SlideMagic Blog

I am (was) a casual Photoshop user. Now and then, I need a tool like this to take a background out of an image, or project een image on a 3D object such as a well.

For more than a decade, I have been pulling my hairs out every time I tried to use the program. I am a pretty skilled computer / software user, but I never managed to get over the dip of becoming an efficient user. In addition, the hefty subscription charge that was introduced does not really make sense for light users such as me.

Now, in my role as coder of my own presentation design app, I actually need a PS-like tool again to manage images that need very precise dimensions and DPIs (something irrelevant in PowerPoint). An inability to create a simple background image that scales on retina displays @2X in less than half hour with the final blow.

So I tried Sketch and everything was done within 5 minutes without the need for any tutorial. Creating the background, adding text, adding shapes, scaling, exporting. Highly recommended!

Sketch is a role model for SlideMagic. The software was started as a graduation project (actually by a student of the same university I got my Computer Science degree), and then moved slowly but surely over the course of a decade to become a market leader.

For a small company that is just starting out selling, it is impossible to reach out to the world. Not enough people, not enough money, not enough time.

Think about something that people usually use in manufacturing: economies of scale. One approach: invest a huge amount of fixed cost to build a massive plant that then can churn out products at a very low cost per unit (huge fixed cost / huge production volume). The other approach is specialisation. By focussing on just one tiny product in a tiny product segment, you might get to the same scale for that product as big competitors do who have to worry about 5,000 other items.

The same is true in sales pitches. You can scatter yourself and pitch clients in different industries, different continents, of different sizes. Or you can just focus on one industry, learn the “language” the people speak there, understand their problems, get referrals to from one happy client to another.

Which sector? Obviously it should make sense given your product. But after that, it is probably up to you. I guess that most companies that follow this approach got there by coincidence. Somehow you start winning pitches and getting leads in one sector and run out of time to focus on another.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

When someone asks me for an introduction to my network with an idea that needs to be pitched, I noticed that I can be as effective in explaining the basics of an idea in a few lines in an email as an entire slide deck.

Why?

I really think about my “audience” (usually a friend or business relationship that has a lot of prior knowledge or interest in the thing I am pitching, otherwise I would not bother to make the introduction). Out go the buzzwords, the market stats, directly raising the points that are unusual, surprising, unexpected, to someone who has a decent understanding of this type of business.

Personal recommendations can be much more powerful in an informal email between friends. You cannot put “she was only the junior assistant on the team, but believe me, she single-handedly delivered that project” on a slide.

You can raise risks in an honest way that are not always detrimental to the pitch: “the whole thing hinges on whether they can get product costs down, but I think they have a good shot at it”.

Next time when you write a pitch deck, ask yourself the question, what would a friend who is doing you a favour have to write in the cover of the email? Read the resulting text, and maybe it inspires you to change your pitch deck as well.

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

Yesterday I managed to get the Windows version of SlideMagic 2.0 running, generated by a script that eats the same code as the Mac version, but now saving a .EXE file instead of a .app. This means that I can soon open a limited beta testing program across all platforms.

The next challenge is to get certified as a reliable developer, Apple in particular puts up all kind of barriers to installation of apps that have not been vetted.

Two by two matrices are a popular tool rank options. Watch out when to use them though:

1. Do you actually have 4 distinct options that can be grouped according to 2 axes? Many situations have only 3 options, where the 4th option that is suggested by your framework is actually not meaningful in reality.
2. If you pass the first test, make sure you set the axes right: the most favourable scenario in the top right, the least attractive options in the bottom left, the other two the “can’t have the best of both world” scenarios.

Below is an example of a 2x2 used in an article about software lock-in I stumbled across. Flipping the axes makes the diagram a lot clearer.

The original diagram

I quickly created reworked the axes in a SlideMagic 2.0 diagram below:

The world of management theory is full of frameworks designed by MBA professors and/or management consulting firms. Many view in the same of was the laws of physics: this is how you go about solving a particular problem.

That is giving them too much credit. Dogmatically forcing a certain problem/solution into a framework will not work: if it does not fit, it does not fit. Every situation, every problem is different. Here is an example of someone adjusting the famous SWOT framework. Here is my own attempt at modifying a SWOT 2x2.

While frameworks can be helpful start thinking about a problem and planning the work that lays ahead of you, they are often not that good as layouts in presentations that communicate your final recommendations. Frameworks are complicated diagrams, and try to be exhaustive and list everything that is relevant for a problem on the page. For your final slide, that might not be what is needed to explain your findings. Frameworks can be useful to solve a problem, but might not be ideal for communicating the findings.

Many clients do not understand that, no, I really do not have time at the moment to do that small presentation design project, as I am focussing 100% on my coding efforts.

People understand that it is unreasonable to ask for a big project, but that small presentation fix, that should work right? It will only take a few hours.

Here is the problem with those few hours:

• The opportunity cost of those few hours can be huge, since coding a big feature in the app can take an entire day or more. Knowing that you have to spend a few hours on something else means you won’t even get started on it.
• Building on that: this small project might actually be an excuse to put off that major feature update
• Now that I am a bit out of the presentation design flow, what used to take me a few hours, could actually take a lot more time.
• A small design fix is not a big rewarding project, it is likely to be a fix: a small payment, not my best work, in short a distraction.

Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash

It took me a few days after the holiday to get back into my own code again (scary how fast you forget things). But I am on a roll again. A major achievement for a 1990s computer scientist is that I got the SlideMagic server running: you can log in as a user to activate the pro features (probably spotless and instant PDF and PowerPoint conversion) and equally important, access to a much broader searchable layout database. The latter works now as well, the server responds with dynamically generated slide suggestions based on search keywords.

The next challenge will be to 1) expand the slide layout database, and make the search suggestions smarter, and 2) to make the user signup/login robust. For most developers, 2) is easy (this is coding 101) and 1) is hard (this requires 25 years of slide design experience). For me it is the other way around.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Cropping an image accurately can be tricky, especially when PowerPoint is trying really hard to suggest possible cuts alongside snap lines it thinks are useful. My solution, drag the image to a huge size (without distorting its aspect ratio), crop, and shrink it down again.

Photo by Morgan Harris on Unsplash

WeWork has filed its S-1 documents to prepare for the upcoming IPO. This set of numbers is the big question for investors (quickly put together in SlideMagic 2.0):

Investment analysts are all over this document: unlike Facebook, or Uber, real estate is a relatively well-understood business, so people can apply traditional valuation methods to try to make sense of a valuation. Is this a gigantic money burning operation, or the start of one of the world’s most profitable tech giants that will change how people work together?

I think WeWork needs an investor presentation that takes the questions head on.

1. What are the economics of a single location (finding. refurbishing, filling, etc.) per square meter, and back it up with data of actual locations. The S-1 contains a graph explaining the concept, but it lacks a y-axis.
2. Show a scenario of the current real estate business, how many locations/members would you need to get to a stable, profitable operation
3. Then, what other options are out there to start building other businesses on top of this.

I have not run the numbers, but I suspect that stage 1. and 2. will not be enough to justify the share price, and your decision to buy into the IPO will depend on what you believe the potential of 3. is.

Photo by Eloise Ambursley on Unsplash