Those terrible manuals

I own some pieces of music gear and most of these devices have a manual which is pretty much incomprehensible. Why is it so difficult to create a manual?

The opening page of one of my manuals

• Users have vastly different experience levels, some are just starting out, others are pros
• A manual serves different purposes ranging from a getting started tutorial, to a reference lookup for obscure featrues
• Sequential pages of A4 is a poor media platform to navigate complex technical content quickly
• Technical language is inherently boring and looks almost the same for descriptions of different features
• Manuals are written by people who understand the product in and out, they have reached a point where it is impossible for them to understand what issues a novice user might have when first encountering the product.
• Logical grouping of features usually do not correspond to the way people learn things. Some features in a certain category are more important (at first) than others.

Manufacturers try. Quick start guides, how-to videos, etc. etc. But still they are not pushing it far enough I think. They should take the perspective of an introduction course that someone would give in person. Forget about the logical structure of the device menus. Forget about the logical groupings of the content. Just record how you would go about creating something from start to finish and touching on all the device's essentials on the way. Basically, a presentation.

In the case of this drum machine, you could recreate the drum track of a well-known pop song, starting from the moment you switch on the device for the first time, all the way down to recording the full track.

---

Image via WikiPedia

Shana Tova!

Tel Aviv is celebrating the Jewish new year today and tomorrow. Misaligned holidays and weekends (ours are Friday to Saturday) can be inconvenient for clients and maybe even you, blog readers, but then, many have discovered the joys of slide decks being turn around over Xmas :-) Shana Tova to everyone who is celebrating.

---

Photo by Clique Images on Unsplash

Writing cold VC emails that work

Here is a very good blog post by Allie Janoch about 2 cold emails she sent: the first one got ignored, the second one led to the funding of her startup.

The second email explains what the company is about (surprisingly not all emails do), a tangible description of the problem it solves, meaningful metrics, an explanation why this is a fit for this VC, links for more detailed info, the right length of text, not too generic, not too much, good typography and paragraph spacing.

---

Cover image by Marius Christensen on Unsplash

"Please pause this video here"

I am watching a lot of tutorial and training videos at the moment, and many of them make the same mistake as the presenter who reads out bullet points.

Usually the introduction of a 10 minute video is an overview slide with 4 lines explaining what the course is going to cover. You read it in exactly 5 seconds, but the video narrator talks and talks and talks around the bullets for ever. Usually somewhere in the comments below is someone who posts a link with a time stamp and says "the real stuff starts here", followed by lots of thank you's from other viewers.

Videos are usually not very well scripted, an instructor just talks around the subject (in my case computer code that is edited "live" on the screen). But sometimes, some visual structure can be useful. For example, discussing pros and cons of multiple approaches to a problem, different software solutions, etc. These subjects are usually discussed in a conversational style where the viewer is losing the overall picture at some stage. It is better in this case to put in a very clear overview table where all the options are compared side by side.

For both these scenarios, you could ask your video audience to simply pause the video, asking them to read what is on the screen and press play again when they are done. Now, you can go through this video slide more as a voice over, providing additional comments, rather than feeling the need to read out the content.

---

Cover image by Bethany Legg on Unsplash

4 types of VC meetings

Why did the VC take your meeting after reading the pitch deck that you emailed?

1. She pretty much understood what you are trying to do from the slides you sent, and is now moving to the next stage of due diligence: figuring out you as a potential new colleague to work with in her portfolio.
2. She pretty much understood what you are trying to do from the slides you sent, already knows it does not fit her investment strategy, but takes the meeting anyway because of external pressure (someone who referred you for example)
3. She pretty much understood what you are trying to do from the slides you sent, already knows it does not fit her investment strategy, but gives in to a relentless pressure from you insisting that she is wrong and you have answers for all her questions and doubts.
4. She did not fully understand what you are trying to do from the slides you sent, and is really looking forward to sit down for an hour to clarity what's in the deck.

