Ed Fidgeon-Kavanagh, the mastermind behind Clearpreso, launched his presentation design and consultancy business almost directly out of college, equipped with a business undergraduate degree from UCD. Although his formal education did not provide all the practical skills he utilises today, it did ignite his passion for presentations, setting him on the path to becoming a full-time “presentation nerd.” Clearpreso’s inception in 2009 was driven by Ed’s desire to escape a mundane temp job as a data analyst and capitalise on his natural talent for creating compelling presentations. With minimal startup costs and a clear vision, he registered a web domain, designed business cards, and began promoting his services through innovative and direct methods. Over the years, Clearpreso has grown significantly, helping countless businesses and startups effectively communicate their ideas through clear, engaging, and visually striking presentations. Ed’s success story underscores the importance of seeing presentations not as an afterthought but as a vital tool for conveying complex ideas and securing investments. His dedication to quality, coupled with creative promotional strategies, has cemented Clearpreso’s reputation as a leader in the presentation design industry.
- What was your background before clearpreso?
I started Clearpreso almost directly out of college. So my background, if you can call it that, was a business undergrad degree in UCD. While the official curriculum didn’t teach me too much that I still use today, it certainly sent me down the path of becoming a full time presentation nerd.
- How did Clearpreso begin?
My journey to where I am today began in 2009 when I was working a temp job as a data analyst, and I decided “I can’t keep doing this”. In that post-crash time it was very apparent that getting a proper job that I actually wanted to do was going to be incredibly difficult. Relatedly, it was becoming obvious that I’d never have less to lose in starting something of my own. I’d always been told “hey, you know you’re really good at this whole presentation thing” so one night I thought up a business name “clearpreso” (Clear Presentation) registered a web domain and bought some business cards and suddenly I had a business. I think my total “startup costs” were somewhere in the region of €40.
- How did you promote it in the early days?
Of course starting up is only when the real problems begin, because to be honest people weren’t really searching for the service I was providing, so I tried a few avenues to get people to “see the light” and work with me.
The first of which was offering to design free presentation makeover samples which I promoted on twitter, this was reasonably successful pretty quickly, and I’m actually doing jobs today – 14 years later – that trace back in various mad tangential ways to those initial samples.
My other early method of drumming up business was to find someone’s presentation online and send them what I suppose you would call an “unsolicited sample” out of the blue. This had about a 50/50 success rate between people giving me a meeting shortly after, or people literally telling me to f*ck off. But sure look, at the start you gotta do what you gotta do.
- Where do startups go wrong in designing their slides?
The first and most deadly mistake I see is that people often think of their pitch deck as an afterthought – rather than what it really is – which is one of most crucial communicators of the ideas in their heads to the outside world. As a founder you know exactly what your startup or idea is and will be, but the outside world has less than zero idea at the beginning. Your presentations, website, social media content etc are some of the very few real-world manifestations of the invisible cloud of complexity that is your business.
By approaching these key documents as an afterthought, many great ideas fail at the first hurdle of getting people to first understand the idea, which if left unhandled means they will never move on to caring about (or investing in) the idea.
Things do not sell themselves, and “build it and they will come” is not a real strategy.
On a design level, the biggest mistake I see is people cramming way too much information onto one slide, often in a quest to reach some arbitrary “low slide count”. But if you’ve put 4 slides worth of material onto one slide… you don’t really have “one” slide.
- How do you go about making the slides clearer and more accessible so that the most relevant information can be seen on screen?
Some key tips would be:
A. Keep things short and to the point.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to sit through a long presentation, and certainly not when they aren’t yet “bought in”. Just assume that the “job” of the presentation is to get a foot in the door and get your target audience intrigued. When in doubt aim to be like a movie trailer… not the script. Do a practice run and time yourself, try to get things down to 5 minutes for an intro-level pitch.
B. More slides with less on them.
As I mentioned before, people have been told by various sources to keep “slide count” low. Those giving that advice make the mistaken assumption that fewer slides will mean a shorter presentation, but really it just means people counterproductively cram multiple slides worth of information on one slide. For everyone’s sake it is better to split the slides out, putting one core idea per slide.
An extreme outlier that illustrates the point is that I have a 30 minute talk I give with 100+ slides in it. People usually say they think I’ve only shown them about 20 slides, but in any case they really don’t care one way or another. There is no concrete relationship between number of slides, and time to present them, so use as many slides as you need.
