SlideMagic Blog

A few things are going on in startup land, especially for consumer facing apps:

• It takes less and less money to launch a product (who could have thought 10 years ago that 1 person could self-finance and launch a PowerPoint alternative)
• Startup ideas and pitches are fragmenting and are everywhere around us. Most ideas are variations on existing concepts that everyone is using. “Uber for gardeners”, got it.
• Business communication gets more efficient. Phone calls, coffee chats, Hangouts: the big, formal standup presentation where everyone patiently and politely let’s you finish your bullet points is on its way out.

What does all this mean for investor pitches?

• Do not feel worried if you can explain what your idea is in just 2 slides. If you are done, there is no need to add padding.
• Since it is so easy to get an app up and running, the actual beta/prototype web site/app is a large part of the product pitch. Does it look polished? Does it work? Do you feel like signing up?
• Related: market size analysis is increasingly replaced with “what % of your user base are willing to pay the $10 per month for this, and how fast you growing?”
• The big, big, big, question is: do users like it. User growth, traction, user behaviour analytics. Numbers, data. All this matters a lot. The qualitative upfront part of the presentation (emotional pictures that show the problem) gets smaller, and the quantitative what is your LTV, CAC, churn, etc. gets bigger. Pitches start to look like consulting decks again.
• Success/failure will be evident in a shorter period of time, so you need to be sure what you are doing with the money you are raising. (You are no biotech startup that raises a lot of money to “continue doing clever R&D”). Know where you spend things on shows that you are mature to investors, but is also protecting you. If you do not have good customer conversion rates, it is a waste of money to raise capital to spend on marketing and attract lots of people at the beginning of the funnel, who will then leave.

These 10 tips by Josh Bernoff to write better are spot on. In presentations, I would take it easy with the sign posts though.

Art: Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939), Weasel with Chaffinch, 1888

Things are changing over at Microsoft: Microsoft interfaces on new apps look great, and it is getting rid of old dogmas, opening up software to a wide range of platforms. At the same time, Apple (while still great) is taking the foot of the gas here and there.

Personally I am still a big Apple fan and will continue using their products. (Although I am one of the unlucky people who bought a Mac Book where the screen is completely peeling of, visit www.staingate.com to sign up for the petition if you suffer from this as well). But it is good to see that Microsoft is trying to compete.

Nicholas Chevallier, Race to the Market, 1880

Millions of web pages and PowerPoint presentations contain images of an empty Board room with plush leather seats. While this room might be the prettiest and most tidy one in your office, the image has appeared so frequently that lots of leather Board seats no longer radiate power.

Image credit: the FAEF Board Room

News media usually go for the next alternative, the name tag at the front door. I think better images are those of the company in action, a truck delivering goods, a plane taking of on the runway, a store interior, an assembly line in action, a nice group photo of employees at work.

You can do better than the empty Board Room

Art: Vincent van Gogh, Bed room in Arles, 1888

I get this feedback from early SlideMagic beta testers. SlideMagic supports one accent colour, one font, and encourages you to work in a strict slide layout grid. For certain presentations, this feedback is valid. I think we will not see any Apple product launch presentations designed in SlideMagic (yet).

For 99% of presentations though, it is actually precisely what I tried to achieve:

• When the software tool you use for presentations is incredibly simple, you spend most of your time worrying about the content rather than searching support web sites how to align the second line of a bullet point paragraph. I want 90% of SlideMagic users to master 100% of its features.
• If all presentations use more or less the same visual concepts to show trade offs, contrasts, sales over time, etc. then people will be able to read and understand them quicker

Today, I would argue that PowerPoint presentations look more similar to each other than the SlideMagic decks: lists of bullet points on a white background using the standard Microsoft Office (olive, blue, red, green) colour scheme.

Below are examples how the same SlideMagic chart would look when used in different companies. You see the impact of consistent use of colours. All SlideMagic charts will be updated instantly after a colour and logo change.

