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Welcome back Launch Key 🚀 community!

No matter where you are in life, you’ve had to tell someone what you do for a living.

How have you improved your elevator pitch?

Mine has changed dramatically over the years as I have leveraged great ideas from tech icons as well as adapted new thinking from today’s young turks.

Get in there and see if you find a nugget that helps you do the same.

Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

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Pull to Eject

The gist of this Launch Key community is that we all should start something - no matter our age.

And today, those types of startups probably won’t require outside capital. Or need a pitch deck.

But being able to tell a great business story is still necessary.

• Its necessary for your own product development

• Its necessary when you open a bank account

• Its necessary for sales language

• It’s necessary for market differentiation

• Its necessary if you ever need to hire

The business story is the fabric that weaves together your vision, customer needs, product fit, competitive landscape and value.

I got a headstart making slides before PowerPoint even existed. Thanks to Launch Key subscriber Paul Gebhardt, not only did I buy a Macintosh, I had an early copy of Aldus Persuasion. And with a local Athens, GA service bureau, I delivered professional slides for grad school presentations in the late 80’s. I probably got better grades than my content deserved.

Yes - I know how that dates me. But it also gave me a ticket to self employment. Business presentations would become a daily ingredient for the masses.

No one was better at that than Steve Jobs.

His Macworld keynotes were legendary. He simplified paradigm shifts about how you’ll use new technology not how it was engineered. Take a few minutes down memory lane to see his famous 2001 introduction of the iPod.

Did you notice anything about the slides behind Jobs?

Many only had a few words - or one picture - on them. They weren’t littered with every single detail. Jobs sold the iPod with personal use details as he explained the benefits of the revolutionary product. I still have one.

If you are as old as me, you remember the Apple vs Microsoft battle for the desktop. Bill Gates was the polar opposite to the Steve Jobs simple slides. He put far too much on every screen.

We all got more software than we needed as personal computing power exploded. PowerPoint became a staple. And ran the same playbook as desktop publishing before – slides became dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Anybody could make them.

I tried various ways to make my slide presentations stand out.

I hired professional designers to build custom templates. I had writers on staff who crafted better verbiage and edited my pitches.

The tools have always been a commodity and I changed them a number of times.

Aldus was sold to Adobe and eventually shuttered. I tried to make PowerPoint work. I liked Prezi for a minute. I made it harder than it had to be by only delivering HTML presentations. Eventually I came back to the best Mac solution - Keynote. Today there are libraries of gorgeous templates that can make anyone ‘look’ professional.

How have you improved your own presentations over time?

I have been amazed in recent years when I’ve been presented with slides that still looked like they were built in 1990’s templates. If your firm is trying to use every pixel on the screen, it’s time to shop firms.

It still comes down to the content.

• Edit your copy

• Turn 1 busy slide into 3

• Tell simple stories on each screen

One of the young turks I really like is Shaan Puri of the My First Million podcast. In between interviewing interesting entrepreneurs, he also gives away great advice.

One of those episodes worth a listen is about the simple pitch formula he’s used to raise millions of dollars. Shaan doesn’t care about the visuals at all (and I think I could help him there). But his successful pitch outline is a modern take for those of us who are old enough to be his uncles and aunts. 😉 

You may not need to raise money. But this framework for business story telling works.

The point is, we’ve all made more presentations than we care to admit. And we probably copied and pasted far more than we should have. If you are starting some new hotness, there is no reason to use old and busted presentation ideas.

Do yourself a favor and follow a link or 2 in this newsletter. You too might find that old dogs should learn new tricks.

A fresh take is good for every business.

Now go launch something 🚀 

Modern Tools

Can AI make presentations better?

Maybe.

Gamma has everything you need to quickly create and refine content with advanced AI.

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Old School Wisdom

As a venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki listened to thousands of crap pitches before be created the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint:

1. Pitch the entire business in 10 key slides

2. Be able to present it in 20 minutes

3. Use nothing smaller than 30 point type

I have used this many times in telling a business story. Sure, the meeting was set up for an hour. But if you can succinctly tell your story in 20 minutes, the quality of discussion is far superior.

Every time.

Free Knowledge

Garr Reynolds TED talk on storytelling is also great inspiration for improving your business story.

As a Professor of Management and Design at Kansai Gaidai University, author, designer and world-renowned communications consultant, Garr helps others achieve “more” by embracing the power and beauty of “less”.

Recommendations

🏆 IDiyas : Weekly patent newsletter highlighting the most prolific inventors, engineers, executives and entrepreneurs.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🧠 Seven Deadly Stupidities : Discover the patterns that lead to failure and learn how to avoid them.

🤓 Product-Led Geek : Get your FREE GROWTH TOOLKIT and join over 7000 founders and leaders learning how to scale their B2B software companies with product-led growth and product-led sales.

Visual Crapshoot