Another take from the Office 2.0 conference. Making presentations. A track was dedicated to companies announcing their new 2.0 wares, the most impressive part of was how bad they all presented. So if you don’t want to be road kill at the next demo op, here’s a few helpful pointers.
No 1. If your presentation starts with “A Web 2.0 site for sharing documents” (one actually did), or “A Twitter for project collaboration”, I’m back to checking my feeds. I don’t care that you look like Angelina Jolie. You’re not her. If you can’t figure out what you do on your own, I’m not going to bother talking about it.
No 2. iphone.mycool20app.com is not a product. It’s a useful feature alright, the iPhone is somewhere between the half-smart phones and full feature PCs, and does deserve a bespoke UI. But myself, I don’t have an iPhone word processing problem to solve. Or maybe I just don’t know about it. Maybe someone just made a million dollar from writing a document while stuck on a bus. If that’s true I want it to be me, so captivate me with the cool thing I could do with it. Otherwise, new resolution on an old app is just not that interesting.
Two kinds of wrong
No 3. Learn to use the damn browser.
This was bugging the hell out of me for the entire hour. Everyone who walked on stage blew up their credibility before the first sentence by not figuring this one out. To sell software for a Web browser without knowing how to operate one …
Here’s the thing. The entire demo is presented on a large screen visible from the back of the room. But half the screen is taken up by the Firefox window title, menu bar, oversized toolbar, bookmark bar, Google search bar, status bar and Windows task bar. I did not come to see Firefox running on XP, I came to see your Web app. F11 it!
(Conference organizers may want to install the FullerScreen extension)
No 4. Speaking of talking, less is more.
Some people fear going on stage and talking in public, which is ironic because the whole point is to let the application do the talking. And in a good presentation, I only need to hear your name and when you’re done. So don’t be afraid, embrace.
In fact, here’s a killer advise. Eat lots of garlic. This will help you keep your mouth shut. The more you talk the more you’ll bore. I’m not trying to be rude, it’s just that public speaking is very hard, as hard as building that new app you just barely finished, that is about to change the world, and you have more important things to do, all those features, than practicing public speaking. So just take this as an opportunity to say the minimum.
Let’s start with the elevator speech. Whatever others told you about it is wrong. Do not start with the elevator speech. You’re getting on stage, nervous, fumbling, half coherent as you pick up the pace, I just finished reading a post, not yet the mythical captive audience.
Chances I won’t hear half of what you said, and barely understand the rest. So don’t sweat. Don’t say anything important up front, or for that matter anything.
Start by showing me what your app does. Do you have a new cool way to share slides? Show me a bunch of slides. I want to know that I’ll look good sharing my slides with others using your app, before we get to the next step. Just show me the app. Next, show me how easy it is to use. Whip something simple, maybe advanced feature or two. Don’t go over them, I’m not here to learn how to use your app in 3 minutes, I’m here to learn if I want to use it. I’ll pick up the screencast later.
And for that matter, don’t tell me about your patent pending Google crashing technology, I’m not a VC hoping to flip your IP. And don’t tell me about your access control for limiting sharing, I haven’t decided to use it yet, so I don’t have an access control problem. Besides, if I want to know, surely your Web site has all the skinny.
Assuming I’m still following, I want to see a slide with your company name and URL. Why? Because I ignored you the first time you walked on stage, and now is my chance to persist it to disk. Keep it on screen for at least half a minute, I don’t have my Web 2.0 Conference Note Taking App fully loaded yet.
By this time I already decided exactly how much I’m willing to pay to use your paradigm shifting solution, so let’s see if we can meet half way, tell me exactly how much it will cost. Don’t assume I’ll know its free. And tell me the other side of cost. You see, I won’t bother registering any of this if I think you’re going to run out of seed money next month, I need to know you’ll be around.
Now, this is very important. I’m a better judge of how long you’ll stay in business than any wishful thinking plans you wrote up to appease investors with the attention span of five PowerPoint bullet points. So keep the spin for them. That’s the only reason I care if your team struggled a year to scale this into a Java app, or if it’s something you whipped out from the LAMP. I’m really looking at how much this costs you to run vs what I think you’ll be bringing in. And I correlate your burn rate myself.
No 5. Have fun. No seriously. I’d rather not create another boring presentation to highlight project milestones against requested features and outstanding bugs. Convince me I’ll have fun doing that using your app.
Kitty
Assaf