If you want to try SlideMagic for yourself, you can sign up here as a beta user.

Art: Salomon de Bray, The Twins Clara and Aelbert de Bray, 1646

Presentation templates in SlideMagic have 3 big advantages:

1. They are very easy to customise: adding rows, columns, boxes can be done without destroying the slide layout. Colours and fonts are adjusted instantly, so templates look never out of place with the rest of your slides
2. You get them straight from a professional presentation designer
3. New templates and updates get pushed instantly to all SlideMagic users

I want to add more templates.

Let me know what templates, concepts, you need. Put requests in the comments are send them to me at [email protected]. You can even send me PowerPoint slides if you want. If you have not done so, I will strip the slides of company specific information before publishing them in the SlideMagic template library.

Art: Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Sescau photographe, 1896

In investor pitches there are usually 2 types of financial forecasts:

• Short-term: super precise, usually mostly cost
• Long-term: ball park, usually mostly revenue

Why do investors want to see some sort of short-term budget?

• While the long-term revenue outlook of a startup is highly uncertain, the near term cost drain is pretty much set in stone. Investors want to know where her money goes: in development, in an expensive, all-or-nothing/bet-the-company Super Bowl ad?
• Investors want to check the consistency of your story. You say that you are not focused on getting customers right now, so you should not be spending anything on marketing. On the other hand, you plan 25 new features in your product, where are the developers (and their salaries) who are going to make it happen

A short term cost budget does not need to contain 25 lines of Excel, by month. A simple x% of revenues number is a bit too simple though.

Art: Marinus van Reymerswaele, The moneychanger and his wife (1539), Museo del Prado, Madrid

Repeating the whole story of your presentation on the last slide is boring. You want to end with a “boom” and quickly remind people of the most important message in the presentation. I usually do that with repeating a key visual (just one). Using (the cliche) that a picture says more than a 1,000 words, the repeated image brings back the full richness of the discussion you had in one millisecond. Much more efficient than writing a bullet point.

If you have to repeat multiple messages, here is another trick: use small screen shots of slides. At the end, the audience does not need to be able to read the entire slide anymore. The thumbnail is a quick visual reminder of the content. Below an example that I created in SlideMagic.

I have added this slide design to the template file of all slides I created for the blog. You can open it in the SlideMagic app here and use it for your own designs. Just change the images.

Art: The Flute Concert of Sanssouci by Adolph Menzel, 1852, depicts Frederick playing the flute in his music room at Sanssouci. C. P. E. Bach accompanies him on the harpsichord.

The Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger fell through. Fred Wilson makes the case that this is probably a good thing, not so much because of consumer choice, but on the other side of the business: content providers trying to get through to consumers with their offering (Netflix, etc.).

This article in the NYT provides some interesting background on the failed $25m lobbying and pitching effort. Some quotes:

“He was smothering us with attention but he was not answering our questions”

“And I could not help but think that this is a $140 billion company with 130 lobbyists — and they are using all of that to the best of their ability to get us to go along”

1. If there are elephants in the room, huge obvious issues that need to be addressed, you have to deal with them, somehow. Avoiding the issue will not make the issue go away.

2. Beyond a certain point, “slick” is actually working against you, when you try to convince a human. (The same point I made with respect to highly sophisticated videos).

Art: The colossus, Francisco de Goya, 1808–1812

The economics of most Internet startups are sort of the same. You invest CAC (customer acquisition cost per user), you convert the free user to a paying user (conversion rate), and you hope she sticks around long enough (churn rate) to get a decent LTV (customer life time value). With a decent growth rate, you have a good business.

Seasoned venture capitalists are tempted to dive straight into these figures and skip the bit what your business is all about. I would encourage you not to give in. It is important to establish that emotional connection with the problem you are trying to solve, how great your product is.

In the end, they will be investing in a business that consists of people and users, not just a spreadsheet that delivers LTV-CAC.

Art: Jean Honore Fragonard, The Love Letter, 1770.