Ban social media speak

Self-proclaimed social media experts have taken all credibility out of buzzwords such as engagement, social, conversation, sharing, etc. etc. Clean your investor pitch from social media speak or you run the risk of sounding like a social media expert.

Instead, to describe what users actually do, use human language. To explain how your business gets traction use really hard, quantitative, measures that add up to the bottom line. "Buzz" does not necessarily bring dollars.

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Art: Shepherdess With a Flock of Sheep, Anton Mauve, sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter.

Kawasaki: the only 10 slides you need in a pitch

Guy Kawasaki (the person behind the 10/20/30 rule) listed these 10 slides as the only ones you need in a startup pitch to investors. I agree and disagree with him.

I agree that these are more or less the 10 points you need to hit. But in order to hit these points, you might need more (visual) slides. Especially number 2: the problem/opportunity. A one slide explanation might not make the point emotionally. Or number 4: the magic, might take more than one slide.

The biggest problem is not which slides you need, the challenge is how to design them. Design is easy for the straightforward slides: title, business model, go-to-market, management team, projections. The other ones are a bit more tricky.

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Art: Rothko number 10, sign up for SlideMagic, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter

2x2 matrix clarity in presentations

The 2x2 matrix is a favourite layout for differentiating yourself from others. 'We, the good guys, are in the top right corner".

But people sometime force the framework somewhat. If you are having trouble filling the bottom left box, consider using a Venn diagram (a "best of both worlds concept").

If it is going to be a 2x2 matrix and your axis choice is a bit tricky, write things out in full. Rather than "ease of deployment, low, high" consider ignoring the axis name and write the 2 categories: "Big system integration project", "Up and running in 5 minutes". You can also write explicitly in the 4 boxes what they are about (BCG did that with their brand matrix: "dogs, cows, stars, question marks")

Framework in pitch presentation are different from those in a micro economics Phd thesis.

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UPDATE January 2018: we have now added 2x2 presentation templates to the SlideMagic template store.

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Art: Peterka Vlada, Sunset at Liberty Square, Oil on canvas, 40x28 inches ( 100x70 cm ), 2012
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"We can skip the problem"

Often, this is what a confident sales rep says when discussing the brief for a sales presentation. For industry insiders, it is true that you do not have to elaborate much about issues they already know. But I think plunging straight into features, benefits, and solutions is the wrong approach.

It is much easier to sell a problem than to sell a solution. Almost all my sales and investor presentations elaborate on the problem.

• For sales presentations, it is a good opportunity to discuss individual issues the client has. The best sales presentations talk about the client, and not about the seller. Even if it is old news for the audience, it is good to start your story on common ground. And most importantly, I often present the solution using a slide layout that I already introduced during the problem part of the presentation. "Here is that same slide we discussed before but now with that big messy part ripped out".
• For investor presentations, you actually need to educate the audience about the issue that your innovation is solving. So here the problem section is actually very important.

So, next time push back when they tell you to skip the problem.

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Art: Dalí Atomicus (1948) by Halsman in an un-retouched version
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Should you work for free?

I design a lot of investor presentations (hey, Google views me as the #1 investor presentation designer!), including pitches for startups. And companies that need to talk to investors are by definition short of budget. Many startups ask me whether I consider working for a delayed fee. Usually, I say "no" and that sounds harsh to a boot strapping startup. Here is a ruthless profit seeker trying to extract money from a small, fragile, company that could do amazing things for the world.

Here are some points to remember, and I invite all freelancers to use them where appropriate:

• Deferred payment is real money. Yes, you are not selling a physical product (nobody would walk into a car showroom and have the guts to ask for free vehicles with payment after the next fund raising round, if it happens), you sell time. But there is a real opportunity cost to working on one project: you cannot work at the same time for a client who does pay cash.
• Deferred payment is your own money. Most startups have some sort of funding, which means that they benefit from OPM (other people's money). Freelancers cannot. It is their own cash. (In my case where I am funding SlideMagic from own personal savings this argument is especially true).
• Startups do not equal charity. Startups want to become a commercial success. Doing pro bono work fore a cause you belief in does not equal providing free work to a company that is raising money.
• Success fees have to be so large that no startup will pay them. Venture capitalists require that their investments need to return 3, 5, 10 times their money. And VCs invest in a stage of a company where at least one risk has been eliminated: funding risk. The designer working on an investor presentation comes in before that, which would merit an even higher return. No startup has agreed to pay 10x the price of a regular project.
• The carrot, we will generate lots of work for you in the future does work for a big company that needs to feed a big fixed cost infrastructure. A successful freelancer will have no problem filling her work pipeline with other clients.
• This startup is not the only one. I get these type of requests every week. If I would say yes, I could spend 120% of my time working on a deferred payment basis. Why should I say "yes" to this startup and turn down the other 10?

