SlideMagic Blog

A memory from my life as a consultant in the 1990s. Creating a document with dozens of people giving input and changing things is hard: analysts correcting mistakes in numbers, graphic designers insisting on following the house style, partners reshuffling the entire deck, fax machines breaking down, cleaners dropping the entire deck (without a staple and no page numbers) on the floor, copy machine operator shifts ending, etc, and all of this under intense time pressure.

I remember one introvert project manager who had his own survival strategy in this overflow of stimuli: towards the end, simply take all the charts, retreat in his office, and start reordering and rewriting every single headline completely. The headlines would be long sentences and in the right sequence would tell the whole story of the project’s conclusions. Sometimes the link between the headline and the chart beneath it was not 100% on every page, but as a whole the deck made sense.

That’s one approach, which would have worked even better if he had done this 24 hours before the deadline instead of 2.

Photo by Francisco Arnela on Unsplash

I use images very differently now in presentations then 10 years ago:

• Zero stock images that look like stock images (fake models, staged compositions, cliche compositions)
• I no longer feel the urge to find an image for every slide I produce to avoid forced visual analogies, and get left with a set of images in a presentation that are completely unrelated and inconsistent

Instead:

• Most of the time, my images reflect something real: the actual leadership team, the product, a factory, a city, a screen shot, the cover of a scientific publication, etc.
• I am still using commercial stock images if I need isolated objects (a bucket, a hammer, etc.)
• Sometimes I might go for a visual theme and try to find images that fit with the concept on virtually every slide (flowers, 50s, record covers, etc.)
• Most of the images I use come from the free site Unsplash. As a result, I don’t even bother saving images to disk anymore, if I need another one, I will search for it again.
• I often make all the images in a presentation black and white, to make the look and feel of slides more consistent, and let the accent colour of the slides (often just one) pop out more.

Photo by Math on Unsplash

Your text book story flow might not always be the one to use in tomorrow’s meeting.

• A 60-minute/75-page final Board presentation of a 3-month consulting project

  • Sequencing is important to take resistant members of the audience from common ground, via cold logic and facts to the conclusion that option 1 is preferred over option 2 and 3 that equal to “fall of the cliff”
  • In some business cultures it is important to establish the credibility of your work (assumptions, models, importance of people in the organisation you spoke to), before getting into the actual crunch
  • Meeting timing, having the whole meeting explode with a debate on page 3, while that highly insightful analysis is on page 7 is not helpful

• A 5-10 minute investment pitch:

  • The order in which questions pop up in the head of an investor might deviate from the business school investment pitch flow template. First, the investor needs to understand what it is you actually want to do, then it might make sense to take out “elephants in the room” before moving on to more important issues, but which are less controversial.
  • Experience differs vastly across investors, some might need the proper 101, others dive straight into the detail, derailing your carefully laid out story

No, I am not saying to throw that perfect storyline out of the window, and in 90% of the cases it is the right thing to do, but think whether your meeting might be part of the other 10%.

Sometimes, the good old way is still the best.

One of the main “side effects” of my new giant iPad is that I start reading magazines again that cannot afford/did not invest in good iPad apps, the screen is big enough to flick through PDF-copies of the paper format. It is great to broaden my news sources again (French, German, Dutch) beyond Anglo publications focused on a small number of issues.

I must say, the simple user interface of just swiping between pages without zooming, multi-directional navigation, pinching, multi-finger swipes, actually works pretty well, and is exactly the mindset I am in when developing my presentation app: 99% of business presentations do not require a fully immersive interactive experience.

Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

The past few weeks have been very interesting for me in my new role as a developer! I have switched platforms 3x now: first starting to explore plugins for PowerPoint (Windows Forms), then moving on to coding an application straight onto windows (Windows WPF), but now I am back in the world of Javascript that in combination with the Electron platform can produce software that runs natively on Windows, Mac, and even Linux with just one code base to maintain. The first intermediate end product will be a local presentation “presenter view” tool that does not require internet connections to deliver/show SlideMagic presentations (it is all a bit clunky still in the web app), and a 100% accurate PowerPoint conversion tool for SlideMagic presentations that runs on both Mac/Windows, and is totally independent of PowerPoint itself, my software is generating the converted files directly without the help of the rendering engines of PowerPoint (plugins).

This whole process is absolutely fascinating. Now that I go through things myself I have come to realise how important it is to master (at least part of) the actual core technology yourself as a founder.

To be continued.

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

1. The audience did not understand a point that you thought was clearly explained
2. The audience perfectly understood what you said, but did not buy it

Different problems, different homework cut out for you

Photo by Chris Moore on Unsplash

Not all feedback on an investor pitch is useful, for different reasons:

• The audience might not know the substance
• The investor who turns you down does not want to be (painfully) honest
• The feedback giver did not actually spend any time reading your deck
• Your mother loves you, whatever you say or do

Here are some deck suggestions that you should treat with suspicion:

• Include the $5b [fill in Gartner IT market segment] to your market estimate…
• …and make that billion number stand out in bold, italic, underline. Hit them with it!
• Change the order of pages 5, 7, and 8
• Keep the deck to 8 pages max
• Combine slide 23 and 24
• Have a look at that AirBnB pitch of 2010, and follow that structure, it worked very well
• Add 2 years to the business plan projection
• You need a vision page
• Some fancy animation will put some “wow” into this page
• Show how your technology can be used in crypto as well, that is hot
• “I am so proud of you my son, I always knew you will do well”

This can come from highly experienced entrepreneurs or investors as well (who might be expert in another field, do not want to hurt you, had not time reading your deck).

Photo by Anton Darius | @theSollers on Unsplash

Wishing everyone a fantastic 2019! As the entire world except Tel Aviv winds down for the holidays. I will use the lull in blog traffic to churn out some more lines of code, hopefully you will get to experience the result in the new year.

Photo by Brigitta Schneiter on Unsplash

My development work initially focused on Windows computers, while Mac users are likely to be the ones that are early adopters of new technology (big corporates with big IT departments usually run Windows and are less flexible to try something new), the market eventually will be Windows users.

I stumbled on a new software development platform that probably allows me to write one code base and use it to deploy software on Windows, Mac, and yes even Linux at the press of a button. This will cause some delay to the development, but can still work at the stage where I am at. I need to see whether this solution grants me the deep access to the operating system I need.

To be continued.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

I have been trying electronic pencils for years and years: different 3rd party iPad styli (is that the correct plural?), the previous Apple pencil itself and previous solutions by Wacom. None of these worked good enough for me to get rid of my note book.

I think has changed with the latest Apple pencil that works on a 2018 iPad Pro. The updated pencil solved a few annoyances when compared to the previous one:

• It snaps to your device (but still falls of in your bag)
• When snapped, it charges, no more need to stick it in the iPad connected
• It no longer rolls
• It has a matt finish and feels nicer to work with

The biggest issue though used to be work flow, with 2 poor options:

• Log into your sleeping iPad all the time when you want to jot something though in a meeting
• Keep your notes app running all the time and thereby letting the graphics intensive app drain your iPad battery.

That has been solved by a feature buried in the settings of the Apple Notes app: a simple double tap of the pencil on the screen wakes up the Notes app. The iPad is still locked as a security precaution, you can set the time it takes for the iPad to open a new note instead of displaying the last note you were writing to anyone who taps the screen.

Photo by Kim Gorga on Unsplash