SlideMagic Blog

Now that I am a CEO of an Internet startup (www.slidemagic.com) my email address is slowly spreading in the databases of app developers, PR people, recruiters, marketing consultants, SEO firms etc. Although not in the same quantities, I start getting the type of pitch emails that venture capitalists, journalists, bloggers must be getting.

Most of these emails actually get through spam and other gmail filters. In some way or another, the recipient will look at them. Especially now that mobile devices enable you to kill dead time with gracing through your email field.

The majority of these emails get totally ignored. First of all because of basic hygiene that has been discussed in thousands of blog posts before: generic subject line, generic “hello there” greetings, spelling mistakes in names, etc.

But there is a bigger thing that turns me of: the way they are written.

• Too generic. The sender has not bothered to check out what my app does, what stage my company is in, what sort of services I might need. Instead, it could have been highly personal and relevant (what features my app lacks, which LinkedIn contacts we have in common, etc.)
• Too complete. The email tries to do a full pitch of the company and its services. As a results things sound bland. You will never land a contract with a cold email. Better is to write something very short, but intriguing. Something that does not cover everything you want to offer me, but makes me hit reply to find out more.
• Specific links to specific information are missing. A portfolio to look at, apps that you designed, not just the root of your web site.

Impatient audiences of senior management or investors often complain (rightfully so) that they have been listening for 10 minutes, 10 slides, and still the main point of the presentation has not been made.

The common reaction to this feedback:

• Shuffle slides around, and drop slides from the back of the presentation all the way upfront. The result: a broken story flow. The sequence of slides in the front does not make sense anymore, and the left over slides in the back don’t connect together.
• Cram a lot of content on the first 3 slides and call them “summary”. The result: your audience never gets to see you beautiful, highly visual slides in the back, as you are fighting your way through the bullet points in the front.

What causes the delay?

• Think about why it takes you so long to get to the point. Does the audience needs all that background? The company mission? The company history?
• Think about what the audience means when they say “getting to the point”? Do they really want the full detail of your solution on the first page, or would simply telling your audience what you are about quickly be enough to calm them down and stop them from guessing?
• Think about whether your existing summary is stuck in the middle: too long to serve as a real teaser for what is about to come, and too short to give the full detail of the pitch.
• Are you taking too much time to present your slides? Uuuh, uuums. Side tangents. Details, exceptions, apologies for rounding errors, footnotes.
• Are you going off script: you put up a slide, but take the story in a different direction (“let me give you some context first”)
• Do you spend too much time on the obvious: explanation of buzzwords (“let me explain what the sharing economy is”, “look at this data about the stellar growth of mobile phone penetration”).
• Are you reading out all the elements of a slide one by one, but because someone else designed the slide for you, they don’t really fit the way you want to tell the story. So after you are done reading, you tell the message the way you wanted it, effectively presenting each slide twice.

I got my hands on a the new Amazon Kindle “Oasis” (affiliate link). It is the 3rd Kindle device I bought. The first one for the sheer benefit of not having to ship physical books across the Atlantic to Israel, the second one after the e-ink, “alway on” screen was implemented, and now the super light Kindle Oasis.

What I like:

• Super light, compact build. About as high as high as an iPhone 6, but wider. The screen size is more or less the same is my old Kindle, the edges just got a lot thinner. It is the perfect aspect ratio for reading.
• The device fits nicely in your hand, with more battery bulk added to one side of the device. Keeping the weight close to your hand makes the device feel lighter. This lever effect makes the iPad feel heavy when held with one hand.
• A fantastic screen. “Retina” crisp. Works in bright daylight, works at night. (The latter apparently without disturbing your sleep patterns)

What I don’t like:

• Poor battery life. Well this is relative, but I got spoiled with my previous Kindle that I could charge every week or so. The protective cover adds an extra battery, but also a lot of weight to the device.
• The touch screen page switching behaviour is sometimes a bit unpredictable.
• The price: almost $300.

Overall a great device and worth the upgrade from my ancient Kindle. If you currently own a Kindle Paperweight though, maybe wait for an upgrade with better battery performance.

A good pitch of an idea provokes feedback of the audience. If people are just sitting there, watching politely, smiling, and walking out of the room, you are unlikely to land an investment.

When you get feedback (praise, criticism, difficult questions), it is important to realise who it is coming from. Do people care about you, want to help you? Do you they have the right background?

