SlideMagic Blog

It is impossible to predict the financials of a business that does not exist yet correctly. And therefore, every financial prediction you see in a startup pitch is made up. Is there any point in doing it? I think you should.

Numbers are a powerful way to check your story for consistency. You cannot sell to more than 6b people on earth, if you are tripling an existing market, are all constraints you should think about. If takes more variable cost to make something than the price you charge, something is wrong. If you want to sell to 10 large Fortune 500 customers, but you only have one sales person in the office, something might not be right. If you plan to hire 300 people next year, that means 1 a day, how are you doing so far?

The key is to translate top level numbers to things you can touch. Sales are customers x products per customer x a price they pay for it. Sales costs are sales people. Etc. etc.

People are not be convinced by the $100m sales in year 5 because your spreadsheet says so. They will believe that you are someone who know what she is doing when the logic behind the $100m stacks up.

Art: Victor Dubreuil, Money to Burn, 1893

Usually big meetings to collect input on a presentation draft are an inefficient use of time. Conversations get side tracked, people make ambiguous comments, introverts who might have intelligent points to add do not speak up (and vice versa). For smaller comments, it is best to have them send to you by email.

There is one exception though: when the overall way to pitch the story is not clear, you have to discuss it with everybody present. Otherwise you end up going back and forth in numerous iterations with a fundamental re-write of the whole pitch. When you do run this kind of meeting, try to keep it focussed on that subject: the overall approach to the story, and not editing sentences and headlines on individual slides.

CEOs are used to doing the company’s product sales pitch. When they look for investors or acquirers for their company, it is temping to just press play and do that same sales pitch again. But they can be very different stories.

An investor needs to hear the sales pitch. It makes her believe that the company makes products that people want to buy. Also, it shows that the company CEO is actually good at selling (or not). But investors needs more: strategy, financials, margins, funding requirements, and a more explicit comparison versus the competition than you would put in the sales deck.

Potential acquirers might not be interested at all in the sales pitch. Maybe they are considering to buy the company for a very specific asset they need. (Technology, people, distribution). Acquirers need a very specific, tailored presentation. To make it, you need to put yourself in their shoes and resist the temptation to hit “play” and run the sales pitch.

Image from WikiPedia

You know how to give that perfect sales presentation, but do you sales reps in the field as well? Probably not. One way to get them to say the right things is write the messages down in bullet points that can be read of the screen. But that does not create the most engaging presentation for your potential customers.

A better approach might be to record yourself delivering the presentation on video and share that with people in the field.

Clients say they get this feedback after giving a pitch. The initial reaction to this would be:

• Cut slides from the deck
• Take the specifics out of your text, make it shorter and more high level
• Combine multiple slides into one

The danger of this is that you end up with a few slides of highly generic and dense bullet points.  Remember:

• Slide count does not equal time spent presenting them
• Smacking someone with the solution in their face instantly takes away the opportunity to lead them by the hand in an interesting story that covers the problem you are trying to solve.
• The best way to sell the solution is to sell the problem

Here is what I do:

• Create a super short intro slide that explains the audience what you solve and what you do. So they can stop guessing about the point you are trying to get to.
• Now, lead people through a sequence of visual slides that highlight the problem, slowing down sufficiently to make sure that the audience “feels” the issue. “Production cost is too high” is too generic. Why is it so expensive, and why could no one do it cheaper until today?
• Then, present your solution and use the framework of the problem you set up in the previous section to mirror your product against markets that are out there in the market today

Image by David Felstead on Flickr

I stumbled across yet another stock photo site that tries to offer “real” rather than cheesy, stages stock photos: Twenty Twenty (www.twenty20.com)

What I like: good images, big library, useful “collections”. Pricing is relatively steep for the casual user (starting at $20 per image, or a $225 monthly subscription for 25 images compared to some of the free stock image sites that are popping up everywhere. Still, only marginally more than the big brand stock photo sites.

My prediction: iStock and shutterstock will add a “non-cheesy” filter option to their image sites soon.

In the latest PowerPoint 2016 software update, Microsoft started to fix one of the last remaining issues in a great product: customisation of the top tool bar. Here is a screen shot of what is new:

Things are limited to just these functions though. In PowerPoint 2011 it was possible to add any function you want to the top bar. File, save, and definitely print, are not the actions a PowerPoint user needs to access all the time. What I would like to see are buttons to align and distribute objects, and move things to the front and the back. Here is my toolbar from PowerPoint 2011:

Image from WikiPedia

Selecting profile pictures for a presentation or web site is always tricky. My advise is to take a huge amount of photos to have as many options as possible to select the best one.

The first and most obvious selection layer are obvious mistakes. Closed eyes, the tie not sitting straight, basic face expressions.

The second layer is more tricky. If you look carefully at a portrait image, it is usually possible to guess the sort of mood the subject was in. The face can be smiling, the eyes not. The person can look embarrassed, amused, shy, uncomfortable, curious… Pick the one that suits best.

Think about this when your picture is being taken. Look at the lens of the camera, the way you would want to look at a potential investor or client standing in front of you. Professional actors can do this for every possible mood they want to project. For you, it is enough to do what comes naturally to you.

This debate on the Fred Wilson blog whether you should look at Twitter in terms of monthly active users who log in, or (the much larger number of) people who view/get exposed to tweets is an important lesson in investor presentation design: sometimes you need to educate your audience how to think about you.

Investors like benchmarks that they can compare quickly across stocks, like features of car: EPS, CAC, churn, MAU, eye balls, beta, EV/EBITDA. If your company does not fit the traditional pattern you need to make sure your audience understands it.

Image from WikiPedia

Categorisation is a key skill for presentation designers. Raw material usually consists of lists of bullet points: some are detailed, some are generic, some are important, others not, some overlap, sometimes lists are not complete.

Moving around these points, grouping, categorising them is an important part in the design process. Next is the decision what issues to tackle on what slides. Where can you condense, where do you need to break things up over multiple visuals.

Image from WikiPedia