SlideMagic Blog

“Big data” is fashionable right now and many startup pitches emphasise how if an investor wants to put dollars in big data, this company is the best place to do it. Visualisations look similar: a big spaghetti of lines enters a box and out comes a super insight. The traditional IT-way of visualising the world: everything fits in an architecture diagram.

The problem: all these decks look and sound the same.

Architecture diagrams that describe the technology in a top down view are not always the best tools to pitch business ideas. The other approach is bottom up, story, and case example driven. Take one specific insight, and work your way through the system and show how it was produced. Super detailed, super specific, and super real.

Once the audience is convinced that this one microscopic case example works/is brilliant, they will have no problem believing that it works for the other 5 billion possible use cases. And in the process, they are convinced that you did not just slap the label “big data” on your pitch because it is the latest fashion.

Art: Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950, image by Matthew Mendoza

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The more I think about it, I can see three different types of presentations:

1. Stage show
2. Cold call
3. Decision document

The stage show

A live, stand up presentation where you introduce an audience to a new idea for the first time

• Big, stage-setting images (a place, a product, a person)
• Highly simplified data charts with just one, really one, message
• Place holder slides (either empty or with a few words)

Note the charts that are absent in this overview:  generic bullet point lists (you knew that already), but also pointless images with visual concepts that can be explained better verbally (no need for the squished tomato to stay that things are tough). Big agenda slides and presentation structure slides might put your audience to sleep early on. If the audience has to be reminded via tracker pages where they are in the story all the time, your story is probably not clear enough.

Cold call

Usually an email attachment or a link to a web site that needs to grab the attention of the recipient who is not neccessarily interested in your idea. The slides will typically be the same as the ones that are used for a stage show, but with a crucial modification: there needs to be a clearly written explanation because you are not present to tell the story behind the slides.

You need to encourage the next page down click, so including big, dense, boring, text slides early on in your document (“we need to say everything on the first 3 pages!”) is likely to encourage your audience to abandon ship early.

I have spent a lot of time over the past day redirecting URLs, mapping deep links, moving Disqus comments, rerouting RSS feeds. I noticed that some very old posts (going back to 2008) still get a lot of traffic, and most of them are about PowerPoint tricks, rather than philosophical posts about the future of pitching ideas in business.

Here are some popular links:

• How to create a McKinsey-style waterfall chart
• How to align bullet points in PowerPoint
• How to create semi-transparent text fills in PowerPoint
• How to put text in a circle in PowerPoint

P.S. In case you wonder about the 4:05 background image, it was taken from the 24-hour movie “The Clock” by Christian Marclay.

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In management, being detail-oriented is not the behaviour that is considered good. Detail-oriented people get lost in tangents, loose track of the big picture, cannot focus to make decisions. Saying that you are not afraid of detail in a job interview will cost you points.

I think it all depends. Yes, staying stuck in unimportant tangents is not helpful, but when it comes to design, it is all about the detail.

You see this now best in mobile application user interface design. The screen is so small that you need to worry about every button or item you put in front of the user. I personally went through this experience when designing SlideMagic.

But slide design is the same. It is actually helpful to think of your slide as a visual on the screen of a mobile phone. This is sort of the perspective of an audience member who sits in the back row. Everything you put on the slide, everything, should be thought through:

• What words to use in the text box, can you cut more without losing the meaning, do you need to add more because it is too vague?
• The rounding of the data
• The order of the bars in the bar chart
• The order of the columns and rows in a table
• Are there duplicate messages? Does a text box say the same thing as the title?
• Do we need icons, or shall we call customers, well, customers?

All the detail will add up to a great slide that gives the big picture.

The answer: yes, I think investors love to double-click an attachment, but they should not be doing it because they gave up on reading the uninspiring cover letter.

