52 Bicycles

I presented on “Bootstrapping your Software Startup” yesterday at Barcamp Boston. The presentation had the germs of a good thing, though it was a last-minute effort on my part Thank goodness I got to see Rod Begbie’s ”How to give better presentations” (his notes here) in the session immediately before - as a result I may have sucked less. I hope I did some good in the room sharing my lessons from being in the startup game for a whilte, but I’d like to own some lessons of my own in giving a talk like this for the first time.

1. Black is the new black: A presentation with a black background is far more effective than one on white when projected from a computer. (I did this, so not so much “owning” this one, but it sets the stage)
2. Most logos expect a white background - including mine. So there was kind of an ugly block of white in the corner for my Element55 bug. Prepping logos and images for the black background doesn’t take a lot of extra effort, but it makes the logos look a lot better.
3. A bug is not necessary - I gave my bio at the beginning, so they knew the name of my company. And since I was giving the presentation as “me” instead of in my role with the firm, reminding/reinforcing the brand via that logo was counterproductive.
4. An email address and my name at the end is a must. “Let’s Talk” were the only two words at the end. While coolly terse, this left out information for people who wanted to follow up, and contrary to the message ,the lack of contact data may even have discouraged people from seeking me out afterward, when in fact I am more than happy to talk to my fellow and aspiring entrepreneurs. (Comment on this post if you want to get in touch directly - they generate emails to me that I can reply to).
5. Brevity is the soul of wit. I started late letting people sit down, then talked for over 20 minutes. As a result, there was not nearly enough time for questions and dialogue that would let me and my audience really benefit from the session. I think budgeting half the session for questions is the right way to go.
6. Practice cuts length. Based on the real content I wanted to convey, I thought I might have a 10 minute presentation. Instead, with my stumbles and diversions, it took me over 20. Even one run-through would have cut those substantially.
7. Slides are minutes. While I followed some good rules to keep my slides visual and not wordy, it was completely unreasonable to think that I could do 15 slides in 10 minutes. 15 minutes maybe, assuming the slides were lightweight.
8. Say less, explain more. I tried to cover too much ground in a short period of time, and as such gave some key topics short shrift. Each could have been a great 20 minute talk by itself, and would have in retrospect been better to focus on one topic in the time slot than touch on them all:
   1. Strategic considerations for starting down the bootstrapping road (2:1 rule, customer-need-solution, small problem etc
   2. Time/resource management for bootstrappers (sales-marketing-development-support approach)
   3. Five Ps marketing introduction from the software entrepreneur perspective
9. Listen to the audience. Again, my over-run meant that I got precious little opportunity to listen to those in my session, either to better explain my points where I unduly glided, or to share in their perspectives and wisdom, which was my real agenda anyway.

So hope that those who attended got something out of it (and I posted my slides here in case they are helpful reminders) and I appreciate the opportunity to not only talk about a subject I love, but learn lessons about how to speak better. My next public speaking engagement is tomorow night - and it will be better for my experience at BahCamp.  

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Technology Business, Barcamp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Reddit This