Suggestions on the leasing & renewals demo deck — the story, not the build. Mostly copy: a few lines, one reorder, one slide promoted.
Deck /demo/leasing-renewals-demo-29891c · v4, 17 slides · Audience: warm prospects, requested by Botnick · Lens: Vinh Giang's storytelling method · Fede's call on all of it
Botnick isn't the audience — the person he forwards it to is. Right now there's no sentence in the deck a champion can repeat in a room we're not in.
He asked for a demo deck, so leading with proof is right; nobody needs to be sold the problem when they already called us. But a warm prospect who likes something shows it to a boss or an owner, and that reader is cold. Seventeen episodes, no thesis. Every slide ends on a fact about Clara — "Signature pending", "status: renewed", "All automatic" — and none ends on the reader's world.
Vinh's core distinction: reporting states what happened, reliving puts the reader in the room. The raw material is already there — a real Sunday night, a real Zillow lead, real parking numbers — and the caption narrates over it. Same facts, told two ways:
Nothing invented. Identical facts; the reader is now standing in the dark office instead of reading a summary of it.
Seventeen wins in a row, no admission. Vinh picks stories by what they buy — stakes buy attention, vulnerability buys trust — and an unbroken run buys neither. The closest we get is slides 14–15 ("Clara didn't negotiate", "she never improvises policy"), but those are boasts wearing an admission's clothes, and they sit at 14 of 17.
Move one to slide 3 or 4 and reframe it as a limit — "here's what she won't do" rather than "look how well she declines." The admission is what lets a champion defend us when we're not there. Highest-value edit on this page.
Slides 04, 06, 07, 08: 12 seconds, 35, 23, 26. By the third one the number is noise — Vinh's "the moment something becomes default, it becomes non-functional," applied to copy. And this is where a warm prospect on a phone stops scrolling; warm means interested, not patient. Collapse two, or keep four and vary what each proves — slide 07 already has a better detail buried in it (she asked for a different unit and got it the same day, same rent, nothing to redo).
Through v1–v2 the slides carried the exchanges as text: "Hey Ethan!…", "Tuesday at 10:00am would be perfect!", "Great thanks just signed!!" The v3/v4 passes swapped them for screenshot crops and terse captions. The words are still in the images, but the deck no longer speaks — and "just signed!!" carries a relieved human in a way "Signature pending" doesn't.
Same shape on slide 03, where the strongest line in the whole deck sits in caption type under an audio player: "Clara catches that 4 PM is too close to Saturday closing and proposes 3:30." Every other proof point is about speed. That one is about judgment — which is the thing the skeptical second reader doesn't believe software has. Give it a slide.
| Edit | Cost |
|---|---|
| Add the sentence Botnick repeats. One slide near the front stating the argument in a line. Everything after it becomes the evidence behind it. | 1 slide |
| Move the limit forward, reframe as a limit. Slide 14 or 15 → position 3–4. | reorder |
| Promote the 3:30 catch to its own slide. | 1 slide |
| Add a point line to each story slide — one sentence landing on the reader's property, not on Clara. | copy |
| Put three or four lines of real dialogue back as text, beside the crop rather than instead of it. | copy |
| Collapse or differentiate two of the four seconds slides. | copy |
| One stakes line on slide 1 — with a real number off the rent roll. Leave the blank until someone can fill it truthfully. | copy |
| Personalize slide 1 to Botnick's portfolio. He asked for this specifically. | copy |
Is this ever screen-shared on a call, or only sent as a link?
Every caption currently narrates its own slide. A presenter reading them aloud is redundant; one who doesn't is competing with the screen — Vinh's hardest slide rule is that the slide must never say the line you're about to say. If it's used both ways, that's two renders of the same seventeen slides (full captions for the read, stripped for the call) — a template change, not a rewrite.
Adjacent, if we want the structural version: Andy Raskin (name the shift and the enemy before the capabilities), April Dunford (insight → alternatives → perfect world → proof; we open at proof), Donald Miller (the customer is the hero, not Clara). Sources: vinhgiang.com · Stage Academy breakdown · Raskin · Dunford. Deck text read from committed v4 (ea4cd77e74); no rewrite above adds a fact the deck doesn't already carry.