10/20/30 Rule of Power Point

Ever heard of the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, selling a business idea etc.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting. If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business or idea, you probably don’t have a business or a worthwhile idea. The ten topics that people normally care are:

Problem
Your solution
Business model / proposed working structure
Underlying magic/technology
Marketing and sales / how do you plan to go about it
Competition / constraints
Team
Projections and milestones
Status and timeline
Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Normally, you have an hour time slot for any presentation, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations normally have text in a 10/12/14 point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of sync. The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. This pitfall has to be avoided. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points and you are guaranteed that it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well.

Observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint and be a success.

(this is not my original idea. I read it on web about 2 years back and have found it to be quite useful)