SlideMagic Blog

After more than 25 years of designing presentations, here is an important insight: most of your slides are tables. Not only the spreadsheet-type straight table with columns full of numbers, but a more generic 2 dimensional layout of any idea.

Writing text on paper, in a word processor or telling a story verbally, is one dimensional. You make a point one after the other. A good slide adds a second dimension to organise your thoughts.

• Time to show a sequence of data
• Steps in a process or a supply chain
• Pros and cons
• Sales, costs, capital

Dependent on this second dimension, different slide types come out: 2x2 matrices, categorised lists, column charts.

The algorithm picks up some real tables as well…

Many of the classical management consulting frameworks were the result of someone trying to fit an idea across 2 axes. When it worked, you got a nice layout to discuss an issue, and often, you spotted missing scenarios that you did not consider before (“hey, what happens in the low-low box?”)

This also shows why bullet points are poor slides: they are 1-dimensional, you are missing that powerful second dimension to organise your idea.

Now you see why in SlideMagic the table is central to everything. It encourages you to think in 2 dimensions for every slide you try to design. Organising and lining up boxes is difficult in most presentation software. And when you got it to work finally, someone asks you to add another row and take out column 2. Piece of cake in SlideMagic.

SlideMagic can change the way a slide looks at the touch of a button:

• Aspect ratio, going back and forth between 16:9 and 4:3
• Background colour: between dark and light
• Explanation panel: with or without a side box with space for text for when you are not there to explain the slide in person

In traditional presentation software, this can be cumbersome to do. The software is not to blame, it is by design. If you give the user full flexibility about how to place images, size shapes, and colours she can use, you cannot avoid stretching of image aspect ratios, mixing up slide layouts, and confusing colours when you apply changing to a slide layout. Yes, all can be fixed, but it always takes a bit of mopping up to get right.

SlideMagic has a very rigid colour and slide layout regime, and it pays off, you can go back and forth between different slide layouts instantly. Here are six versions of the same slide, all generated with a single click without corrections:

4:3, dark slide background (see how the app interface itself turns light to provide enough contrast)

Dark background, with the slide-out panel

16:9, dark background

Wide screen, with a light background, the app turns dark again

I am still mainly focused on improving the app, but soon I focus on marketing as soon as I see that a group users really gets hooked on using the product (and that group can be very small). One good way to show what the app can do is short screen capture videos I think. I quickly put two together, without editing, just my playing around.

The first one creates a data table with integrated bar chart (notice how it lines up) from scratch:

The second slide uses the built in slide template bank (the app has access to the same slides as you can search online). Notice how you pull in the template, quickly add in columns, delete rows, and pull in another image. (I am using the beta Unsplash integration here). They key problem with pre-designed PowerPoint templates is having a design layman adjusting a template that was created by a pro. SlideMagic solves that.

I am monitoring my server logs to catch broken links now that I am taking years of Shopify links down (it is like playing tennis against a ball throwing machine). One of the URLs that produced a 404 error was this one:

Do-interested-VCs-like-short-pitch-decks-that-stimulate-discussion-or-detailed-pitch-decks-that-demonstrate-thought-thoroughness

Someone must have typed this question in somewhere. Let’s try to answer it:

I think the different types of documents are needed in different stages of the VC due diligence.

Initially a VC is trying to get her head around what it is that you are actually doing. Presenting a massive fact pack with market statistics will show that you are diligent, but will not help her answer the question of the moment. It will also show that you do not really have great sales skills and tact.

On the other hand, showing up with 2 pages TED Talk-style (2 page filling images) in order to have a fresh exchange of ideas freed from bullet points, will not get you past that initial hurdle either.

In some sectors, leaving detail out can actually hurt. For example for a biotech pitch, it can all hinge on the results of your clinical trial, down to nitty gritty statistics. Leaving that out invalidates the pitch.

There is no one-fits-all answer here. Think how much time you have, think at what stage of the process you are in, think how well an investor understands the industry and see what is the right information needed for this moment.

If you are sending a deck via email (“send and pray”), add a bit more information, maybe separated in a clear upfront pitch and an appendix in the back. Again use judgement: details work plans of the team are probably not interesting, additional pages with bio info of the team could actually help (easy to skim, team is very important), confidential IP/technical information or financial data you might not want to email to an investor at all initially.

The new platform now includes the entire collection of the slides of my old Shopify templates store (and much more of course). Yes, it might be costing me SEO rankings, but I am going to close it down: multiple platforms are confusing for users, and hard to manage. Also the old store was difficult to use for subscribers who had to go through some check out process every time they want to download a slide.

For each paying subscriber with an active subscription, I have created an account on the new platform with a Pro subscription that expires at the same time your subscription on the old store did. I don’t store your passwords, so you have to go to slidemagic.com (this site), go to the log in page, and hit “forgot password”. After entering the email address you used for the old store, you should receive a link where you can create a new password (invisible to me).

I will keep the slide download option running on the platform, because that is what people are used to when it comes to buying presentation-related things online, but selling templates is not the main point of SlideMagic. The pro subscription also unlocks the full feature set of the downloadable presentation app. Try using it:

• Super easy to customise templates
• A lot, lot more templates available
• PowerPoint export so your colleagues do not have to notice (of course you can tell them about the secret of SlideMagic).

