Today we’re gonna be looking at the slides of a Swedish company, most of you have heard
of, probably even used recently. This is a Spotify presentation.
The presentation we’ll be looking at today is not really an investor pitch deck per se.
These slides were created by one of Spotify’s early developers, Jon Aslund, who joined the
company in 2006. They were meant to recruit people for their team, pitching top talent
at local universities back in Sweden.
For the most part, this presentation is a regular pitch deck. At least up until the
middle of its staggering 70 slides! After slide 35, the presentation becomes pretty
technical, given the fact that this was addressed to computer software engineers.
However, the first half of the deck could easily be a regular pitch deck, given a few
more slides on the business model, user acquisition and go-to-market strategy. But it does a fine
job in depicting the company's value proposition, the team’s technical skills and most importantly,
the companies’ traction!
So, with this in mind, let’s dig into the slides, and see what we can learn here. Also,
what we would change in order to make the slides more compelling.
Right from the get-go, this is such a cool deck to redesign.
First, look at how well the information is laid out and how little text each slide has.
Reducing the amount of content on each slide is the simplest rule on the book, and yet
seemingly the hardest to follow. Short ideas with bold text make up the best presentations!
I already know I’ll have a lot of room and flexibility to play around with the slide
layouts and visuals!
The second thing to notice here is how well these slides have “aged”. Obviously, the
logo has changed a bit, and sure some of the assets are a little outdated, but the rest
of the slides feel totally current. And that, I can tell you, they owe it to simplicity.
A dark background with white text will hardly ever go out of fashion! That being said, this
presentation is 70 slides long, so at some point, I need to change the formula
in order to break the monotony and keep people engaged.
The third, and probably the most powerful thing about this Spotify deck is the traction
slides. These slides are the killer ones because they validate the company in such a convincing
way. Any investor would drool to see these devastating metrics. When you have tens of
millions of users, actively creating hundreds of millions of playlists in your platform,
you have an incredibly powerful story to tell. Make sure your traction slides stand out on
your deck because, rest assured, they’ll be the ones to get you meetings, and dollars.
So, here’s what I want to do with this presentation.
The first thing I want to change is updating Spotify’s brand with the new logo, and color
scheme. The new identity is much cleaner, and it will pop right from the cover slide.
I want to create two different color sets for this presentation: one where I keep the
dark background with white text, and a second one with the inverted combination. This will
help bring more variety to the slides as opposed to just having a dark background for the entire
deck. I also like to keep the green hue as a highlight that I can use on details, such
as titles, quotes, and icons.
I also want to keep the idea of having big titles on each slide. For that, I use Slidebean’s
Headlines which let me cover almost the entire slide with these short lines. I also chose
a thick font, Montserrat Bold, which helps emphasize each sentence even more.
The way, the way I choose images for each presentation varies a lot from one deck to
the other. For Spotify, my thought process revolves around the music industry; it’s
always had a rebel tone to it. It is an industry that speaks to the misfits and the trendsetters;
the ones who connect with their hearts and minds. All of this is the inspiration where
I want to draw from in order to choose my images. Unsplash is a great source of visuals,
and I was able to find images for all of my slides.
A little side note here: try to stay away from obvious graphic choices. Let me give
you an example: for slide 5, the original pitch deck has the logo of KTH Royal Institute
of Technology. The obvious choice would be to upload the logo of the Institute and move
one to the next slide. But to be honest, that logo seems so boring and so different from
the rest of the slides, that I wanted to explore a different path. I went ahead and simply
wrote the name of the Institute, and looked for an image that transmitted a technological
or academic environment. And the result, I feel, is much more impactful. These little
choices can go a long way in making your slides more interesting, so try to take these small risks.
Finally, I want to play around with different layouts to create more captivating compositions.
This is especially important when dealing with such a long presentation. Thinking about new
layouts can sometimes be a little overwhelming, so I like to use the Slide module.
In there, I can browse for different layout proposals, and create really cool slides with
a single click. After I add them, I simply replace the placeholders with my own content.
This process, I do for every single slide, until I have a colorful, dynamic and stunning
set of slides. I loved working with this Spotify deck because the very concept of the company
evokes a lot of ideas to play with. Let me know what you think of this redesign, and
stay tuned for our next presentation teardown.
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Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next week.