Building Our Deck For Technori Pitch
This past Wednesday, Josh and I presented Phaxio to five hundred of our peers at Technori Pitch. (For those of you unfamiliar with Pitch, it’s a gathering of tech enthusiasts that culminates with a showcase of five local startups, each of which gets five minutes of stage time, and a three minute Q&A session.) Presenting your startup is exciting and nerve-wracking; after all you could be opening yourself up to a bunch of mean-spirited criticism – especially if you’re pitching a fax.
Luckily, our pitch was well received, so I thought it might be helpful to give other early startups a glimpse into what it took to create our presentation.
Round One
A couple of weeks before our presentation I began to build what I thought was a pretty straightforward deck. I used simple fonts, kept sizes above 30 points, and stuck with similar colors. I used a couple of the slides that we had used in the past for sales and press presentations, and created a couple of new slides.
The deck was lacking. It was boring, and although it wasn’t particularly bad, it wasn’t good either. There were no exciting slides, and when you’re presenting fax you really need to engage the audience.
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Less Text (Round Two)
The first step was cutting text. Previously we had presented to companies that already knew they needed our services, so our slides showed off features instead of selling Phaxio. This time, we had to pitch the problem, then begin to sell the audience.
Why Do We Exist (Round Three)
The Sunday before we presented we scrapped everything, and I stayed up the entire night building a new presentation. The deck was full of vibrant images and void of pages full of text. Rather than letting people know what we did by writing it on the slides, I would need to explain the “story” of Phaxio.
The challenge was to find a way to get through to potential users in the audience (developers) while also entertaining everyone else. I scoured the web for hours looking for images that conveyed my points while also being simple, fun and relatable. This paid off. Non-technical people were willing to listen and understand the issue we solved, while developers waited for the more technical side of our presentation.
Build The Damn Product
Fax is an anti-buzzword, and I knew that people were going to be turned off as soon as I said it. My plan was to present the problem, sell the idea of the solution and then explain that the solution was fax. It was a gamble. If I waited too long to get to fax, people would get tired of listening to me. If I brought up fax too quickly, I’d lose the tech-elitists.
I wasted no time getting to our presentation. You’ll notice I didn’t include what we do on our first slide – something that Josh would change later – and I didn’t introduce myself, Josh or the company. I just jumped right in to the presentation. My first line was “Many of you are building new, exciting applications…“
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Really, Fax?! (Our Final Version)
Josh and I already understood why people hated fax and we knew it would be important to create a slide that let the audience know that we could relate to their skepticism. Right after I said fax, we moved to the slide of the Office Space guys lynching their fax machine. The skepticism turned to laughter and they continued listening. Well played us.
Polishing and Practice
We practiced the crap out of our presentation. That helped us get a feel for the slides which meant that we could continue to make changes and polish the deck. Josh hated any text and made an effort to rip it all out. We also added the image of the Rube Goldberg machine which helped illustrate the point that new companies would need to use fax to “mesh” into larger companies’ existing business processes. Here’s our final version:
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Advice
Images. Images. Images.
Text is boring (also, nobody wants to read your presentation). Go with images.
Have a backup plan if the internet is down or slow.
We saw this hurt other presenters. Make sure that you’re prepared with screenshots.
Your time is going to fly
We never practiced with people laughing so make sure that you budget time for surprises.
Send pdfs along with your slides and get there early.
I actually submitted only pdfs to Robbie (the Technori guy that manages the presentations). Later when he requested a ppt I sent that along as well. But, because he’d seen the pdfs, he was able to notice that his laptop was missing fonts that we’d used. Being there early meant we had enough time to fix this.
Top images credit to Bugpub.