1. Your mother: she totally admires everything you do, but in most cases might not have deep knowledge of what it is you are actually doing
2. An industry incumbent who cannot see any change happening having worked in the field for 30 years
3. A (potential) competitor who is jealous
4. A friendly investor who does not understand the field
5. A friendly investor who does understand the field
6. An interested investor who is negotiating with you
7. A friend of a friend of a friend who is an expert in the field but who was arm twisted in listening to you to return a favour but does not really have time for this and/or you
8. Etc.

Pay special attention to people who know what they are talking about, or people that are an example of a type of audience you are going to pitch to a lot (confident, successful investors, that might not fully understand the ins and outs of your market). Group one helps you bullet proof the content, group 2 helps you bullet proof the presentation.

What sort of feedback do you get:

There are 2 categories of people that are trying out my presentation design app SlideMagic for real, and they are encouraging me that I on to something useful.

• Business school / university students. They work in a relatively risk free environment. Risk free from a creative perspective, there is no boss who tells them to stick to the rules. But on the other hand, the audience for their pitches is smart and pretty brutal when it comes to feedback. And finally, this younger generation appreciates good design.
• Former clients who have come to appreciate my presentation design style and now discovered that they can get there 80% of the way without paying for a bespoke project

Art: William Hahn, Going Home, 1878

PowerPoint allows you to draw curves as lines, but it is harder to make fills under a curved line without resorting to actual data charts. Here is what I do: I use rectangular shapes to cut/shave a shape. See below. Notice that it is also possible to fill your custom shapes with images.

Draw a shape

Position your knife

Use the “subtract” function to cut the shape

Horizontal knife

One more cut

Fix the edges with format shape - edit shape - edit points

Add an image if you want

Each investor pitch project is different, each requiring upgrades in specific areas. Here is a list of what I typically encounter. Usually a client did a few right, but needs help in a few others.

• Too PowerPoint: all the standard colours, fonts, etc.
• 1990: clip arty or 2005: cheesy stock images
• Too TED: so minimalist that it is impossible to understand what the company is actually doing
• Missing business case (revenue model, etc)
• Grand opening full of obvious facts that takes forever before turning attention to the company itself
• The company does not explain why what they do is so hard, clever, original
• Bullet point overload (but I see less and less of this)
• Not addressing the elephant in the room, the obvious big question that is screaming out to be answered
• Not enough “meat” to show that there is real science, technology, substance here
• Visual analogies are too complicated to understand
• Excel data dumps straight into PowerPoint
• Too many benefits, as a result the audience perceives: “no benefit”
• Unfocused feature expansion list: “and we will this, and we will do this, and we will do this”
• Too much design: icons, cute fonts, Adobe Illustrator shapes mixed with PowerPoint

We all understand that story telling is a better way to get an idea across than reading out bullet point after bullet point. Still, most presentations happen in a business context. And in business, people do not have the patience a movie audience has (15 versus 90 minutes).

One approach I use to plan a story flow for a business presentation is anticipating the next question of a smart audience. Each pitch, each situation, each industry, each vertical, each country, each type of meeting has their own sequence of questions:

• What is it they actually do?
• Will it work?
• Why is this a big deal?
• Why has this not been done before?
• Can they pull it of?
• Can people game the system?
• Will anyone sign up for this?
• What happens if Google enters the market tomorrow?
• Can they make money?
• Will people pay for this?
• Can they sell it?
• Are they focused enough?
• How financially stable are these guys?
• Do I like these people?
• What is the accent?
• When is lunch?
• Do they have data to prove it?
• Why did no one else invest?
• Isn’t this exactly the same as the idea I heard last week?
• How can a 25 year old make this happen?
• Can it scale?
• Will the government agree to this?
• What if a “Black Swan” event happens?
• Why is she not answering my question?

“Kerning” is tweaking the spacing between characters in a word. Not to be confused with line spacing, tweaking the vertical space between lines.

Line spacing is important in presentation design. When you use very large font sizes, PowerPoint adds too much wide in between lines, you need to trim it.

As an amateur designer of PowerPoint slides for a business presentation, you probably never need to worry about kerning. The one exception is cleaning up the mess that other users and/or templates have created. On the Mac, select all the text on a slide, click the little-used icon shown below, and set things back to “normal”

Cover image from WikiPedia

I got to speak with a high school teacher yesterday and he made an interesting remark about the use of on-screen presentations in the class room. He uses pictures and very simple visual concepts to keep the attention of the teenagers focused. The charts’ main purpose is not to transfer information, they are there to keep people focused and interested.

What a different approach than most of my teachers in the 1980s: copy a page from the course book on an overhead transparency and uncover paragraph after paragraph, slowly. Or, turn your back to the class and re-write the book on the black board.

Image from WikiPedia