SlideMagic Blog

TED talks have done great things for presentation audiences. They set the standard for minimalist slide design, carefully thought through story lines, and well-rehearsed on stage performances. These are great things for investor presentations as well. However, there are differences.

• TED talks have a broad general audience, investor presentations face highly specialised, knowledgeable audiences that will have heard dozens of similar pitches by similar companies trying to do similar things
• TED talks have big audiences without Q&A, investor presentations are dialogues before a smaller audience
• TED talks are watched live or via online videos (i.e., the presenter is there to explain), investor presentations are often read on a screen without someone present to make the points
• TED talks aim to change the audience behaviour or stun the audience with a new/little known fact/innovation. Investor presentations aim to get you through to the next round of a due diligence process
• TED talks do not require detailed information, audiences of investor presentations might obsess over the value of very specific benchmarks (web site visitor behaviour, clinical research results)

In short, use all the good things that you learned from TED performances, but don’t copy a TED format blindly when pitching investors.

Image by urban_data on Flickr

I just returned from a fantastic holiday in South Africa and will pick up my daily posting schedule soon. Apologies for the radio silence.

Art: Henri Rousseau, The Hungry Lion, 1905.

We have just deployed a new color picker in my presentation design tool SlideMagic. It extracts suggested colors from images. By default, it takes your logo image and offers a menu of accent colors that can be selected with one click.

You can also select any image that is in your SlideMagic image library.

This feature had some especially stubborn and unpredictable bugs. It would work on one machine, not on another. Maybe you can check and let me know if it works (well, especially if it does not) together with your OS/browser combination that you used.

Not a user yet? You can sign up here for SlideMagic.

Apologies for infrequent posting, I am driving through beautiful South Africa at the moment.

Art: Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House in Arles, 1888

Product architectures evolve over time. For you the owner of a company, or the manager of a product category, there is no easier way to structure your story then the structure along which you see the world: the product architecture. Customer issues, competitors, customer segments, it all fits brilliantly together.

That is, it makes sense to you, not necessarily to your audience. Product structures tie your hands and force you to follow a certain story line. Not all products are interesting, not all products are relevant.

Maybe it is time to take a step back from how you organise your internal reports and take a fresh look at how to tell the story of your company.

Art: Paul Signac, Railway Station near Bois Colombes, 1885

I will be spending more time with my family, and less time at the computer over the coming weeks, so blog posting will be irregular and unpredictable. Going straight against the rules of good social media behaviour, I do not build up an article bank and auto post new posts at the optimal time for maximum impressions. Most of my posts are spontaneous and written “live”. I hope all of you have a good summer.

Art: Caspar David Friedrich, The Summer, 1807

You hear it from a presentation designer: busy charts can be useful. Take this one from the Economist for example. It shows a ranking of country populations over time.

The chart contains a number of dimensions:

• A ranking
• Three different moments in time
• Information about the continent of the country (colour)
• A rough indication of the population number (the length of the bar)

It is especially interesting to see how the designer integrated the labels of the bar chart in the bars itself. Connecting lines guide the eye over the three time periods.

A number of conclusion jump out:

• India / China are still going to be the most populous, they just get a lot bigger
• Europe is vanishing, Africa is coming
• Especially in 2050, there are a number of countries in the top 10 that you would not have expected there, based on the attention they are getting.

A chart like this is OK to present in a document that is meant for reading/pondering, on a big screen in front of a live audience it is a bit hard to digest. In the latter scenario, I would present the chart in full, apologise for the data complexity and then start covering up specific parts of the chart so that it supports just one message. You can have 3-4 instance of the same chart.

Photo credit: US Army, 2008 Bejing Olympics opening ceremony

My presentation design app SlideMagic is slowly making progress. I filed a full patent application for the design UI concept with the US patent office and added new features plus many bug fixes:

• The UI colour of the app now changes to black if you pick an accent colour that is close to SlideMagic blue
• CTRL clicking multiple cells enable you to copy paste formatting quickly
• PDF exports now have page numbers

We are working to make the user interface for the stack chart the same as the bar/column one, add a colour picker that allows you to extract the accent colour from your logo image and enable drawing arrows. With these updates we can start something that we have not done before: marketing the app to a larger audience.

Art: Arthur Streeton, The Golden Summer, 1889

In many investor presentations, startups want to educate the audience first on a big trend that is happening. But, especially in consumer/internet, people catch up really quickly and you will loose the audience attention and your credibility of you spend time and slides on explaining things that everyone understands.

Some examples I can remember (some of them from my time at McKinsey):

• Home pages
• Sticky eye balls
• Portals
• Market places
• Social networks
• Social media
• Viral videos
• Location-based services
• Online video and the growth of bandwidth
• Sharing economy

Smart VCs read the same blogs as you.

Art: Student at his desk, Pieter Codde, 1630

Your company changes rapidly, your pitch stays the same. I meet many company CEOs that started their company years ago, often at some startup pitch event. The story opening then was about them, in the absence of a real company. Years later, that same intro can often still be found in the presentation, just with an update of the sales and employee numbers.

Your pitch presentation should be one step ahead of your company, not one step behind.

Art: Lautrec, Woman at her toilette, 1889

If you are following this blog through facebook, there is a big change that you will have missed many posts. Since I am investing my funds in SlideMagic features and not yet in marketing, I cannot afford to buy facebook ads. The best way to follow the blog is via a good old RSS or email subscription. You can add yourself to the list here: subscribe.

That email list is purely for blog updates, only people who opted in for SlideMagic product updates after registering for the app might get the occasional product update email.

Art: Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin, 1889