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How To Promote Your Business or Service

Haiku Deck Rock Star Series: Crafting the Perfect Pitch

More than two years ago, soon after we launched, this ingeniously simple and informative Haiku Deck caught my attention. “Startup Pitch Template” was created by Jeremy Caplan, Director of Education for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and an accomplished journalist himself.

How To Promote Your Business: Startup Pitch Template by Jeremy Caplan

Startup Pitch Template, by Jeremy Caplan

Startup Pitch Template has proven to be one of the most enduringly popular Haiku Decks of all time, continuing to draw significant organic traffic, thousands of views, and dozens of social shares each month, more than 2 years after its creation.

When you consider that in the context of Haiku Deck’s origin — a radical pivot, inspired by the pain of putting together a pitch deck for a completely different business idea  — it’s pretty clear that people are looking for a better way to pitch their business ideas.

Our co-founder and CEO Adam shared this backstory, and his best tips for a killer pitch, in this entertaining Haiku Deck:


Secrets Of A Killer Pitch #sicpitch #sic2013 – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

If your agenda is to promote or pitch, Haiku Deck is your secret weapon — especially with recent release of new features like logo slides and custom color backgrounds.

“If your agenda is to promote or pitch, Haiku Deck is your secret weapon.”

When I relaunched my consulting business recently, I didn’t have time to create a website or even business cards, but I definitely had time to make a Haiku Deck! It was a fun, flexible way to experiment with messaging and imagery. (Compare that to the expense of creating videos, which can be expensive and nearly impossible to update.)


Vitamin C Creative Overview – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Rock Star Tips for Promoting Your Business

How to Promote Your Business: Sample logo slide

Sample logo slide

  • Use a paragraph slide to share a mini-manifesto highlighting what you believe and why, or to summarize your offering. Danielle Oteri does this beautifully in her Haiku Deck created to promote the Feast On Innovation (which sounds AMAZING, by the way).
How To Promote Your Business: Sample paragraph slide

Sample paragraph slide

How To Promote Your Business: Sample solid color slide

Sample solid-color slide

Your Turn

We’d love to see your killer pitches and promotional Haiku Decks! Please share links in the comments, or tweet them with the hashtag #hdgallery.

More in the Rock Star Series

How To Build Thought Leadership

How To Make Your Company Values Visible

How To Give a Killer Presentation

How To Give a Killer Presentation

Haiku Deck Rock Star Series: Presenting Like a Pro

Is one of your new year’s resolutions to up your presentation game?

Between the “fresh start” feeling and the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. — undoubtedly one of the most enthralling public speakers of all time — there’s no better time of year to tackle this elusive goal head-on.

Is there a perfect way to give a killer presentation? Well, not exactly. You’ll have to find your way.

You can take inspiration from these five outstanding live presentations, or get a few ideas for structure and flow from this new killer speech template.


Killer Speech Template – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Rock Star Tips for Killer Presentations

The MOST IMPORTANT THING I would emphasize to you, as you contemplate how to give a killer presentation, is that one slide does not fit all — if you’re presenting live, you need to have far, far less text than if you’re creating a piece of standalone content to be read (more on this topic in How To Build Thought Leadership).

If you’re presenting live, you need to have far, far less text than if you’re creating a piece of standalone content to be read.

If you’d like to share your slides after your in-the-room talk (which I strongly encourage you to do — presentations are killer pieces of personal intellectual property), I suggest using Notes to add detail and context or to create handouts, or copying your slides and fleshing your ideas out a bit more so they stand alone.

A few other rock star tips:

  • Make your presentation feel cohesive, thematically and visually, by identifying a central theme to inspire your words and images. See, for example, this presentation I gave at AMA Houston, where I used origami images throughout to evoke the Haiku Deck logo. (Notice also how I included most of what I said in the room in the Notes, to make the meaning more clear without cluttering up my slides.)
How to Give a Killer Presentation: Using unifying thematic imagery

An example of unifying thematic imagery

  • Mix up your slide types so they don’t get repetitive. Try to work in a few paragraph slides, a list or two, some charts, and some high-impact headline slides.
  • Be sure to keep your slide text minimal so you will never, ever be tempted to read it out loud to your audience, which research shows is by far the most annoying thing you can do as a presenter. Find out the other annoying things to avoid here.
  • Even if you have a “set” presentation that you give frequently, take the time to customize your message to the audience and the location. This could be through the opening and closing stories you tell, the examples you highlight, or the images you choose.

Your Turn

We’d love to see your killer Haiku Deck presentation! Please share links in the comments, or tweet them with the hashtag #hdgallery.