Think about which of these scenarios you are in. Think about which of these scenarios are most likely to happen. Think about what your chances are in scenarios 2, 3, and 4.

---

Cover image by rawpixel on Unsplash

Updated market numbers

Most companies have them: a slide deck with market size data by geography, segment, etc. Every quarter, half year, year, the source data gets updated. How to present it?

Maybe first: how not to present it. Create a slide for every breakdown in the report before thinking what the data means or is telling you. Then read out the percentages and growth rates page by page to the bored audience.

A better approach. Build an appendix that contains a good overview of all the data in the report. These charts are meant for reading, reference material to look up a number. Because the breakdowns and set up of the data is unlikely to change from quarter to quarter, people will get used to your chart layouts and can find their way quickly in the report.

Now drop the report all together and write down the key market trends you have experienced yourself. Open up your appendix charts and look whether these trends are reflected in the numbers. Adjust your list. Now, and only now, start making charts that back up the key trends you identified. The charts should only present the relevant data, a chart with just 3 numbers could do the trick. For broader context, people can open the appendix.

---

Cover image by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Back...

I just returned from a most wonderful holiday in Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Obviously these 2 countries are great holiday destinations with beautiful nature, interesting cultural heritage sites, and great food, but this trip also reminds me once again how the whole world, and especially Asia, is developing and changing rapidly. The more countries I had a chance to visit, the more I see that economic development does not really happen at a country, but at a city/metropolis level. Driving through Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, you see development and energy all around you.

Fifteen years ago, I was one of the pioneers to deliver high end design services from a relatively "remote" location (guy in Tel Aviv making presentation decks for New York and SV clients), but as people now get used to this model of working, there is great opportunity for young people with a laptop and an internet connection to do this kind of work also from the more remote villages in countries such as Sri Lanka, not just in the main capital cities. I receive more and more emails from people offering to help me with my work from smaller towns across Asia.

I will pick up my regular posting schedule again and I hope that you also had a great summer break.

---

Cover image via WikiPedia

Infrequent postings...

I will be spending time away from my desk over the next few weeks, posts will be less frequent than usual. I hope all of you are having a great summer as well.

---

Cover image by Maxwell Gifted on Unsplash

Mission implausible

This was the title of a recent article in the Economist. (The link is behind a paywall*). The general idea is that corporate mission statements are all the same, and are totally not credible. A company's mission and values is communicated by how it behaves, not what it says on the web site.

What does it mean for presentations? Putting your company's mission statement on page 1 is unlikely to get your audience to move to the edges of their seats.

* I actually tried licensing the content, which took me through an interesting process. "Do you want print as well?". "Please list all the countries where you want to use it" (Worldwide was not an option in the drop down). "How many months?". And in the dropdown menu of "who are you?", the blogger did not show up. In the end The Economist suggested GBP 500 for linking to an article for just one month that might have gotten them more subscribers. 

---

Cover image by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Not all grey is grey

Design mistakes happen to the best of us. See this screen shot of a blog post from a few days ago. The image the looks black and white, is actually not black and white. It is always good to remove all colour from all images, even when they appear to be black and white already.

In PowerPoint you do this in picture format - colour, see the screen shot below.

---

Cover image by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

How to make your presentation less formal

I thought this comment exchange on a post of a few days ago is worth sharing with all of you:

Disqus embedding is not perfect, here is the discussion:

Question: My presentation looks very formal for a first-level discussions. I need a way to turn presentation to rough sketches. Is there an app or an easy way to transform my formal presentation slides into paper napkin sketches?

My reply: I am not sure you need paper sketch-style slides to make your presentation look less formal. I would loosen up the existing design, cutting words, changing language, etc. One way to do this is to find another presentation somewhere with an informal style you like, now copy the style of the template and re-create your existing presentation so that it exactly fits this model. I am pretty confident that in the end, you will discard your "formal" presentation all together and run with your new deck in all meetings (both formal and informal).

