SlideMagic Blog

Entrepreneurs can get very excited sometimes: “This is amazing, that is amazing, this is better, that is better”. There is basically no single aspect where the product (concept) of their seed-stage startup does not completely destroy the competition with their existing solutions that somehow served the market for the past decade. Also, commercialisation is all but in the bag after we sign that one big corporate strategic partner next month. Even the smallest of questions / challenges by potential investors are met with a relentless pounding of counter arguments even before she finished making her point.

Investors like enthusiasm, but also value realism when it comes to taking an individual on board that will have to return part of not all, of their funds to their own investors. When it sounds too good to be true, there is probably something hiding somewhere. Venture investors take calculated risks. If your company is a 100% sure huge success, valuations would be sky high, but investor returns the same as government bonds.

Cover by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash

Yes, I am a computer science engineer, but I graduated back in 1992, so in order to get my coding skills back up I am going through an accelerated refresher course. Here is what it takes me to master new concepts via self study. It might inform people that are writing presentations / courses to train others:

1. I speed read through a chapter to vaguely familiarise me with the new concepts, I don’t even attempt to understand the code examples.
2. Put the material away.
3. I re-read the whole text properly now, forcing myself to continue if I don’t get things 100%. It is here where my brain starts protesting (“please do something else, this is boring”).
4. Put the material away.
5. Now, I go through everything and don’t continue until I understood everything
6. Finally, I start doing exercises, and discover that I actually did not get some basic things, forcing me to go back into the text
7. In a few bursts of effort I complete the exercises.

The rest pauses in between are key to me understanding this. In the earlier phases of the process, my brain is fighting boredom, and the last phases, my brain is literally stuck, needs to pause, but somehow gets itself together to crack on.

Cover image by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

I had the opportunity to look over the shoulder of a VC going through decks in her inbox. The first decision is “archive/delete” instantly or keep for closer analysis. Here is how this decision got made:

• She opened pretty much every attachment
• Quick page up and down through the whole deck to see what it actually looks like / what info is inside / (typos cost you points here, see yesterday’s post)
• Then the most important bit: trying to understand (quickly) what the company is actually trying to do, this is not as obvious as it sounds with many pitch decks
• Two quick filters: 1) “Do we invest in this type of company at all?” 2) “Is it even possible that this can ever work as a company if all risks were taken care of?”
• Quick browse of the team page and boom, the first decision is made.

Cover image by Mario Rodriguez on Unsplash

And they say different things about you:

Type 1. You could not be bothered to invest the extra time to weed out obvious mistakes (and I am sometimes actually guilty of this on this blog, when jot down a quick idea).

• Small typos with a red underlining from the spell checker
• Obvious grammar mistakes resulting from incorrectly rewriting a sentence.

Type 2. Mistakes which you did not catch because you did not detect them yourself.

• Picking the wrong word in the wrong context (words that sound the same but mean something different)
• Less obvious errors in grammar.

When an investor reads your investor deck, she will probably forgive you, depending on the context. Sloppy “type 1” errors are OK in small informal notes, but leaves her wondering whether you would have the drive to weed out any source possible reason to lose a pitch in high-stake, all or nothing, efforts. I see many type 2 errors in documents by entrepreneurs who are non-native English speakers, and here it might trigger the “ultimately we need to get a US CEO” knee jerk reaction, as she is worried that you are not “presentable” enough to represent the company to potential big clients and/or future investors.

Better have that “all or nothing” deck checked by a native speaker.

Cover image by Ben Hershey on Unsplash

I started writing my first blog posts in July 2008, and did not expect to be doing it still 10 years later, more or less 5 days a week.

I went from Slides that Stick, Sticky Slides, IdeaTransplant, to SlideMagic. In the beginning, I was looking really hard for stuff to write about, and trying to learn from all this experienced bloggers with their clever SEO strategies. After a while, I realised that it is easier (and more interesting) to just write about things that come across my desk everyday in the work I do. The fluffy, SEO-stuffed blogs are no longer here, and I am still going strong.

The whole journey has been really fun, and it built my professional reputation as an independent presentation designer with a very clearly defined micro segment of skills: investor pitches. But it also made me look out for new challenges. I can sustain the current bespoke design shop probably pretty much forever, but growing it is hard with only 1 pair of hands.

Many of of my blog posts now also include me as an audience, eye balling back the sort of posts helps me focus my effort to develop a tool or approach that ends presentation suffering in companies (audiences and writers). The awareness of the problem is now well established (with great help of Garr Reynolds and other early visionaries): people recognise when a presentation is bad. The next step is creating something practical that makes it easier for people to change.

