SlideMagic Blog

SlideMagic is very suited to make decks that promote real estate projects or funds. It is easy to manage pictures of properties and add boxes with information about square feet and returns. I have added a template for a real estate fund pitch to get you started.

Note that when searching for slide templates, you do not need to resort to keywords such as “real estate” (it will give some results now though), any layout that shows lists, or grids, or portfolios, or screenshots will do. Real estate presentations use very generic layouts.

See below the secret of a pro photographer (follow Scott). To get the most natural and relaxed images of people (for example your team) for your presentation, say the photoshoot is over, and then take a few more shots… (Click the arrow to see the next image)

A nice team photo is so much better than a page with headshots in inconsistent formats.

If there is no alternative (traveling to get everyone in one room is hard during this pandemic), there is always SlideMagic with lots of team slide templates that can help you make those headshots look as consistent as possible!

Photo by Uyen Nguyen on Unsplash

Organisation cultures are changing. Traditional hierarchies becomes less important, and project teams often become the engine of doing things. Also outsiders such as freelancers do not fit in nicely in big structures. At my time in McKinsey in the 1990s, we could have full meetings about whether a line should be dotted or not, and who would have to be drawn slightly higher than someone else on a page. Mistakes here were especially painful in a presentation to the management team.

Organisation chars in presentation are tricky for two reasons: it is hard to get all the boxes right on the page from a technical point of view, and it is hard to make everyone happy that the hierarchy and lines of the boxes reflect reality.

At the request of a user I have added a few more organisation charts to the SlideMagic slide template database. Complex organisation diagrams are not SlideMagic territory (if they are. hard to draw, the audience must also find them hard to understand). Instead, I created a few simple templates that can lay out the structure of an organisation in simple way, cutting the amount of lines, and increasing the size of text boxes.

If you present your chart as a a rough summary of the organisation rather than an exact reflection of hierarchy, you might just get away with it. If you pretend to be precise, people will nitpick…

The “connector” element in SlideMagic is still the weakest drawing tool and I am thinking about a new diagramming user interface now that my front end HTML design skills have improved significantly over the past year. As usual, the problem is not technical. Also in PowerPoint with its more sophisticated diagramming interface, it is hard to get connecting. lines to do what you want. They always angle and bend in a different way than you want them to.

A SlideMagic user could not find a TAM (total addressable market) slide and used a service I am offering that not many people take advantage of: request them to be added. You can find 4 new slides about TAM here.

About the layouts:

• Unlike most of the traditional TAM slide templates, I did not go for concentric circles. Yes, SlideMagic does not do circles (yet), but I find these hand drawn circles always misleading. It is very hard to get the circle size to be accurate. Hence the more simple bars.
• TAM is a bit of a buzzword, I hence I tried to avoid using TAM (available, or addressable?), SAM, target market, etc. and use normal English instead.

About TAMs.

Watch out with using TAM slides in your investor pitch. Yes, it is included in many template guidelines, but believe me, investors do not really respond well to the type of analysis where we identify a $15 billion universe, $100m or which we can address, and $200k sales we are going to get in year 5. Also, most of them do not like buzzwords.

A TAM-like concept is useful when you want to introduce a new market (i.e., a bucket that does not exist in any Gartner report yet). Rather than calling it TAM, or trying to relate it to any of these buckets, maybe provide a simple analysis instead of what people in the world could spend on services like this. Show the assumptions you made, bottom up. This does not try to create a new Gartner bucket, but instead educates the investor how to think about your market.

Most corporate presentation templates are designed starting from an empty slide. The designer feels the urge to spice things up a bit with logos and other graphical elements. Now when you actually use that template (designed for a blank page) with everyday presentation content, things start to clash.

The same things must have happened to the designers at BMW, who forgot the license plate that would be plastered over the front of their new car design….

The next time you brief a designer for a new PowerPoint template, give her a full slide deck including content, let her create a design you like, then strip out all the elements and see what you are left with.

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Version 2.3.18 went up with a few improvements including 2 noticeable ones:

• A much brighter app user interface colour. As you know, SlideMagic mirrors the colour you use in your presentation: if your presentation uses blue, the SlideMagic app accent colours (to show things you selected for example) will turn to its complement: orange. Up until v2.3.18, this was the exact colour opposite, creating problems for users with muted, very dark accent colours. In the latest version I forced up the brightness and saturation of the app accent colour so that it clearly stands out in all cases. Look how that orange is now popping out for my SlideMagic blue colour.
• An improved image user interface, where the crop modes “center”, “contain”, and “cover” are now clearly highlighted. Also, SlideMagic now shows the mega bytes an image consumes as soon as you select it. Sometimes, a very large image is actually not that big in storage, but the opposite happens as well, that tiny image on your slide takes up 10MB of space and as a result you are compressing down the entire slide deck. Now it is easy to catch these memory eaters quickly and compress the image if needed. Compression no longer “flattens” the image effects (greyscale, blur, flip), so you can re and undo these on the compressed image as well.

