SlideMagic Blog

In some cases, an investor might take a meeting or call with zero chance of investing. The investor liked you, the investor is returning a favor to a friend….

The opening sentence of the meeting is likely just that: ‘Zero percent chance that I will invest” followed by a pretty good reason “You are a medical device company, and I only invest in drugs”.

After such an opening, some startups might still try. The result: still no investment, and an investor who is slightly annoyed and cuts the meeting short.

It is better to change objective, and see where this person could actually be helpful.

Celebrity investors often joke that if your pitch cannot fit into a napkin, the pitch must be bad. This is feedback from a super famous investor, who receives dozens of pitches each day, gets pitched everywhere she goes. Yes, if you happen to bump into this investor in the corridor, launch into a 30 minute pitch and get cut off after 45 seconds, you are probably not good at adjusting the pitch to the environment you are in.

Each presentation setting is different. If you meet the celebrity investor’s team in a follow up meeting, and you give a super high level, superficial pitch that is over in 1 minute, you will not have scored many points to get you to meeting 3….

SlideMagic Pro (including PowerPoint and PDF conversions) will be available free for students! I have just updated the web site and its pricing page. To apply, create a free account, verify your email, and visit www.slidemagic.com/web/student. At the moment, application processing is partly manual, but in a week from now, the automated system will go live, where students from certain countries can directly log in to the web site of their academic institutions, after which SlideMagic Pro gets turned on instantly. Watch this space.

In big conferences you see a lot of presentations, and meet a lot of people, and it can be hard to be remembered after a quick corridor chat. For each conversation try to remember something unusual or memorable that happened. “I was the one that pointed you to a local vintage guitar shop”.

V37 of SlideMagic had an issue on Windows: closing the last window with the top right ‘X’ did not completely close the app process and as a result, SlideMagic would not reopen again. This issue has been patched in V39 which should automatically install.

You can force an installation in 2 ways

1. Reboot your machine to close V37. Run SlideMagic V37, wait for 5 seconds until the ‘update available’ notification appears. Close SlideMagic V37 via the ‘Exit’ command in the file dropdown manu. Restart SlideMagic which should now start as V39.
2. Or download and install the latest version from slidemagic.com

This issue does not apply to Mac users.

The blog post updates are not going well after the Google Feedreader shutdown. Images don’t get copied correctly, etc. I am trying to get the blog to run on my own servers, with my own email update service. This will also allow me to check and fix all broken links over the years. The challenge will be the 10 years back catalogue with all the image files. Let’s see how it goes.

Writing emails to busy people is hard. One thing to keep in mind is that they usually get the same type of question.

• Can I meet you for a coffee?
• Do you want to be on my Board?
• Do you want to invest in me?
• Do you want to buy my software?

If you are asking one of these questions, stand out from the others

If you are actually not asking one of these questions, make it very clear. Your email might get eyeballed very quickly and rejected with “no, I don’t have time for more Board seats”…

No.

Now that mobile devices are becoming the dominant screen on which we look at brands, more and more logos become text-based. The font is the key design aspect of the logo. To set your whole presentation in a funky font would not make sense.

Having said that, the fonts of your presentation and the logo are very close, but just a bit different, a design nerd might find it bothersome. (Arial - Helvetica for example). This would only be an issue for big, bold headlines. Though.

Some brands do force the match between logo font and text font. Think of the ads produced by the Absolut Vodka brand. Slogans and headlines are in Extra Bold Futura Condensed all caps and it matches the brand exactly.

You probably have a generic pitch deck that you have been using over and over again. You eyeball the slides before emailing to yet another potential client or investor. If you have given this presentation a thousand times, it is worth to have a look at each slide and ask yourself the question, are you excited to present it, do you want to surprise the audience with this unexpected insight?

If the answer is “yes”, keep it in, if not, considering taking it out. Here are examples of slides that can provoke a luke warm response…

• Repetitions. You have already explained on slide 4 that “X” was a major issue, and now on slide 14, you introduce your product feature that kills this issue. No need to explain that issue again, and you probably notice that in your presentation you tend to apologize for this slide: “ah, yes, as I said before…”
• Feature check lists. If your products has all the standard features that are expected from an offering in this product category, there is no need to walk through each single one of them. You are probably dreading having to go through these 5 slides (here is the user profile, here is the contact book, etc. etc.)
• Historical baggage. In the early days, talking about your company foundation used to be really exciting. Now, 5 years later, that slide has become sort of dense, and the opening of the new office 3 months ago does not really add anything to the story anymore.

Another software-related post after my computer swap. SlideMagic is an app that runs both on Mac OSX and Windows machines, so I need a Windows computer to compile and build the software (luckily from one code base). Some observations:

• Desktop operating systems are very mature pieces of software, and sliding more and more in the background. On my old Mac, I did not even bother to upgrade to Monterrey as of now, because of compatibility issues of some very old music production software that I use. Having used Monterrey for a week now, I still hardly notice the difference.
• I used the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 11. Windows is now totally at par with the Mac when it comes to look and feel. The whole experience looks great and works well.
• On Macs with an Intel chip, I would install Windows using Bootcamp. Starting the machine with Windows would leave no trace of anything Mac: you are working on a pure Intel-based Windows machine. Now that Apple switches to different chips, I have opted again for a virtual machine. Windows 11 runs nicely inside a window alongside my Mac software. It is easy to exchange files, very quick going back and forth between the systems, and most importantly, it is easy to adjust the hard disk space your Windows machine takes on your Mac, nothing is set in stone.
• More and more software is written like SlideMagic, one code base creates identical looking apps for both Windows and Mac.
• With the differences in software / UI disappearing, the main differentiator between Mac and Windows is actually the hardware: build quality, design, and most importantly the quality of the screen. Macs are usually great, but in the world of Windows, there is a huge range of machines, from really poor/cheap to fantastic/expensive.