If you insist on making "sketchy" presentations, here are two approaches:

1. Apple Keynote has rougher border styles. combine this with a custom hand-writing-style font
2. The manual way: recreate your presentation but leave selected bits out (boxes, maybe certain charts, arrows), print it, take a big marker, draw in the elements, scan the thing to PDF. It will look really good, but is hard to edit.
3. A variant on this: take a print out of the half-finished deck to your meeting, and complete the charts on the spot, "live". This could work in a meeting setting.

---

Cover image by Evan Clark on Unsplash

The business plan "voice over"

Business plans are usually "mechanical" documents: systematic analysis of markets, competitors, economics, milestones, etc.. It is the document trail of a strategy consulting project. Hard work, systematic, rigorous (hopefully).

For investors, it can be comforting that you can rest your hand on a beefy pile of paper, she will be confident that you have thought things through as best as you could, and that there is some direction and a sense of budget in that early stage company.

But, business plans make long and boring reads. They are structured as, well, a business plan, not an exciting story. Text is usually written in one go, as information is captured: creating duplications, side tangents, and an excess of buzzwords that were not zapped by an editor. Also, they are often written by more than one person, adding inconsistent styles on top of the duplications.

A good investor presentation (or even a good "business plan edited for investors"), is more like a "voice over" (lots of quotation marks in this post), of they dry exhaustive, duplicate, raw, business plan. Let's pause on this diagram that shows you exactly what we are doing, now look at this market in a new way, see this picture that shows why all existing solutions are so poor, in this long list of competitors there is this guy we should be worried about, look the CVs of our team, we all have a Phd in [x], yes I know, the obvious, elephant in the room question is [y], the answer is on page 35, etc. etc.

Note how this voice over is different from a summary, and how "voice over charts" are likely to look different from "summary charts".

A super confident entrepreneur could pull of an investor presentation just like that, a big PDF file, annotated with digital yellow stickies providing the narrative. For the other 99%, crafting an investor presentation would be translating those stickies with the voice over into a decent looking slide deck.

---

Cover image by neil godding on Unsplash

Microsoft, please beef up the PowerPoint web app API

There are 2 types of software approaches for writing add-ins for Microsoft Office applications: so called VSTOs, and web applications. VSTO is the older technology. It integrates deeply into Office and the Windows operating system, code is written in C#. This restriction to Windows is the reason that all PowerPoint plug ins and extensions run on Windows at the moment. The web application API is the newer approach, allowing you to code applications with standard Javascript/HTML.

This has huge advantages:

• It runs on all platforms and devices, not just Windows.
• Any coder who knows Javascript/HTML can hit the ground running with developing apps, a far bigger developer community than people who know their way around VSTO/C#.
• It is a lot easier to integrate these Office web apps into existing web applications (such as SlideMagic).

I have a lot of ideas to extend PowerPoint beyond the current plugins that offer in-app access to stock photo sites but.... PowerPoint is at the bottom of the priority list when it comes to API development at Microsoft. Excel, Outlook, and to a certain extend Word, get priority. Specifically, the ability to manipulate slide content is very limited (put text in the currently selected text block, or place an image somewhere on the page).

PowerPoint is the key communication tool that is used in corporates (not Word). PowerPoint is tricky to master (50% to blame on software, 50% to blame on the "eye for design" that not everyone has). Combine these 2 and it is the biggest opportunity for 3rd party developers to make a change to business communication, make a financial return for both developers and Microsoft, and make PowerPoint stand out over Apple Keynote. 

I do not know the reason for this lower priority, it can be a deliberate strategic choice and/or a technical reason. I hope it is the first, because it can be fixed most easily.

This blog is read by many influencers in the presentation world, if you can, please reach out. I "signed" this online petition as well, but I am not sure how much wait it carriers, feel free to add your clicks.