Many cold investor emails make a couple of mistakes:

1. Non-descriptive subject line
2. A cover letter in the body text that is far to long, full of buzzwords, and vague about what next step you actually want
3. As an attachment, the full investor presentation, or maybe even the full business plan

Remember what your objective of a cold investor email is: not landing the investment, but creating the opening for the next interaction (probably a phone call). So:

1. Use the space you have in the subject line to make sure your email gets opened ([x] suggested I contact you
2. Write a very short and to the point “cover letter” (a few sentences) in which you explain what you and hint at why it is a great business opportunity. Ask what you want to achieve (a phone call?)
3. Attach a few highly visual slides that focus on what would normally be the opening of your full investor presentation: a rough description what you do, a reminder of the pain you are trying to solve, and the brilliant solution.

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Over the past years I have changed my brand and blog look and feel many times over. Axiom One was the legal name for the management consulting firm I set up (found it by browsing a dictionary, hence the letter “A”, I liked the meaning of axiom, which is a mathematical foundation that cannot be proven but a required building block to build entire theories about the universe.

Then came the blog with “Slides that stick”, and moving to “sticky slides”, designing slides that would not instantly be forgotten but stick in the mind of the audience. Slowly I focussed less on my strategy consulting business (I would always be a low cost alternative to a larger firm), and started building a reputation in business presentation design, an area where I could aspire to be one of the best in the world.

Idea Transplant was a name that covered my work (doing serious, often highly confidential presentations) better than “sticky” which has some negative connotations. The honey was replaced by artwork (I love the Dutch masters and the impressionists). Idea Transplant will continue to be the brand for my bespoke presentation design service offering.

Idea Transplant is not the right name for my business presentation design app which I named SlideMagic. It is a functional name that people can remember, recreate when they hear/read it. I am not totally convinced that it is the best name for the concept but I focus all my investment in building the product right now and save splurging on marketing later (SlideMagic is 100% self-funded at the moment).

Being an introvert and being afraid of public speaking are 2 different things.

Introverts find it hard to engage in small talk, introverts think before they speak, introverts do not enjoy loud crowds, let alone trying to make yourself heard in them.

But, introverts can be great public speakers. On stage, there is no small talk, but the real substance of your presentation. People are quiet and listening to you. The perfect spot for an introvert to shine.

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When designing a table there is always the question: which dimension to put in rows, and which in columns. Personally, I do what looks best, without applying any specific rules.

• If one dimension has labels that are very long, I prefer to put them in rows
• If one dimension has lots of data points, I tend to put them in rows (16:9 screens give more flexibility for wide designs though)
• Years usually go in columns
• Big options (1, 2, or 3) usually go in columns
• Ranking different values usually is better vertically, it is easier to compare a column of numbers than have your eyes move across a row of numbers.

Art: Lyubov Popova, Air, Man, Space, 1912

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When I was a still a junior consultant at McKinsey, one of the senior partners on a team I was working on said that most consulting projects really generate only one truly original new idea/insight. The rest of the hard work is not really that original (**1% inspiration, 99% perspiration**as Thomas Edison put it)). Still, that one insight usually drives the entire recommendation.

At McKinsey, these truly new ideas were often the result of a novel way of combining facts/data sources for the first time and/or being able to quantify/compare things that nobody thought could be quantified.

Looking back at presentations and pitches I have worked on, the on truly new idea concept probably holds. Use it in your presentation design. Facts, and logic flows that everyone is already used to/knows are not interesting. It might be better to go quickly to that unexplored territory that you discovered.

Many people think that the wide screen 16:9 format looks modern for presentations, a slide fills the entire LCD screen, rather than being framed by 2 black bars or worse: stretched/distorted while you cannot find the screen remote in the conference room.

There is a problem though. Widescreen was designed with movies in mind. For text it is a disaster. Even at a decent font size, there are too many words on a single line, it is hard to follow for the eye.

Solutions:

1. Even bigger fonts
2. Rather than list things vertically, try putting them in boxes that are horizontally spaced out
3. Stick to 4:3 and find that sticky, dusty, old, remote control in the conference room (look for the ASP button)