People think that it's great when people are tweeting about them during a presentation. At Excelerate Labs, we have learned to be the guy who will make people stop tweeting for 10 minutes. And this is the story of how I have learned to do that.
1. It's all about the story!
Before doing anything, I had to find my story: how am I going to tell my message, how to make people remember Pictarine the morning after they’ve had some drinks. This was our chance: be different, be memorable!
All the best stories share the same patterns. One simple message, with a hook that really gets your attention, where you remember some very specific details and respond emotionally. To better understand this, it really helped to read Made to Stick.
Based on this book, I created my story by writing one idea per slide: “Photos are more engaging than reading text,” “demo of a photo feed,”.... I pitched my presentation like this for 2 weeks, with only white slides and black text! Each day, I was playing with the story, adding some ugly photos as placeholders until the story was compelling enough to go to the next step, but minimizing the time I spent on design.
2. Slides: simple and beautiful
Next, it was time to illustrate the story. Most of my slides were only one photo or do no have more than 3 words. You want people to focus on you, not to try to read a slide.
I spent at least 10 hours to find the good photos for a 10 minutes presentation. Finding beautiful photos with the good resolution is hard. I used Google Image with a filter on large size pictures and bought some on Fotolia.
I made my slides myself with Keynote, as I preferred to have a total control over them. I spent some time learning how animations work, and to create a unique look, I used the same background as our app. Every slide has to be perfect: text, photos, animation.... It took me at least 20 hours to create 40 slides!
I strongly recommend you to read the amazing book Presentation Zen, your slides will never be the same!
3. Be yourself, but be inspired!
My presentation looked like me, and you have to find your own style, you have to be yourself. But there are also others you can learn from. One week before Demo Day, no matter how I changed the pitch, I was not satisfied by the way I presented our product... Especially for a non-native English speaker, it was hard to find the good words to use. So I spent some time watching Steve Jobs’ keynotes on Youtube, to really understand why you always think his products are like magic! I jotted down so good sentences to reuse in my pitch and it helped me a lot. So I encourage everyone to find inspiration with the best speakers!
4. Pitching “lean”
Troy told us that during the month of August, we will go through our entire pitch at least 100 times.... and of course he was right! At Excelerate, we had to pitch in front of Troy, Sam and sometime other people everyday, including the weekend! And each time, something was wrong: your story sucks, your story sucks again, this joke is not funny, improve your pronunciation, this photo is ugly, stop pacing when you talk, keep eye contact with the audience... Feedback with one day iterations – this is lean pitching!
The last 3 days, all rehearsals I have made alone were without slides: in the bus, at 1871 or at home.... You are the pitch and you don't need any slides!
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5. D-Day, on stage
Of course, it was hard to sleep the day before Demo Day, but we had already had a complete rehearsal at House of Blues the day before. We knew exactly what was going to happen and this has helped a lot to calm my nerves.
Max, my cofounder, was my amazing “human clicker”: he was backstage and took care of running the slides, so I could focus only on the pitch. When you are backstage, ready to go on, you don't hear people around you, you are only focus on one thing: I don't want to mess up! And finally, you walk onto stage, and that is the best moment of the summer!
I would love you to share your presentation experience. So leave a comment and come today for Excelerate’s Community Showcase! You can buy tickets here.