Please help convince @OfficeDev to beef up the PowerPoint web app API as soon as possible - https://t.co/Upa41YtRvI

— Jan Schultink (@janschultink) July 30, 2018

---

Cover image by Henrikke Due on Unsplash

Do you do websites as well?

The pitch deck is usually the first piece of marketing material a startup needs ("Oh no, we need a logo as well"), next up: the web site.

If your company has not launched yet, and/or your company is not about being a highly interactive game (i.e., the web site is not the product), seed company web sites can be very simple (and easy/cheap) to make.

The objective is to create a credible business card for your company that supports your pitch to investors and/or partners and/or potential customers

A check list:

• Get a decent domain name and use it as your email address as well
• Get an ad-free account with a web site platform such as squarespace or wix.
• Set up the colors, logo, so everything looks consistent with the pitch deck(s) you are sending out
• Check the content for your "business card":
  • Is it clear what the company does (if you are not in stealth mode)
  • Is everything up to date (including the (c) in the footer), names of products, people, investors, board members, etc. etc.
  • Are all the social media accounts hooked up (if they are active, no need to link to that Google Plus domain you got)
  • Is there a good team section: consistent head shots, work experience, links to LinkedIn profiles, twitter accounts
  • Proper and up to date contact details: a Google street view search does not take you to your parent's house.
  • If your legal name is different than the one you are trading with, put it somewhere in the footer for people who do background checks on the company.
• Images, diagrams are consistent with your pitch decks, take it easy with stock images and videos of culturally diversified teams working happily together that do not resemble the head shots in your team section (if they do however, this could be a great background to put up).
• The things loads quickly and shows up decently in all possible platforms.
• Check typos.
• Cut verbose, fluffy buzzwords

When you are ready to sell and your web site becomes a store front rather than a business card, you need to up the investment and effort to a completely different level. But until then, things can stay simple.

---

Cover image by Adrian Kirkegaard on Unsplash

Working with Windows full time

I am starting to get my head around building applications for Microsoft Office / PowerPoint, and this can be done easier on a Windows machine, so I am now pretty much all day working in a Microsoft environment on Apple hardware. (Don't worry, the result of the effort will run on Windows and Mac).

The whole Windows experience is fantastic and completely at par with a Mac. As I said in a post before, I now consider PowerPoint to be a better presentation program than Keynote, and PowerPoint for Windows is better than PowerPoint for Mac.

The only issue for me is to get the Apple keyboard and mouse properly integrated with the workflow (scroll directions, knowing where certain keys are, and getting used to the difference between CMD and CTRL). (And... the Logic Pro X music software does not run on Windows).

---

Cover image by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Rants don't convince

I think the success rate of convincing people in political rants/debates is exactly 0%, and this tweet reminds me of that:

Haley asks students: What do you accomplish by posting "own the libs" online? https://t.co/KN4zowACh7 pic.twitter.com/pZ0o845i8r

— The Hill (@thehill) July 23, 2018

Some things to remember when convincing people:

• You can probably only convince people that are somewhat in the center between view points, forget about those who are extreme/too far away.
• Telling your opponents that you are stupid, is a sure guarantee that they refuse to even listen to you (or people probably have to like you somewhat in order to believe you).
• Getting a resounding round of applause and lots of likes by people who agree with you is nice, but is no success indicator whether you changed anyone's mind
• Think what moves people on the other side, then work backwards to how that relates to their viewpoint on the specific issue that is on the table.
• People are not segmented in 2 camps across all issues (the way it looks like on election day), so stereotyping is unlikely to work.

(* End of rant *)

---

Cover image by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Do presentations "dumb down"?

I am currently reading the book "How Music Works" by David Byrne (Talking Heads). Off topic: it is a fascinating study about creating and perceiving music, highly recommended.

