SlideMagic Blog

Coding a program, building a spreadsheet, and designing a presentation follows a similar pattern for me:

Coding: quickly put together something to see whether it works, then clean up to make the script more efficient, and the code better to understand (especially if I have to get back to it in a few months)

Spreadsheet: create the required calculations quickly, then optimise so that it becomes easy to generate multiple scenarios, multiple business units, and most importantly, I can regroup and slice the economic drivers of a company (per unit, per client, % of sales, fixed, per product, etc. etc.) so you get a great understanding of how the profit “engine” actually works.

Presentations: especially for complicated tradeoffs, my “pros and cons” diagrams go through many iterations of regrouping, consolidating, separating, re-ordering rows and columns until a very clear picture of the message emerges. Also flow diagrams can benefit a lot from repeated iterations until you get one that is clearly laid out with minimal crossing of lines.

We start from simple, the (over)complicate, in order to end up with something simple again, but that final simple version looks very different from the one you started out with.

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Most books, blogs, and courses about presentations aim at a setting where you present for a big audience. The role of the sides is the support the presenter, who is the central element of the full theatrical performance.

The majority of decks as I see them coming across my desk are meant to speak for themselves, as an attachment to an email for example. “Send me the deck”, says the investor after a 2 minute talk at a conference. Your audience here: impatient speed readers.

Think about yourself browsing a newspaper, or a piece of research. What do you pay attention to, what do you ignore? Some points to consider:

• Like on the big keynote screen, a page full of dense text and bullet points will get skipped over
• But, super short, summary statements will not be understood without context, since you are not there to explain them.
• Anything that sounds like what everyone else is writing, full of cliches, will get skipped over.
• Real photos attract the attention, people on the team, the prototype, the office, even small text surrounding it (you often read the small print under an image in a newspaper)
• Arguments, comparisons, pros and cons, need to be made very visible in clear tables or graphs, remember how in car or consumer electronics reviews to skip right to the end to the red and green check marks.
• Personal stories that sound interesting on stage, might look clumsy when written down in a deck.
• Watch out for inconsistencies, errors, in financial data and/or market sizes, someone reading at a screen has more time to go back and forth than someone sitting in an auditorium. Errors cost you credibility.
• Consider putting links in your deck so people can instantly go to LinkedIn profiles of team members, or the source behind market research.
• The speed reader is a bit less patient to wait for the big punch in your story. Building excitement and anticipation can work great on stage (like a DJ building towards that drop), the speed reader can’t resist and will click through the last page to see how the story ends.

Many company web sites feature some sort of video that plays in the background, covering the entire page. Some things to consider:

• This is a background, and should not claim all the attention of the visitor. So pick calm videos, not highway car chases. Also, a series of 5 different short videos of lakes in New Zealand that loop every 10 seconds is still distracting.
• A web site without content, but with a video in the background does not create a professional company presence. Content first.
• Stock photos with model-turned happy diverse employees are boring, so are videos with the same people featuring in them.

If you have looked a web site (or presentation slide) for a long time as a designer you stop noticing things that a first time visitor will spot. Your brain knows the video loop by heart, filters it out, just to let you focus on that annoying DIV tag that refuses to line up. Force yourself to take that first time visitor perspective and ask yourself whether that video really adds something.

In the very early stages of a company, your website as actually aimed at investors. They want something that looks modest, professional, and with the essentials: a description what it is you are doing (consistent with the confidential pitch deck), a sense that you can communicate professionally and convincingly to future clients and investors, links to team bios, and hygiene factors such as a street address, proper domain name, etc. that shows that you are serious about your venture. Wild animations and spectacular videos do not always support this point.

Before putting your pitch deck together in it is good to think about where your audience stands. Investors can have varying backgrounds and knowledge about a certain market. Also the stage in her due diligence process will make a difference.

