informative slides that will be photographed by hungry aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, designers, and CEOs. But in the world of Google and Amazon, there are probably hundreds of “how to’s” for these professions available at the click of a mouse.

The other option is to make it more personal:

• Case examples
• Anecdotes
• Stories

Yes, you might not hit all the points of investing 101, but the audience will learn something they cannot learn anywhere else, will remember more, and have a better time.

On stage, you do not present slides that layout your weaknesses in the best possible visual way. On the other hand, when preparing for your presentation, (or briefing your presentation designer), it does not make sense to brush every weakness away.

I have clients who respond to every possible probe with: “of course not”,  “and this”, “and that”, “and then there is this data”, “look at this customer quote”. And still, there must be a reason why the company hardly has any revenue.

A better approach is to recognise the weaknesses, lay them out openly on the table, and try to figure out a way to address them.

Image from WikiPedia

It is that time of the year. Here are some things kids do, and you will recognise them in grown-up presentations as well:

• “Press play”, rattle down the lines to show that you can memorise things. You speak slower, softer when your memory needs to work harder. Eyes up to locate that next phrase.
• Blank stare. You can’t see the audience because of the stage lights, so you are not really looking at them.
• No connection to the substance. You simply say the words without feeling their meaning.
• “Bye”. The moment you spoke the last word, you turn around and walk off stage

Art: The Country School, Winslow Homer, 1871

Doctors know what causes a certain disease. Investors know that hardware margins are small. Social media experts are aware of the huge install base of Pokemon Go. Cable operators know that an onsite visit to a customer costs a fortune. Even this presentation designer has argued many times not to preach to the converted, it is better to spend time and slides on issues that are less clear cut or controversial.

I still believe this is true, but I would not go as far as completely eliminating the obvious point from your presentation. This will break the flow of your story. Also you miss out on the opportunity of using the same visual concept for both presenting the (obvious) problem and your (not so obvious) solution.

A place holder slide with a simple image or statistic is enough to remind the audience of the obvious in 20 seconds.

Image from WikiPedia