In the book, he talks about how music software is influencing music creation and draws parallels with what PowerPoint is doing to presentations:

"With the Microsoft presentation software PowerPoint , for example , you have to simplify your presentations so much that subtle nuances in the subjects being discussed often get edited out . These nuances are not forbidden , they’re not blocked , but including them tends to make for a less successful presentation . Likewise , that which is easy to bullet - point and simply visualize works better . That doesn’t mean it actually is better ; it means working in certain ways is simply easier than working in others ."

Byrne, David. How Music Works (p. 132). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. 

I agree that a good presentation irons out subtleties and nuances, but I would not call this dumbing down. A 10 minute presentation needs to get the investment pitch done with a very pragmatic objective of getting to the next stage of due diligence. In a sense you can compare it to the hit single with the simple hook that can create interest for the broader work of the artist.

---

Image via WikiPedia

Look like a company that gets funded

When you are going on your first fund raising round, you need to stand out from the crowd in 2 ways: 1) investors need to remember you, 2) investors need to remember you as a company they want to invest in.

Creating an over the top, crazy, original, cutesy, pitch deck will score you point 1, but it is a risky bet, 1 does not automatically lead to 2.

I can't find the exact blog post to link to, but Seth Godin always preaches to look like the company you want to be. And in startup fundraising, it is pretty much the same. Early pitch decks of successful companies that got funded just have that look of companies who get funded. Yes, a tautology. 

It is very hard to copy a certain look. Try and copy the look & feel of a famous poster in your presentation, and it almost always comes out differently. It is very difficult for the brain to look and reproduce things objectively. Yes, the margins are a bit smaller, the fonts are different, what is wrong with using black instead of dark grey. Each change is small, but they all add up.

Don't copy an old pitch deck slide-by-slide, but step back and put yourself in the shoes of an investor, and reverse engineer why she decided to put in her money after reading/seeing the slides. 

---

Cover image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Communicating musical ideas

In my spare time, I like to play electronic musical instruments. Recently, I amassed all my courage together, and started writing my own music, and send it carefully to a few selected friends, forcing myself to feel the responsibility of creating something for an audience.

It is very hard to communicate a musical idea in raw form, and it feels a bit like the curse of knowledge. The expert cannot explain an idea because she has all the context in her head that others lack. When I tap a melody on the table, I hear a symphony, the audience hears tapping.

So, sending over a basic chord progression and a rough melody line with a plastic drum beat, some strings, and a piano is not cutting it. Now, what gave me some encouragement, is to try and play famous songs using exactly these tools, going the other way.

Let's see what happens.

---

Cover image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Programming and Excel

As I am diving deeper and deeper into my effort to brush up my coding skills from where I left in with a Computer Science degree in 1992, I am surprised by how difficult it is to interpret code. Yes, coding languages have become very "compact": a simple expression can do incredibly things: define an object that returns a function which in itself returns an array objects where each property is again a function. The language is incredibly efficient, but it takes some head scratching to understand it. A bit like the English "42" is a shortcut for a  more elaborate explanation of the meaning of life.

There is a parallel here to building Excel models. I have probably spent a good part of a decade building financial models that value companies or evaluate strategies. You can also be very efficient in Excel:

1. Putting very long and elaborate formulas in just one cell saves you a lot of rows with subtotals and other intermediary steps of calculations
2. Using advanced Excel functions that calculate a value for you as a black box

I never used any of the above for these reasons:

• Errors, for example including the first row of your spreadsheet with the years (1993, 1994, 1995...) into your cash flow. A small mistake can make your model of by a few billion dollars.
• Changing models the next morning. If everything is spelled out it is easy to add a market, a scenario, change an assumption
• Changing models six months later, elaborate models are much easier to understand.
• An elaborate model makes it easy to spot other interesting insights, why valuations are different, and what actually makes the difference, and what is totally irrelevant.

When it comes to Excel programming, I am pretty confident that my approach is still the right one and I will continue to study coding to see whether my hunch is wrong.

---

Cover image by Mateusz Delegacz on Unsplash