• Is she even aware of this market? “What, x million people in the world buy product y?
• Does she understand that you are addressing a problem? “What, all this is still done manually in 2019?”
• Is she overlooking a possible solution? “Hey, I did not know that you could apply technology x to do y!”
• She has seen hundreds of your type of startups and wants to dive straight into the traction numbers to see how you stack up.
• She gets the opportunity, but is wondering about the quality of the team (including you)

Different audience, different priorities in the deck

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This is a useful list of design myths. Here are a few relevant for presentation design (I adjusted the wording a bit here and there):

• Myth #34: Simple = minimal
• Myth #28: White space is wasted space
• Myth #19: You don’t need the presentation content to design a presentation template
• Myth #14: You are like your audience
• Myth #13: Icons enhance slide clarity
• Myth #10: If your design is good, small details don’t matter
• Myth #8: Stock photos improve the audience’s understanding
• Myth #7: Graphics will make a slide element more visible

Photo by Alexander Schlembach on Unsplash

The song “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen started as “joke” and trying to see how far people could push things with overdubs (180 in total, made on 24 channel mixers) and bringing opera influences into rock. A quote from Wikipedia:

“Baker recalled in 1999, "‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was totally insane, but we enjoyed every minute of it. It was basically a joke, but a successful joke. [Laughs]. We had to record it in three separate units. We did the whole beginning bit, then the whole middle bit and then the whole end. It was complete madness. The middle part started off being just a couple of seconds, but Freddie kept coming in with more “Galileos” and we kept on adding to the opera section, and it just got bigger and bigger. We never stopped laughing.”

Some of the best presentations I designed for clients started like this. “Let’s try something completely different”. Often, these cases involved a relatively low-risk keynote for an internal audience. But many times these decks developed into serious presentations for outsiders.

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Here is where things stand with the development of SlideMagic 2.0. I am making good progress with a new presentation design app that follows the same (patented) design approach as the current web app but a lot of the small inconveniences ironed out:

• A native app that runs both on Windows and Mac and saves and loads files to a local hard drive, allows you to work offline, and deliver much snappier editing response times
• Built-in, instant export to PowerPoint
• Instant conversion between 4:3 and 16:9, back and forth
• A more integrated user interface enabling the editing of grids, shapes, and text from one screen

The prototype is coming along nicely, but still a lot of effort is required to iron out the small glitches before I can let the genie out of the bottle…

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Here are some lessons learned along the way from my journey into coding:

Learning to code is not something you do on the side, this requires 100% of your attention

You can’t learn coding from reading or watching videos, you actually have to do it, understanding things passively is totally different from getting a machine to do what you want, which involves getting many small details right

You can get lost for days in endless searches to figure something out, and then all of a sudden everything falls into place over the course of 30 minutes

In the beginning, your code is fragile and you are hesitant to touch anything once it is working (but you don’t truly understand how), over time you get mor courage to perform drastic surgery as you are confident you can restore things to the way they were

Throughout the process your program UI needs to look “nice”, at least for me, staring at a horrible temporary user interface is not motivating. (I have the same with designing slide decks, I can’t stand ugly charts, even if they are drafts)

Coding an app involves a lot of challenges, if it starts to overwhelm you, pick one and completely nail it, even in a separate test app if necessary

I think it is OK to become lazy and “forget” how exact syntaxes work, there is always Google to fix that/remind you, as long as you understand the broader concepts

Google is a jungle: it has all the answers, but also many answers that are wrong, or highly dated, in which case the right answer might be lurking all the way down at the bottom of a page, written down by someone who does not really master English

Some useful guidance by Jason Lemkin, a VC. Two items on the list stand out:

The initial decision is made within 20 minutes of the first face-to-face. Make it exciting, speak with data, and get to the point. The initial Yes, Maybe or No decision is made within 20 minutes. So save slides 20–200 for questions and back-up.

Making stuff up is death, or close to it. If you don’t know the answer, just say that, it’s fine. But make something up that the VC knows the answer is otherwise … that’s almost always a No right there.

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Most technology investors have a decent understanding of the market context your startup is operating in. So there is no need for that awe-inspiring, eye-opening, TED-talk style introduction presentation that plants an idea in the audience head they never heard of 17 minutes before.

Most VCs I speak to value a deck that makes it clear what the company is doing, how to compare/contrast it to companies and technologies they already know, how for the development is and what the background of the team is.

So, an Apple product launch-style is not needed, but still there are some pitch deck hygiene factors. Your deck should look decent and professional, not only so that the VC understands it, but maybe even more that the VC gets confidence in you as a professional communicator:

• Can you sell to potential customers?
• Can you sell ideas to the board?
• Can you sell to investors in future fund raising rounds?

The strategy “I sent a bare bone deck in standard PowerPoint format because we spend our time building a company instead of presentations” might look cool, but it will leave a lingering question in the investor’s mind.

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