SlideMagic Blog

Every potential investor will probably reply with “sure” to the question if she is interested in a copy of the pitch deck. But what should you share? Some of your slides could be highly confidential, others might be too detailed. It is impossible to give a conclusive answer to this question, but here are some points to consider, given a number of possible investor profiles.

• Investor profile: angel investor who invests as a hobby and loves networking and being involved in the buzz of the startup world. She is incredibly friendly and wants to be helpful, but you don’t know her that well. She was asking fairly high level questions and you had to give her a 101 on the industry you are working in. Maybe a short summary deck with non-confidential information will do. She probably does not have a deep technological understanding of your niche, and is likely to forward material to many of her friends to see if they can help you as well.
• Investor profile: junior analyst at a specialized VC firm who keeps on asking about very detailed financial growth benchmarks. She is begging you to provide all the ammunition you can find to convince her boss. No, they don’t sign NDAs. You probably have to provide the details as it sounds like an all-or-nothing shot with a highly relevant investor.
• Investor profile: you happen to sit next to her at a post-COVID dinner party and find out she is actually an investor with a potential fit. The setting was not right for an in-depth pitch. Maybe here you should send a very short “business card” presentation, slides that look great, give a brief explanation of the idea, plus additional background on you as an entrepreneur. The objective is not to land the investment, but to get an opportunity to do that proper pitch.
• Investor profile: someone who makes it pretty clear that the possibility of investment is close to zero: wrong industry, wrong stage, wrong geography. Saying that she is interested in the deck is her being polite. Maybe better not to send anything at all.

I am following a number of amateur statisticians here in Israel to get insight in how the vaccination campaign is going. This ‘underground’ information sources gives a for better picture of what is going on than the main news media can provide. A better explanation and earlier detection of trends.

Most of these statisticians use the same chart that they update every day. And I noticed that after a few weeks, you actually stop seeing how poorly the chart is designed, your eyes will zoom straight to that one figure that has been updated.

Stock brokers spot the latest share price instantly on a busy ticker board. Mathematicians see the crucial line in the proof on the blackboard.

You , the presentation designer, have become used to your own dashboard. It might be time to take a step back.

Photo by Neil Martin on Unsplash

Prefab PowerPoint templates can look incredibly pretty. The problem is editing and customizing them. It is easy to change text, but if your message requires 5 instead of 4 bubbles, you need to make drastic changes to the layout of a slide.

• There are the technical skills of duplicating and placing that shape.
• There are design skills, “somehow the proportions of the slide don’t look right anymore and I can not pinpoint what causes it”.
• There could be a more fundamental problem, maybe a 5 bubble chart requires an entirely different slide than a 4 bubble one
• There is the problem of fitting things in with the right fonts and colors that fit your corporate identity (corporates usually do not use the cute fonts found in powerpoint templates).

Changing a PowerPoint template is a bit like handing a paint brush to a random person with the request to add one more person to The Night Watch on the canvas, and change the coloring from dark to light (the scene is set in the middle of the day, but got darker over the years).

What I am trying to achieve with SlideMagic:

• Lower the ambition on the complexity of slide designs, and make sure that the designs that do make the cut look pretty good
• Offer an editor that makes it easy to change layouts without leaving any traces

This chart lays out the philosophy behind SlideMagic: spend more time pitching, less time editing. There are only a limited number of productive hours in a day, it is a waste to spend them on slide design…

• If you are preparing for an all-or-nothing pitch, you free up time to really, really rehearse your story.
• If that quarterly report is sitting on the top of the to-do list and preventing your from doing other things, get it out of the way quickly.

P.S. I have add this slide to the database here, or search for ‘slidemagic’ in the desktop app to use it in your own presentation

As of version 2.6.27, the way settings are stored in SlideMagic. I rely on open source software and the previous engine I used to save settings on your machine was not maintained very well by its developer and started to cause more and more bugs over time.

If you are a pro subscriber, please log in again after you update. Also, you might have to re-enter your accent color to store it on your machine. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Photo by Rima Kruciene on Unsplash

Recently, a SlideMagic user asked for some help with adding “some more color” to a slide. (A table to be included in an internal strategy document).

My response was the opposite, rather than adding color and accents, I took things out. To make things stand out, you can either emphasize these things, or de-emphasize everything else.

Here is the starting point (confidential text removed). Btw., look how neat and organized it already looks, thanks to SlideMagic…

Below my suggestion:

The things I did:

• Changed color accents
• Grouped and de-duplicated text boxes that contained the exact same text
• Changed relative heights of rows
• Moved title category labels to the top
• Added the arrows to visualize that the bottom item supports everything else

I remember doing a project for a TV broadcaster back at my days at McKinsey. Because the client was in the business of communication, it was very picky on how reports should be written and presented.

Presentations are part of your corporate culture. If they look sloppy, are full of pages with boring bullet points, contain incomprehensible diagrams, are loaded with buzzwords, it says something about the organisation that produces them, especially when you requires staff and customers to sit through them.

Maybe you invested a lot in that first meeting sales presentation, but you can’t keep it up in the decks for the 2nd, 3rd or 4th due diligence meeting. This is where you show your real face.

These follow up decks do not have to be master pieces of graphics design, they still should look decent, consistent and on-brand.

(SlideMagic is here to help).

Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash

When you page down through all the slides after you completed your deck, you can feel the excitement (or lack of it) they bring up to tell your story.

• Great slide
• Great slide
• Great slide
• Ahh, here we go into the clinical data
• Great slide
• Great slide

Certain slides ended up in your deck at a certain spot for a good reason at the time. But your story might have moved on, things that were an issue might have become obvious, or maybe the message that chart brings is now a different one. When you get that “aah, that one” moment when clicking through your deck, it is time to make some changes.

Every slide should be an invitation for you to jump in add something exciting to what you already presented.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

That’s the one that is sitting on the Zoom screen for 30 minutes when you take questions. Here are things that are a bit boring to look at during that time:

• THANK YOU!
• Q&A
• Appendix
• A super detailed recap of the entire presentation in 15 bullet points
• A super detailed Gantt chart of the next steps
• The chart with your weakest data that you had to pull up to answer a question
• The chart with the calculation mistake that triggered a question

The last slide is a billboard that can get engraved in people’s memory like a Super Bowl ad (with a slightly smaller audience). So better choices are a memorable visual that you used somewhere in your presentation to explain the opportunity, a nice product shot. Make sure you navigate back to it when needed.

Photo by Jaxon Lott on Unsplash

I came across a pitch for a business idea that involves a few different businesses, with a number of different people.

The natural way to tell the story is a build-up: here is this interesting problem, that is a massive opportunity, that only we can solve with this interesting technology.

Investors are different from viewers of an action-packed thriller. The moment the “opening title” starts rolling, they start evaluating the investment opportunity, trying to identify the obvious strengths, the obvious weaknesses, and the question marks.

So for investors, you might have to skip to the last page of your thriller and uncover the mystery, before starting your pitch. Here are the 3 businesses, this is what they roughly do, and these are the people involved for each one of them. No let’s start from the beginning.

Photo by Quinn Buffing on Unsplash