It might be time to give your deck another look.
When you send a deck to a potential client or an investor, what are you hoping to achieve? You want to tell them a story. In the case of an investor, you want to tell them the story of your company so far and to a potential client, you want to paint a picture of their future in which you are an integral part.
Over the last few months, I have come to find this practice absurd.
Why? Not because telling stories is weird, but rather because slides are not a natural way of doing so.
Bear with me here.
Working in the chatbot space has afforded me the unique opportunity to reimagine a world with far fewer graphical user interfaces than we have today. In such a paradigm, decks seem bizarre.
Think about it.
Slides were made as a visual aid to your speech. They were made for in-person presentations.
Using them to convey information on their own? Nothing more than a creative hack used by startup founders and sales executives.
In an ideal scenario, you would meet with every potential client or investor in person to discuss your thoughts. The problem with this way of doing things though is that our measly physical vessels can only be in one place at a time.
This is why we use decks. Each slide answers a hypothetical question that you expect the person on the other end to ask and perhaps more importantly, you can attach them to a mail and mail merge the deck to several people at once.
Is it just about the decks?
On a broader level, I am questioning the basic need for large parts of the internet. You can’t explain your company’s service to every single person interested, so you create a landing page which in itself is the best way to communicate about your offering to users. You can’t have a weekly face to face with all your current clients so you send out an email newsletter. We have created whole new mediums of communication that get around the problem of not being able to talk with someone face to face. I think that chatbots will help us get around this issue.
They allow us to simulate a conversational interaction where it was otherwise not possible. Bots are not going to replace every interaction we have with technology, but they definitely give us cause to re-examine the way we interact with computers today and ask ourselves: could a bot do it better?
Inspired by this idea we decided to try it out. We converted AirBnB’s early pitch deck into a bot.
Here is the original deck
Like the PitchDeck Bot and my thoughts here? Click the applause below. It lets others see the story and helps me in reaching out to a lot more people 🙂
We are a bunch of nice people working to create something really cool and valuable for our customers. Interested in working with us? Drop me a line at ish[at]hellotars.com
Ish is the co-founder at Tars. His day-to-day activities primarily involve making sure that the Tars tech team doesn’t burn the office to the ground. In the process, Ish has become the world champion at using a fire extinguisher and intends to participate in the World Fire Extinguisher championship next year.
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