C. Guide attention by bringing things in piece by piece.
If you absolutely must have complex/dense slides, at least bring things in piece by piece with subtle animations. This will help you guide your audience’s attention and they won’t be able to “read ahead”.
D. Steal visual ideas from all around you.
Great design is all around you, and you should steal the best concepts and use them in your presentations. I have a folder full of screenshots of great pieces of web design, I have another folder full of photos of posters and billboards I’ve seen in real life. Copy the best of what works in other mediums, because you probably won’t find good inspiration from the usual “death by bullet point” presentations you see from day to day.
E. Use simple everyday language, shelve the jargon
No one likes speaking “business-english” rife with jargon, and nobody enjoys listening to it either, we all know it’s a silly game. Add to that that when pitching an idea to someone for the first time you should be aiming for a zero-possible-confusion scenario, so just use simpler language that everyone can understand.
- You often say referrals are your best source of new clients. What would be some of your top tips for freelance designers to begin to get referrals and grow their business?
I genuinely have no magic answer for this apart from doing great work. It took me a very, very, long time for there to be enough people out there recommending my services, but over time if you do quality work you’ll build up a strong network of advocates.
I suppose I’m lucky in that I deal with slide decks because people have to see them all the time in their professional life, so it’s easy for them to say to a colleague “hey buddy, that presentation is letting you down, but I know a guy”
- Now that events are back in person, are there any events recently or coming up that you are particularly excited about?
Yeh it’s been really exciting to see things bouncing back, and I’d highly encourage people to seek out in-person startup events in their area. Like a lot of other people I spend a lot of time working from home so It’s always so energising to spend time in real life around really interesting and motivated people who are doing exciting things. It’s definitely a shortcut to gaining inspiration and motivation.
If you live in Dublin I’d suggest keeping an eye out for events at Dogpatch Labs in the docklands. They just have so much going on from big demo days right on down to small niche meetups, it’s really the beating heart of the Dublin startup scene in my opinion.
One event I attended last year that I’ll be making sure to revisit is Resonance based down in Killaloe in the west of ireland. It embodies the core of what an event should be about: a diverse set of speakers from crazily different backgrounds ranging from tech to sports and astrophysics to economics, and all at a small accessible size where you’ll end up meeting a huge chunk of the attendees. I’ll be heading back to that for sure!
- How do you use Social media for promotion?
I owe a lot of my success to early-Twitter (I’m never, ever, calling it “X”). Especially in the initial days when I was putting out calls for people to send me presentations so I could do samples for them it gave me reach that I could have never achieved otherwise. A follow or retweet from the right person or two can really kick start things.
If I were starting up nowadays I think I would spend most of my efforts on Linkedin because a huge cohort of the right people login to Linkedin, and with business in mind, whereas other networks have become a bit of a… well… messy hellscape.
Also if we’re honest with ourselves the standard of content on Linkedin is so mundane and boring that standing out is easy. If you put together a quality blog or video with a bit of effort that showcases your personality and helps educate people or pique the interest of your audience it’ll get a lot of traction.
9. Do you have any recommendations for softwear that founders could use for their slide
To be honest I don’t have a very strong preference on presentation software. They all allow you to work with the basic building blocks of what makes a slide: shapes, images, text, videos and animations. In reality they are all effectively the same. I use powerpoint for about 2/3rds of my presentation clients, because it’s the software they are used to using and editing. Most of the remainder Is Google Slides, which is very strong when it comes to collaborative work. But as I say, they are all virtually identical, use whichever works best for you and the people you’ll be working with!
10. Have you worked with any founders in the Diversity and Inclusion field?
I haven’t gone out of my way to actively find diverse founders but over the years an incredible array of diverse founders have found their way to me. Interestingly I think dyslexic founders tend to be vastly over represented in the most successful companies I’ve worked with, which I think tallies with what Richard Branson always said about his dyslexia being his superpower because of how differently it helped him view the world.
In terms of the startups I work with, some of my favourite to work with are health tech startups that aim to improve people’s lives, one that springs to mind is Telea, who are helping voice therapists deliver quicker and more effectively voice therapy through their app to help patients communicate in a clear, confident manner. It’s great to see how technology can really help improve lives. I’m lucky that I get to work with really talented people trying really ambitious things, it’s great to play a small role in their striving for success!