We have seen them all: a slide that describes four market segments. 4 boxes with a couple of bullet points next to each box: some detail about growth, size, remarks about a competitor, some new product development that happens in one market, in short: stuff.

This slide is the end product of an analysis, you did your homework, all the facts are in, and most people put it straight in the presentation deck. They are skipping an important step: create the slide that tells the story.

How to extract and visualise it?

1. Put your busy slide aside
2. Write down in “broken” short-hand bullets what is actually going on. “There are 4 markets, 2 big slow growing, and 2 small high growth, and it is in one of these where we have a unique opportunity”
3. Now decide on the visual composition. Eye balling the story above, it looks like it is some sort of 2x2 showing the 2 types of markets alongside axes of size and growth, with a call out coming out of the market with the opportunity showing why.
4. Create your slide and double check against your busy starter slide whether you forgot anything absolutely essential.
5. Now, make your busy slide even more busy, adding all the facts and figures and store it as a backup in the appendix.

Now you have 3 levels of story:

1. There are 4 markets, and we should go for market number 3.
2. The reasons why number 3 is so attractive (requires a bit more reading/listening)
3. The full detail of all the markets (requires a lot more reading).

Presentations should look beautiful, but they should also be practical. PowerPoint decks are the main vehicle used in organisations to make and document decisions. PowerPoint decks are used for collaborations among colleagues, PowerPoint decks are shared on different computers with different operating systems. PowerPoint deck versions often last longer than the length of the job posting of the original creator.

So, when evaluating pitches for a new presentation design, weigh that practical component as well.

Cover image by Lachlan Donald on Unsplash

Space on presentation slides is scarce, and you need to think twice about every word you put down.

• More text takes longer to read
• Text blocks are as important as shapes in setting the layout of your slide
  • More text makes the slide look cluttered and busy
  • More text can create visual imbalances: some boxes have lots of text others not, some boxes have 2 lines of text, others just one, etc.

So what to do? Some of these are so obvious and basic, but hard to forget in the middle of the night before the deadline:

• Use short words… Yes as simple as that: “rationalise operational infrastructure” vs. “cut costs”. Long words take up lots of space and hyphenation looks ugly.
• Rely on mental short cuts that the audience already has: “non-organic growth strategies and portfolio restructuring” can be replaced by “M&A”
• Eliminate words that do not add anything to a sentence (buzzwords, filler words), or repeat what has been said before, (hey I am doing it myself here).
• Regroup things. Box one: “Improve the basics: operations, purchasing, pricing”, box two: “Enter the US market with product [X]”, instead of 4 boxes with uneven content.

Cover image by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash

I came across this slide in an investor presentation of a public company the other day. The slide is in the public domain, but still I disguised the branding in order not to “picking” on a specific company. It is an example of a slide that is probably a leftover of an internal consulting project that evaluated different market segments. In that context, it was probably useful, in this context (the investor who was never part of the consulting project team), it is hard to grasp what is going on in five seconds.

Below you can see my makeover.

• On purpose, I stuck to a simple, no-nonsense, everyday, “anyone-can-do” presentation style. Managers should be spending their time on running a company, not experimenting with fancy graphics in presentations
• I changed the design to a simple column chart that ties everything together. The original slide had market sizes, growth, potential, history, all in different places.
• I removed that 1 data point column chart that never makes sense
• I took out the packaging images with labels that were hard to read

Spam 1.0 was a blind barrage of emails sent to as many people as possible, hoping that the law of big numbers and a 0.01% response rate would make the economics work. You had to highlight your email address (jan at slidemagic dot com) in order not to end up on the global spam email distribution list.

Gmail spam filters pretty much solved that problem.

Spam 2.0 is the next wave. As a startup CEO I am bombarded by emails plugging developers and SAAS software tools. They are better targeted, have at least an offer that is vaguely relevant to me, and somehow get through the gmail spam filter.

And the worst part, the CRM systems that are powering these emails are incredibly persistent, they go on and on and on of apologising that I must be very busy and do not have time to reply to the email. It is a bit like the Crowded House song in the above video, after the CD track is finished (1990s…), the song starts again at 3:38 with “I am still here”.

I have developed a new instant archive “knee jerk”, as soon as you read an email with a familiar tone “Hey, we that as a startup CEO you are very busy but”, you send the email to the archives.

My response would have been different if the approach was really personal and tailored. Like the one you should be using when fund raising for your company and sending teaser decks. But that approach is too costly for selling monthly SAAS subscriptions. My opinion: mass marketing via email will never work.