More in the Rock Star Series

How To Build Thought Leadership

How To Make Your Company Values Visible

How To Promote Your Business or Service

How To Make Your Company Values Visible

Haiku Deck Rock Star Series: Showcasing Company Values and Culture

There’s nothing quite like the last few work days of the year — they’re a bit quieter yet also more festive, with heightened camaraderie and (if your office is anything like ours) heightened quantities of hot chocolate and peppermint bark. Creative fuel, we call it…

In my book, it’s an ideal time for reflecting on the year’s accomplishments and tackling important, yet often-delayed, projects like capturing company values and guiding principles. Here’s one I put together in well under an hour.


Haiku Deck Culture and Core Values – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Here’s another nice example from Neal Kearney Realty:


Kearney Realty Co. – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Making values visible — and visual — helps make them real, and also sets the tone beautifully for next year’s plans and goals.

After all, if your company values and mission/vision statements truly matter, they deserve to be showcased in a beautiful, inspiring format, not pinned forlornly to the wall above the copy machine or buried in an Intranet folder.

Making values visible — and visual — helps make them real, and also sets the tone beautifully for next year’s plans and goals.

To help you get to that satisfying “done” even faster, here’s a template you can use to showcase your company values in a beautiful, visual Haiku Deck.


Culture and Core Values Haiku Deck Presentation Template – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Rock Star Tips for Making Company Values Visible

  • This is a great place to make use of the new logo slide type — try using it for the first and last slides of your Haiku Deck.
  • The paragraph slide type gives you a bit more text to work with for capturing a concise founding story, an inspiring quote from your founder, or a well-crafted mission statement. If you need more space, you can always add detail in the Notes field.
Rock Star Series: Making Company Values Visible with Haiku Deck

Sample paragraph slide

Your Turn

We’d love to see your company values in Haiku Deck form! Please share links in the comments, or tweet them with the hashtag #hdgallery.

More in the Rock Star Series

How To Build Thought Leadership

How To Give a Killer Presentation

How To Promote Your Business or Service

How to Build Thought Leadership

Haiku Deck Rock Star Series: Building Thought Leadership

We believe everybody has ideas and stories that are worth sharing — yes, you!

It might be social media tips, a unique approach to landing real estate listings, or thoughts about the future of education or ecommerce, but your unique expertise and insights can help others interested in your topic, and they can help you extend your personal brand as well through thought leadership.

At work we think and talk a lot about presentation technology and trends (naturally), but I don’t always take the time to zoom out and capture these thoughts.

When I noticed that one of the month’s showcase themes on SlideShare was “Future Of…,” it was pretty easy to put this together.


The Future of Presentations: Top Trends for Communicators – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

I uploaded my Haiku Deck to SlideShare (where it reached more than 10,000 people in a single weekend), shared it on all of my social networks, and added a link to my email signature. Sometimes I’m wowed by how quickly content like this can spread when you just put your ideas out there.

Sometimes I’m wowed by how quickly content like this can spread when you just put your ideas out there.

What kind of thought leadership content could you create? What have you learned or observed this year, or what trends do you see for next year? I’d love to see your thought leadership Haiku Decks out there, spreading ideas and inspiration.

What have you learned or observed this year, or what trends do you see for next year?

To make it easy, here’s an idea sharing template you can use as a visual model, plus my favorite “rock star” tips:


Idea Sharing Presentation Template – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Rock Star Tips for Creating Thought Leadership Content

  • This is an ideal place to try out the new logo slide type — you can add your company logo or even a picture of yourself to connect your ideas to your identity.
  • For this kind of highly shareable content, you want to make sure your message is self-contained within your slides. It’s a perfect place to use the paragraph slide type to be sure each idea is expressed clearly and fully. (Remember that more and more presentation content is viewed on mobile devices, where Notes may not be visible.)
Building thought leadership: Sample paragraph slide type

Sample paragraph slide 

  • This doesn’t mean you should cram your slides full of text, however — you want to keep your ideas crisp, clear, and easy to scan.
  • You can set your deck privacy to “private” or “restricted” while you’re working on it, but don’t forget to change it to “public” to get your ideas out there!

Rock Star Tips for Promoting Your Thought Leadership Content

Building thought leadership: Optimizing your decks for Twitter

Tweets with images win!

 Your Turn

We’d love to see your thought leadership Haiku Decks! Please share links in the comments, or tweet them with the hashtag #hdgallery.

More in the Rock Star Series

How To Make Company Values Visible

How To Give a Killer Presentation

How To Promote Your Business or Service

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