SlideMagic Blog

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.

Photo by Jhonatan Saavedra Perales on Unsplash

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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Another blog post by an experienced technology user predicting the future where tablets and other mobile devices will take over from laptops. I disagree.

I think there are vastly different user segments in technology. Fred is a senior executive who is at the receiving end of a huge inflow of pitch decks, is probably on the road a lot, and has dozens of deal negotiations running in parallel most of which go via email. Tablets work great here.

Bloggers/journalists who can work all day from a coffee shop are probably best equipped with a tiny laptop or tablet with keyboard. Management consultants posted at a client out of town need a heavy duty work horse laptop with the biggest screen possible. Traveling salesmen need a device with lots of storage and good connectors to projectors. Developers need a high powered laptop with a big screen.

And… designers and analysts, they actually need a desktop… Having a calm creative space to create a new presentation. A big canvas to map out a new spreadsheet model. Being able to pull data from multiple sources you have open on your screen.

My own setup is a laptop, but it is hooked up to a big monitor. The laptop is just an insurance for the odd trip out of the office where I still need to access my data and/or make emergency edits / solve an issue for a template store customer.

You can see when people are working in the wrong device. The analyst making mistakes in the company valuation as she insists on working on that latest super thin/light laptop. The spelling mistakes in important emails written hastily on a mobile phone.

I am diving into the joys of user interface design and start to understand some of the anecdotes of Steve Jobs giving feedback to his design teams. That box that is just slightly, slightly off by a few pixels, or that slide that refuses to scale up to the exact size of the screen. You can spend days on getting the most trivial things right.

I am also looking around at a lot of user interfaces that were developed recently, and must say that, yes, things look prettier than in the 1990s, but are they easier? I am afraid not. Clunky fingers are not the best instruments to create business documents. Small screens are not the optimal canvas to be creative. Nobody remembers what a 3 finger touch press does, minimal interfaces look really cool but are useless if you can’t find what you need to find, it is weird to see how hard it can be to figure out how to create a new document, save it somewhere, find it again, and send it to a colleague. And most desktop software with mouse interfaces groups features by similarity, not by how often and when you use them.

In PowerPoint, I am using 25 years of experience and a custom toolbar at the top of the screen to bypass 90% of the regular user interface. And yes, my own web app has a few hick ups as well. I am working hard to fix things.

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Every founder should read this post by Mark Suster about the decline in seed funding:

• It has become a lot cheaper to start a company

  • Less $$$ needed
  • VC can wait on the sideline a bit longer to monitor progress

• VCs have gotten bigger because of institutional investors seeking alternatives to traditional asset classes, are lured by those big exits and IPOs

  • VC don’t have the people/patience to monitor a scattered portfolio of dozens of small bets
  • The small bet roulette economics don’t really stack up

Here is the deck:

So what does this mean for a seed founder:

Think whether you actually need the big VC check at the moment or can self-fund a bit longer. This will give you a bigger stake in your own company in the end, plus frees up a lot of time to focus on your product

Seed pitch decks with rosy stories that are just PowerPoint and no product and/or people are probably going to put in the “let’s monitor” box. A big bold vision is nice, but your deck should equally focus on the tangible progress you made with the product, and the credentials of the team.

This opens up an opportunity for a savvy angel investor though. Someone who really, really understands a specific market (better than VCs), and/or someone who has first hand experience of the talents/skills of an entrepreneur who might not “look good on paper” to VCs.

Most slide layouts for me start with counting:

• There are 3 objectives to the strategy
• There are 2 options with 3 evaluation criteria
• The architecture consists of 4 layers
• We are pulled in 2 different directions
• The market can be segmented alongside 2 axes
• The process has 3 steps
• There are 2 reinforcing loops

That first observation pretty much decides the composition of the chart, which you can design without the actual content. Putting in content first, and then worrying about layout is the wrong order to do things.

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I have been writing posts on almost every work day since 2008, and now and then I look back (like other bloggers do) and ahead. It has been instrumental in my career as a designer, without my blog, there would have been no way I could have sustained a presentation design business in Tel Aviv serving clients all over the globe.

The world of blogging has changed. When I started out, I was up against SEO-keyword stuffed marketing fluff, later the social media experts stuffing their feeds with links to stories.

I did basically my own thing, not worrying about any of this, and just creating a trail of stories that were mostly based on client work I did everyday. As a result, things will change a bit into the future, as my design work has now stopped and I am focusing fulltime on coding the 2nd version of my app.

Let’s see where it brings us.

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