Kickstarter presentation

This Kickstarter presentation is a beautiful example of simple visualisations that go beyond PowerPoint slides. It is a series of web pages, with simple typography, well-chosen images that are made uniform in style through a color overlay.



Slide design and web design are converging.

Open clip art

I am not a fan of 1990s-looking presentations full of childish Microsoft clipart, but this site Open Clip Art can still be useful resource for presentation designers. Firstly, clip art designers are moving into full illustration designs. Secondly, the site is a good place to find icons for your presentation. All material is free to use. As with all user generated content sites, there is no professional reviews before designs get posted, you need to select the poor from the great yourself.

An infographic that works

Usually, I find infographics too forced, trying to be cute at the expense of being understood. This visualisation of a big organisation over time is an exception. It must have taken some time to construct though...


Via Fast Company Design.

It does not look scientific!

In some professions people have gotten used to a certain way of communicating. Lawyers use complicated language, medical diagrams look incomprehensible (people want them to look realistic).

Recently, I changed a medical diagram to make it look less realistic, but a lot clearer to explain. I am still convincing the client that it is the right thing to do.

Origin of the elevator pitch?

Tom Tunguz claims that this is the origin of the elevator pitch:

The term elevator pitch originates from the very first demonstration of an elevator with a safety brake. At the time, elevators were hazardous, routinely plummeting down shafts when their hoisting ropes fell, destroying their payloads. In 1852, Elisha Otis invented a locking system that would catch and secure plunging elevator. Unable to drive much interest in his innovation, Otis organized a demonstration in New York City. He stood in the elevator as an assistant severed the hoisting ropes and the safety brake engaged. Otis' innovation paved the way for humans to ride in elevators. Today, the Otis company’s products transport 7B people every three days.

If true, this is a more interesting tale than the story that I thought was the source: finding yourself next to your client CEO going up in the elevator and having 1 minute to sell your idea.

Market sizing

Forecasting the size of a market that does not exist is tricky and nobody will have the right answer. Googling will result in endless research agencies or investment banks or consulting firms throwing in yet another inconsistent number.

With new markets, it is often as important to convince/teach an investor how to think about the market sizing than getting her to accept the answer, the point estimate. So merely quoting a random number without having a clue how it was derived is not going to help you very much.

So here is an alternative approach: make your own and keep the analysis very transparent. Build a spreadsheet that start with hard facts (populations etc., and slowly, slowly, adds more uncertain numbers. Use different colours for numbers with different confidence levels (green for rock solid all the way down to red for I-made-this-up). Put the resulting market size in your presentation, and add the detailed calculation to the appendix of your presentation.

Now you are on top of your numbers and understand where they are coming from. It shows you know what you are talking about, and you can teach your potential investor how to make her own market estimate.

And this, and this, and this

Rattling through 25 points about why your idea is great on page 1 of your deck is not convincing.

• You do not give the audience the ability to warm up, and first of all understand what it is you do
• You dilute the power of the arguments by spending too little time on each: big need, no competition, great team, we all heard them before
• You remind us of weak pitches where the lack of quality of the story is made up for by quantity: products with 25 benefits usually have no benefits

Instead, resist the temptation for detail and explain roughly what you do on page 1, plus the most important differentiator. Then follow with a presentation that is short enough for the audience to focus on your key points.

Popular posts in 2012

Here are some posts that people have been reading a lot on my blog in 2012:

• Aligning bullet points in PowerPoint
• How to create a McKinsey-style waterfall chart
• Putting PowerPoint text in a circle
• Semi-transparent text fills
• Building a logo page in PowerPoint
• How to make a 3D translucent ball
• Presentations on tablets
• About logic in presentations
• Keynote versus PowerPoint
• Combining stacked and clustered column charts

For me it is interesting to see that almost none of these posts were written in 2012, and that pretty much all of them are about technical PowerPoint software skills (there is a correlation here, as my posts have evolved a bit over the years). Presumably this is the result of people Googling when they are stuck in PowerPoint. 

Anyway, hopefully these posts are useful if you missed them the first time around.

Letting go of your favorite slides

When a company grows, a slide deck has to be used by more than one person. It is often hard for the pioneer presenter to let go of the old slides that she has been using for years. “What is wrong with this slide? When I put it up I tell this, this this, and this, these are really important points.”

Most of the above points do not appear on the slide though. The new presenters do not make them, the email recipients of the deck do not read them. The slide is merely a mental placeholder for the expert presenter to tell her story.

Time to let go.

6.1m and 6.1m

If important numbers in your presentation are exactly the same (sales are $6.1m, cash flow is $6.1m and we will have 6.1m users in year 3), it is almost worth tweaking the assumptions in your Excel model a bit so that they are just slightly different. Usually, there is no material difference in the accuracy of your forecast, but it will be a lot easier to understand.

Videolean

If you are a startup, you should consider getting yourself on the beta list of Videolean, a tool that promises to help you create promotion animation videos for $100 or less.


It is amazing to see what you can pack in just 60 seconds of video. Take Videolean’s on video for example: they pitch the problem, the solution, and present how the tool works.

A tool like this can replace a large number of slides in an investor presentation.

(P.S. all these videos seem to be using the voice over of the same guy, who probably costs more than $100, I wonder who he is).

Redundant table column headings

I try to get rid of them, most of the time it is obvious that a column contains a company name, a date, or a comment. Sales, profits or acquisition value are a bit more tricky.