Download the latest version of SlideMagic for Windows or Mac to try it out.

If you hear this from an investor as the very first sentence she says, this could either be:

1. A gutsy negotiation tactic to get the valuation of the shares in the B-round preferred equity shares down
2. She will not invest in you but wants to be helpful anyway

In 99% of the cases it is scenario number 2, so launching with full energy with your pitch (page 1/50, “market developments”) might get you cut off.

In these cases, I would still clarify, ‘OK, but why?’. The answer is probably: “You are in stage x in market y, we invest only in stage w and market v, but we have a friend in common so I agreed to take the call”. No chance of scenario 1…

All is not lost though. Switch tactic immediately and find out what this investor can do for you. Useful contacts. Ideas for investors who would fit the bill. Time is probably limited (she is doing you a favour, so hold back with arguing or discussion, take notes and put all the feedback in the perspective of the person it is coming from.

The notes might actually contain something that is new to you, and you will have left a very good impression for when you guys meet again in a situation where there is a better match.

Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash

SlideMagic swaps instantly between traditional and widescreen aspect ratios. The slide content stays nicely in the slide frame, everything stays aligned and you can revert instantly.

Because SlideMagic does not distort aspect ratios of images (no stretching or squeezing), the positioning of an image changes slightly if you switch between a narrow and a wide screen layout. This can be annoying for images where positioning is a big deal (compare the lined up eye lines of a series of portrait images versus a long-distance shot of a mountain range). If you switch aspects 5 minutes before your meeting, your presentation is misaligned. (This is obviously still a lot better than PowerPoint where everything would stretch and move to unpredictable places when picking a different screen format)

Well, SlideMagic fixed this last hitch as well. I just released V2.3.17 (download SlideMagic here for both Windows and Mac) which now keeps 2 sets of image size and crop frames, one for each slide aspect ratio. You switch back and forth, so will the image positioning. Make sure to double check each image once in both aspect ratios, and the settings will be saved together with the presentation.

For future releases I am studying more advanced image analysis, where I could automatically recognise a face in an image for example, and lock in the position of the eyes (maybe the first true “AI” application in SlideMagic).

Version 2.3.16 of the SlideMagic presentation app went up last night (download it here for either Mac or Windows). The major new feature in this release is the dynamic generation of slides (at least, the first steps).

There are different types of template search queries entered on the SlideMagic server. People look for a specific framework (e.g., ‘BCG matrix’), a specific layout (‘3 bullet points’), but then there is a whole lot of more descriptive queries to are a better match for an image search site (‘house’ , ‘diabetes’). While I could populate the database with hand-made slides for each of these terms, it is more efficient to let technology do the work for you.

So at the moment, when the server gives up and returns a “no slides found” message, the user gets offered the option to run an image search instead with the same keywords. After picking an image, the SlideMagic app turns it into a framed slide with proper image credits that can form the basis for a new slide design. This slide is created on the fly, without the need to store templates on my server. So the number of slides that SlideMagic can produce now goes into the millions rather than hundreds.

The screen shots below give an overview of the flow as it stands at the moment:

Obviously a slide with a simple image is still pretty basic. I am looking into expanding this approach with colour matches, and more interestingly analysing images for white space, with suggested pre-population of text placeholders on the image.

Most sales have 2 pitches:

• The first is the seller pitching to an employee of the client
• The second is that employee having to make the case to her colleagues

(A similar situation: first the startup pitches a partner of a VC, then that partner has to convince her other partners)

I never discuss that second type of pitch here very much. In most cases an employee or VC partner probably has a deep conviction that a certain deal needs to be done (otherwise you would not put your reputation on the line for it). So all of a sudden, these people are the ones pitching the idea to a potentially unenthusiastic audience.

In these situations it is important to keept that impartial distance from the deal. A colleague who is aggressively countering every possible small objection to the deal loses a lot of trust and credibility. “Hmmm, she must have been brainwashed”. Instead, layout your case objectively. Point out the strengths, but also show the risks, doubts, and possible elephants in the room, and make the case why you think these can be overcome and this is a good bet to take.

P.S. This shows startup/product pitchers who the role of their contact person at a client/investor is changing. First you need to convince them, then you need to coach them how to pitch your idea themselves. If in this second phase of the process, you get a question, she is no longer doubting the idea, but collecting evidence to convince her colleagues. It also shows that bypassing that junior analyst and calling her boss directly might back fire instantly, you just lost your major supporter.