Presenting your ideas

You have this brilliant idea of an application that will change the world. You go heads down working on it for months building a proof of concept (POC) for the application. Now you are ready with the POC and need funding to implement the application in real world.

You make an appointment with investors; meet with them and present your idea along with the POC

You are like

Investors are like

You have spent years perfecting your engineering techniques. Why would it be any different for presenting techniques.

Presenting is an art and takes a lot of patience and practice to perfect it.

Stages of presentations

1. Planning

  1. What message do you want to convey?
    • Example: “My application does financial management” is not a central message. Central message is something like – “Financial management is core skills that teenagers should know about”
  2. Use tools like MindMap to help with planning
  3. Work on the main content first. This will help you decide how you want to introduce the subject
  4. Timing per slide – 2 to 5 minutes
  5. Know your audience
    • Level of knowledge: Presenting to engineers vs executives
    • Size of audience

2. Start

  1. First 30 to 60 seconds are the most important part while presenting
  2. This is where audience decides if they want to listen to you or not.
  3. Start in one of 3 ways
    • Start with a question: “Do teenagers understand the importance of compounding interest?” – This technique gets everybody involved and allows you to know the level of audience
    • Something mysterious: “When I was a teenager … ” – This technique piques interest and generates more involvement
    • What’s in it for me factor: Understanding what the audience gets out of the next 30-60 minutes that they are going to spend listening to you.

3. Beginning

  1. Talk about yourself – This builds your credibility
  2. Let the audience know how long the presentation is going to be
  3. Let them know how you plan to handle question.
    • Keep questions for the end?
    • Feel free to ask questions when you have them?
  4. Give high level list of what you are going to talk about

4. Finish

  1. “So there you have it factor”
  2. Some ways to finish
    • Do a summary of the presentation
    • Call for questions
    • Have a short quiz

Overcoming Nerves

  • Practice, practice and then practice some more
  • Look around the room for happy faces in different areas of the room. Then look at them while presenting 🙂 This helps is multiple different ways
    • Makes you feel comfortable
    • Makes you look confident

During the presentation

  • Body language
    • Eye contact with the audience.
    • Standing up during presentation helps
  • Audience interaction
    • If audience is not interacting, ask
      • Yes or No questions
      • “Raise your hand” questions
  • People have micro-sleeps (day dreaming, thinking of something else).
    • For important points repeat it a couple of times
    • Use graphics instead of long wall of texts
  • Tips for powerpoint
    • Not much text on slides
    • Not too many slides
    • Include graphics
    • Think if it is possible to convert the list into diagrams?
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