If you are stuck email [email protected], and I am here to help.

I added a few more slides to the database today, one of them was this one: a template to present a sensitivity analysis.

Why this particular layout?

• It is nicely spaced out, a calm composition for so much data
• Numbers are disconnected from the spreadsheet: rounded up, entered by hand
• Colours, bold, are used to direct the eye to what is important, and what is secondary

Some thoughts about how and when to present this type of analysis:

• Presenting sensitivities and not the same as analysing them. The latter is the homework that you should have been doing before the presentation. Figure to what factors your model is sensitive, decided whether that is how it should be, then gather more information where needed to increase your confidence in variables that can make a big difference. What is left to discuss are sensitivities after you did everything to minimise and/or understand them.
• The ranges of the variables you show should be realistic. This is not an exercise in mathematics, but an attempt to really understand what drives the future.
• Pick dimensions that are not correlated, if the risks on the x and y axes are the same, you are not adding much insight.
• Try flipping the analysis upside down, instead of showing deviations from the base case, show “what you would have to believe” in order to get to a certain number.
• Be careful when sharing this type of data if you are in some negotiation about valuation. If the other side understand your model, they can basically salami slice the valuation using your own excel. You need to understand the sensitivities, but sharing them directly might not be smart.

Building a product is slow, but steady going. I jotted down this list of the various hurdles and went through to get a useable product today:

• Design the UI: most of this was done for version 1.0 five years ago
• Understand the basics of Javascript (with 1990s Pascal to start from)
• Understand post 1990s programming concepts: objects, methods
• Get an environment up and running so that I actually could run a simple piece of code
• Find a way to get access to the data (presentations) version 1.0 was producing.
• Setup an environment that turns a program that says “Hello world” and turns it into a desktop app
• Figure out a way to scale text in a browser environment, preserving the exact proportions of design elements (resize your web page, this is not what most web pages need).
• Get github and multiple versions to work
• Build the first rendering engine that actually displays a chart: text boxes are easy, scaling images a bit trickier, data charts get nastier even
• Find a way to register clicks and make things editable: shapes, menus, in different context.
• Copy the rendering engine to a generic format (for thumb nails in story mode for example)
• Duplicate the app engine to enable multi-screen presenter mode (running 2 processes and a master process that talk to each other)
• Enabling on-screen editing of text, graphs, image dragging, image cropping, flipping
• Building the grid editing system (implementing my patent)
• Build the PowerPoint conversion
• Build the PDF conversion
• Build the image export
• Build the printing functionality
• Add automatic 16:9 to 4:3 and back conversion
• Add automatic dark/white background conversion (beyond simply changing the background color)
• Enable multiple windows (each window is a full copy of the render process) and coordinate settings between them
• Build user authentication: pro users get features others don’t have access to via a web server, involving password hashing and building a user database
• Build the first version of the online template database: search slide layouts inside the app, but pull data from the central server
• Hook up unsplash image search
• Hook up noun project icon search
• Create an auto-update mechanism that updates the desktop app in the background when new versions are released
• Get the mac app to run on windows as well
• Get certified with Microsoft and Apple so that people don’t receive scary warnings when installing the software
• Build the full-scale slide template server, integrating the PowerPoint-only content from the old one
• Get payments working
• Build the front end of the marketing web site and the template store
• Get PowerPoint conversion to work on the server as well
• Build the management console to manage slides, users, and the search algorithms

I just took the password wall off the SlideMagic 2.0 app, so everyone can have a look (www.slidemagic.com., you just need to create an account. Payment plans are working on the template store, which should also be reflected in the app. I am sure there are hidden bugs lurking, but I keep on pushing. Remember that I do not have a 24/7 support organisation up and running yet… Valentine’s Day 2020 is a memorable day already :-)

Photo by Cesira Alvarado on Unsplash

A quick update (things are a bit quiet on the blog this week).

While the SlideMagic app is my project that I can afford to take some time for to go through multiple beta iterations to get it right, the template bank is a much more straightforward business, I want to get it running on the new platform as soon as possible.

The key functions work: search a slide (search algorithm is still being improved), and you can download it in multiple formats. The “only” thing left to do is the payment infrastructure. I got the account management and download book keeping working which leaves me with one nice challenge: EU VAT accounting for digital downloads.

The EU put all kind of laws in place to get a cut of the profits that the internet giants are making over their head. That is all great, but in the process they created complicated accounting rules that also apply to me. I as a tiny startup need to have the same tracking in place as Spotify.

This is a technical challenge that will not move humanity forward (unlike the UI of my app, or the new slide search algorithms). But, I have to crack it. Hopefully in a week or so, my system accurately adds taxes (or not) depending on your country, as an individual, as a company, with valid (or invalid) EU VAT numbers, and generate reports for my own book keeping and refunding EU tax authorities at the press of a button. My accountant (a big international firm suggested I do this manually, I think there must be a smarter way to do this. Pfff.

I did not realise PowerPoint could do this: put captions or subtitles on your slide live, while you speak into a microphone. Instructions how to get this work can be found here.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash