SlideMagic Blog

Forecasting the size of a market that does not exist is tricky and nobody will have the right answer. Googling will result in endless research agencies or investment banks or consulting firms throwing in yet another inconsistent number.

With new markets, it is often as important to convince/teach an investor how to think about the market sizing than getting her to accept the answer, the point estimate. So merely quoting a random number without having a clue how it was derived is not going to help you very much.

So here is an alternative approach: make your own and keep the analysis very transparent. Build a spreadsheet that start with hard facts (populations etc., and slowly, slowly, adds more uncertain numbers. Use different colours for numbers with different confidence levels (green for rock solid all the way down to red for I-made-this-up). Put the resulting market size in your presentation, and add the detailed calculation to the appendix of your presentation.

Now you are on top of your numbers and understand where they are coming from. It shows you know what you are talking about, and you can teach your potential investor how to make her own market estimate.

Rattling through 25 points about why your idea is great on page 1 of your deck is not convincing.

• You do not give the audience the ability to warm up, and first of all understand what it is you do
• You dilute the power of the arguments by spending too little time on each: big need, no competition, great team, we all heard them before
• You remind us of weak pitches where the lack of quality of the story is made up for by quantity: products with 25 benefits usually have no benefits

Instead, resist the temptation for detail and explain roughly what you do on page 1, plus the most important differentiator. Then follow with a presentation that is short enough for the audience to focus on your key points.

Here are some posts that people have been reading a lot on my blog in 2012:

• Aligning bullet points in PowerPoint
• How to create a McKinsey-style waterfall chart
• Putting PowerPoint text in a circle
• Semi-transparent text fills
• Building a logo page in PowerPoint
• How to make a 3D translucent ball
• Presentations on tablets
• About logic in presentations
• Keynote versus PowerPoint
• Combining stacked and clustered column charts

For me it is interesting to see that almost none of these posts were written in 2012, and that pretty much all of them are about technical PowerPoint software skills (there is a correlation here, as my posts have evolved a bit over the years). Presumably this is the result of people Googling when they are stuck in PowerPoint.

Anyway, hopefully these posts are useful if you missed them the first time around.

When a company grows, a slide deck has to be used by more than one person. It is often hard for the pioneer presenter to let go of the old slides that she has been using for years. “What is wrong with this slide? When I put it up I tell this, this this, and this, these are really important points.”

Most of the above points do not appear on the slide though. The new presenters do not make them, the email recipients of the deck do not read them. The slide is merely a mental placeholder for the expert presenter to tell her story.

Time to let go.

If important numbers in your presentation are exactly the same (sales are $6.1m, cash flow is $6.1m and we will have 6.1m users in year 3), it is almost worth tweaking the assumptions in your Excel model a bit so that they are just slightly different. Usually, there is no material difference in the accuracy of your forecast, but it will be a lot easier to understand.

If you are a startup, you should consider getting yourself on the beta list of Videolean, a tool that promises to help you create promotion animation videos for $100 or less.

It is amazing to see what you can pack in just 60 seconds of video. Take Videolean’s on video for example: they pitch the problem, the solution, and present how the tool works.

A tool like this can replace a large number of slides in an investor presentation.

(P.S. all these videos seem to be using the voice over of the same guy, who probably costs more than $100, I wonder who he is).

I try to get rid of them, most of the time it is obvious that a column contains a company name, a date, or a comment. Sales, profits or acquisition value are a bit more tricky.

Every startup pitch has a hockey stick chart that shows its financial path to glory. As a result, investors will not believe it by simply looking at it. You need to explain what she has to believe in order for the end point to be true. What are the 7 numbers you need to multiply in order to reach that $50m in year 5? If she believes in 4 of the 7, and she buys into your methodology to calculate the potential, then you she might connect the year five dot with the 0 today.

Pink Floyd asked backing vocalist Clare Torry to “just go insane” and improvise on the music track of The Great Gig in The Sky. The result was not insane, not laughable, not unprofessional, but an incredible song. (Richard Wright describes the briefing 25:30 minutes into the video of the documentary below)

There is a parallel in presentation design. My best presentations have been for clients who told me to go crazy and all the way. The resulting presentations were never crazy or unprofessional, they are my best pieces of work today. You will not get laughed at when you let your creativity go.

Happy holidays everyone!

I am working on the release of version 1.1 of my book about presentation design, iBooks does not process submissions over the holidays, but hopefully in January a new version will get pushed to your iPads.

So far I discovered/received feedback that some internal bookmarks do not work, and that there are still a few lorem ipsums hidden deep down in the book. I will fix this.

The book is now available in 50 countries, but readers have pointed out that the book cannot be bought in the Israeli app store. This is due to Apple’s strategy of not allowing the sale of paid iBooks in Israel, free iBooks are available. I do not understand this, but so be it.

I will keep you posted.