And finally, there is a psychological argument here. Over the past 10 years, I have had very little success with deferred payments. Usually the startups who believe in themselves, pay cash, and stay happy clients for many years. The ones that seek deferred payments somehow don't make it, as if they know something already.

What is the solution? Some startups are happy to pay for a good investor presentation and see it is a crucial investment to get through the very first stages of their company. In other situations, I try to find a working model where I can be involved less to get to an acceptable result for a much better price.

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Art: Giacomo Francesco Cipper - Peasant Repast with a Young Beggar, 1725
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Investors, it is your track record

Many of my clients are venture capitalists themselves who need to go out and raise money from big pension funds or wealthy individuals.

There are usually two big components in their own investor presentations:

1. The concept of the fund (where/what/how much it invests)
2. The investor track record of the team.

Investors tend to spend a lot of time on number 1, but the thing that really matters is number 2. Unfortunately, most investors cannot say that they were seed investors in Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Uber. So the challenge of the presentation is to convince institutional investors that you can be trusted with their money.

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Art: Theodor Rombouts, The Cardplayers

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Overpolishing

Some stories are best served raw. The other day, a client pitches a wonderful startup idea to me. The company solves two broken issues (sorry for the cryptical language), and has a solution that changes something that has not been changed since the 1950s.

During the design process I felt somehow that we made it too polished, adding too many "and also, and also, and also" points. It is the full story, the full picture, but the additions kill the energy of the pitch. I think we should go back to the raw version and accept that in a 20 minute pitch we do not have time to cover everything.

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Art: Vertumnus, a portrait depicting Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, the Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590

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Presenting at a pitch competition: audience versus professional jury

They are different. The audience will put more value on:

• Entertainment value ("stunning" slides, unusual props, presentation style)
• Emotional connection to your business idea (not-for-profit ideas do well)
• Emotional connection to the speaker (is she sympathetic, an underdog taking on big bad forces in the world)
• Whether they actually remember you after a long morning of pitches (most of the audience will not take notes)

The professional audience will put more value on the business potential of your idea.

Focus on the objective: winning the pitch competition, which is different than receiving a cheque.

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Art: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Police Verso, 1872

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The excitement sapper on the last page

A good pitch should be a crescendo of energy and excitement. Ideally it goes up all the way through the story. But it is hard to avoid even for the best story tellers that in the middle of the presentation the audience attention drops a bit. Make sure to bring everyone back to the tip of their chairs at the end tough.

A sure energy sapper is a last presentation slide full of bullet points that recap the entire presentation. "Oh no, he is going to read out the entire thing!" When the presenter is at bullet 2, the audience has finished reading the entire page full of things they already heard over the past 20 minutes.

A better approach is to repeat one crucial visual, diagram, image on the last page that reflects a key point in your presentation. It will be visual memory anchor point for your entire presentation. 

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Art: Paul Klee, The Red Balloon, 1922

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How to pitch a VC, according to VCs...

There is no better person to get VC pitch advice from then the people who sit at the receiving end of your presentation. Here are startup VC pitch suggestions from a few well known people in the industry. Click on the image to see what to they have to say.

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Mark Suster, Upfront Ventures

Dave McGlure, 500 Startups

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Paul Graham, Y Combinator

David Rose, angel investor

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Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

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Art: Frans Hals, Regents of the St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Haarlem, 1641

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Big data overload

"Big data" is fashionable right now and many startup pitches emphasise how if an investor wants to put dollars in big data, this company is the best place to do it. Visualisations look similar: a big spaghetti of lines enters a box and out comes a super insight. The traditional IT-way of visualising the world: everything fits in an architecture diagram.

The problem: all these decks look and sound the same.

Architecture diagrams that describe the technology in a top down view are not always the best tools to pitch business ideas. The other approach is bottom up, story, and case example driven. Take one specific insight, and work your way through the system and show how it was produced. Super detailed, super specific, and super real.

Once the audience is convinced that this one microscopic case example works/is brilliant, they will have no problem believing that it works for the other 5 billion possible use cases. And in the process, they are convinced that you did not just slap the label "big data" on your pitch because it is the latest fashion.

Art: Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950, image by Matthew Mendoza

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