SlideMagic Blog

I often say that slides are a safety net for the presenter in the early days of a presentation. After a number of runs, the presenter becomes confident enough to deliver the story pretty much without slides. Putting up the next slide is merely a mental placeholder that triggers the next point in the story.

As a presenter, you might fail to notice that after a couple of months your story can change/drift, and the actual slide that you put on the projector no longer back it up completely.

It is good to do an objective 10,000 km check up now and then, maybe with the help of a person who is not that immersed in the story as you are.

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In the 1980s, I remember plotting the results of science experiments in high school on millimeter paper. Logarithmic scales came in handy: they allow you to plot data series with big variabilities accurately, and/or they can show mathematical relationships beautifully (a completely straight line on a logarithmic scale for example).

Scientific charts are for pondering at your desktop, a different setting from a 20 minute all or nothing investment pitch. When you show a boring growth line and have to alert the audience that the tiny labels on your y axis are in fact on a logarithmic scale, you have lost some of your fire power. It looks less spectacular, and more importantly, it requires additional thought steps in the brains of your audience. The hockey stick simply works better.

If you are dealing with serious science, consider 2 charts right after each other, the first (populist) one showing the raw growth, then followed by a logarithmic one that takes the responsible scientific approach.

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Seth Godin always reminds me that it is impossible to please everyone, and as a result focus on people who really love and support your work.

The SlideMagic app and template store currently are small retail businesses where I am also in charge of customer service. And as a result, service at the moment is at the highest standards, you get a pretty experienced presentation designer to fix charts for your for $1 if things are not right.

Still, now and then you get interactions with clients who talk to you like the hotline of a major airline rather than a mom & pop store, requiring immediate refunds or else…

Hopefully one day SlideMagic will be big enough to merit an airline-size customer support desk, in the mean time I continue to develop things with followers who support me.

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Pitch presentations have become more common, to a level that they now match the request letters people used to write on type writers in the 1970s to pitch business proposals: most people have made hundreds of them, seen thousands of them, everyone knows how they look, everyone knows what it is trying to do, everyone knows the basics of a startup pitch.

Despite them being very common (and maybe because of), writing a good pitch letter was (is) hard. Writing the actual thing does not take a lot of time, but knowing what and how to write is tricky and that blank piece of paper is daunting.

That is pretty much the feeling you get when having to email a pitch deck to someone.

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Well said:

So a pitch deck:

1. Makes you in charge of the flow
2. Helps you show data
3. Is a check list
4. Lets you rehearse

“Earth shattering, stunning visuals that will convince the investor in the spot” does not feature in this list.

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I cannot find the original tweet anymore, but the gist of it was this: if you are pitching your company to investors and pretend it is later stage than it really is, don’t be surprised that the whole story will come crashing down if the VC starts discussing metrics that are appropriate for the stage you claim to be in.

It is better to be honest about the stage of your company, but then blow investors away with indicators that show that you are well on track to reach the next level soon, either with or without her.

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The other day, I watched a documentary about film scoring, in which the composer could not stress enough how important it is to listen to the director, and the director only.

In presentation design, I see something similar. There is only one owner of a story. In many cases this is the CEO of a startup who needs to raise money, the Senior Partner in an investment fund that needs to raise money, the CFO of a publicly traded company that is updating the analyst community.

This person has a clear idea (most of the times) what her story should be. Or this person might actually not be 100% sure about the story. Or have ambiguous ideas, or contemplating different options. Existing slides/decks or other people’s stories are an interpretation of that story, or a representation of last quarter’s story. These sources hardly ever show ambiguity or uncertainty.

Part of the challenge of being a good presentation designer is to have the credibility to stand up to the CEO and push back against her if you think it is wrong, but also challenge interpretations of other people in the organisation. Credibility you get from being a good visual designer, a good communicator, but most of all, actually understanding what the story is about at a reasonably detailed level. The latter has nothing to do with presentation design.

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Artists and designers often say that when you use a fresh pair of ears and/or eyes to examine your work again, things can appear to be completely different from how you remember them (both in a positive or negative way). Why?

The brain mixes up reality and imagination. When writing songs for example, I can get totally immersed in what I am creating, and after a while my brain probably hears what it wants to hear, which could deviate somewhat from what my instruments produce. Your brain added context.

Listening to it again the next morning with the imaginative context, can be a rude awakening… This is a similar effect as the “Curse of Knowledge”, which says that experts find it so hard to explain something to an audience that misses their mental frame of reference.

With first versions of presentation, I almost always try to avoid sending things out “hot from the oven”, instead sleep on it one night, and use those fresh eyes as a sanity check.

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People do not update their presentation decks that often, and as a result, case examples or data that was really cutting edge 6 months ago, can quickly become stale, or even incorrect. Putting up a slide with Stuxnet, the $1 Shave Club, the Gig Economy, mobile first, can flick a switch in the mind of a clued up audience to stop paying attention or worse, feeling offended.

Usually when examples hit mainstream news sources, it is not going to wow your audience anymore. Keep your presentation fresh, with insights and data that only you can provide (and are allowed to share): meetings with customers, discussions with portfolio companies, niche scientific and technical publications, access to different countries, languages.

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Small inconsistencies in the numbers of your presentation (28 or 27 portfolio companies, 27 or 28 investments?) can confuse the audience (they are trying to figure out the numbers instead of listening to your story and evaporate your credibility (if that number is wrong, what about the others?).

Most of the time, what looks like small mistakes aren’t actually mistakes, just different cuts of the numbers (including follow up rounds, excluding Ireland, first 9 months instead of half year, rounding, etc. etc.). The analyst can easily defend them and nobody did anything wrong.

But, these “mistakes” are a pain. How do you prevent them?

Create one very simple spreadsheet with the top line numbers that is the source for every slide in the deck, and in case your presentation derails into an argument about data, put in that spreadsheet in the appendix to kill these discussions in a second.

This all sounds very easy and obvious, but think about it next time, someone makes a direct edit in a column chart from the top of her mind (“hmmm, that 27 should be 28”).

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