Start a presentation with the thing your audience cares about most: the decision you need from them, a number from their own work, or a short moment from a real situation. Then say your main point in one sentence and tell them how you'll get there. That is the whole first 30 seconds, about 50 to 75 words. Your name, the thanks and the agenda can come once people are listening, or not at all.
What the first 30 seconds should do
People decide early whether to listen or to check their email, and they decide on what you say, not on what your slides say. At a comfortable presenting pace, 30 seconds is about 50 to 75 words: three or four sentences. Spend them on three things, in this order.
| Beat | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| BeatHook | What it doesPoints at something the room already cares about | Example“One order in five to our Ohio stores arrived late last month.” |
| BeatPoint | What it doesThe one sentence you want repeated afterward | Example“Moving the pick cutoff from 3 p.m. to noon fixes most of that.” |
| BeatMap | What it doesShows the route and when people can ask questions | Example“I'll show where the delays start, what noon costs, and then I'd like a decision.” |
The order matters. A point lands harder once the room has a problem to attach it to, and a map only interests people who want to arrive. If you need to say who you are, one clause after the hook is enough: "I'm Dana, I run the Columbus warehouse." That clause does the work of ethos, the speaker's credibility in the classical three appeals, and in a meeting where everyone knows why you're there it rarely needs more.
Consultants and soldiers reached the same order separately. Barbara Minto, a former McKinsey consultant, built The Pyramid Principle around an introduction that states the situation, the complication and the question it raises, then answers it. The US Army's correspondence regulation, AR 25-50, asks writers to put the bottom line up front. Journalists call their version the inverted pyramid. A presentation opening is the spoken form of the same idea.
Why the agenda slide shouldn't come first
In many business decks, the first slide after the title is the agenda: Background, Current state, Analysis, Recommendations, Next steps, Q&A. It could be the agenda of almost any presentation ever given, which is the problem. It asks the room to care about the route before they know where it leads, and it spends your best 30 seconds on the slide people skim.
You don't have to drop the agenda. Move it after the hook and the point, and make it say something.
A map after the hook
- Where the Ohio delays start (3 min)
- What a noon cutoff costs us (4 min)
- The decision I need today (3 min)
- Your questions (5 min)
The agenda in every deck
- Background
- Current state
- Analysis
- Recommendations
- Q&A
Usually the map is one spoken sentence after your point. Show it as a slide only when it earns the space: in a workshop or half-day session, where people want to know when the break is, or in a board meeting where an agenda is required. Either way, it goes second.
10 ways to start a presentation
Each opening has an example written for a common kind of presentation and a note on what to show on screen while you say it. The people and numbers are invented. For a speech without slides, see how to start a speech.
1. Lead with the bottom line
State the decision or the result first, then the reasons. This is the right default for executives, clients and anyone with a full calendar. They relax once they know what you want, and they can push back on the part that matters instead of waiting for it.
I'm asking for $40,000 to replace the warehouse scanners this quarter instead of next year. The current ones fail on about one shift in four, and every failure costs us roughly two hours of picking. In the next ten minutes I'll show you the failure log, the two quotes we have, and what happens if we wait.
2. Start in the middle of a moment
Open in medias res: drop the room into a specific moment, with a time, a place and a person, and skip the setup. Stories suit trainings, conference talks and pitches. They fail when they run long, so keep this one under 30 seconds and state your point straight after it.
At 6:40 on a Tuesday morning, Dale reached under a running conveyor to free a jammed box. He'd done it a hundred times. This time the belt caught his sleeve. Dale is fine. He's in the back row today. What saved his arm was Marisol, who knew exactly where the emergency pull cord was. Most of you walk past that cord every day. This session is about that cord and four other ways to stop a machine on this floor.
3. Give one number, sized to the room
A statistic works when the audience can picture it, which usually means it's about them: their customers, their hours, their budget. Translate big numbers into a unit people feel, such as a person's working weeks, a day's orders or the seats in the room.
Last quarter we answered 11,400 support tickets. About 3,000 of them asked the same thing: how to reset a password. At five minutes each, that's more than six weeks of one person's year spent typing the same reply. I think we can get it close to zero by spring, and it starts with one change to the login page.
4. Ask the question they came with
Skip "How many of you have ever wondered…" and ask the question people already had when they sat down. Then answer it, or promise to by the end. A real question makes a good presentation title, too.
Why did Denver hit its number this quarter when the other four offices missed? It wasn't a bigger territory, and it wasn't new hires. It was one change to how they follow up after a demo. It took them a week to set up, and by the end of this meeting I'd like every office to have a date to start it.
5. Ask for a show of hands, then use it
A show of hands turns listeners into participants and gives you live data. The rule is to ask only if you'll do something with the answer. Raise your own hand as you ask, so people see what you want. It works in workshops, classes and trainings. In a boardroom of six, it's awkward.
Raise your hand if you had to chase someone for a login in your first week here. Keep it up if it took more than a day. Look around: that's about half the room, and every one of those days was paid for. In the next twenty minutes I'll show you the access checklist we're testing, so the people who start next month can keep their hands down.
6. Show the before and after
Put two states side by side and let the gap raise the question. Juxtaposition works best with a measurement the room trusts, and with the cause held back for a sentence or two.
In March, adding a new supplier took us 19 days and four signatures. Last week it took three days and one signature. The suppliers didn't change, and neither did the people signing. What changed is the order in which we ask for documents, and I want to show you how, so the other two plants can copy it.
7. Set up a puzzle and solve it later
Give the audience something to work out, and they'll stay to see if they were right. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, he announced three products, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a mobile phone and an internet communicator, and repeated the list until the room understood they were one device. The reveal landed because the audience was busy solving it.
These are two photos of Main Street, taken about fifty years apart. One building is missing from the second. It wasn't a fire, and it wasn't a flood. By the end of this presentation you'll know what happened to it, and why the town council has been arguing about the empty lot ever since.
8. Show the thing itself
If your subject is something people can see, start by showing it: the product, the broken part, the form customers have to fill in. A live demo is the strongest version and the riskiest, so rehearse it on the machine you'll present from and keep a recording ready.
Watch this. [Fills in the current signup form, live, while the timer runs.] Four minutes and ten seconds, and I designed this form. The new version has nine fields instead of forty-one. Let me do it again.
A prop doesn't have to come first to work. Bill Gates's 2009 TED talk is remembered for the moment he let a jar of mosquitoes loose on the audience (they weren't infected). That came almost five minutes in. He opened by talking about a letter he had written the week before on his foundation's work, and the mosquitoes worked because by then the room knew what malaria costs.
9. Quote your customer, not a famous person
A famous quotation borrows authority from someone with no connection to your topic, and the audience has often heard it before. Words from a customer, a user interview, a student survey or a patient's letter are evidence. Get permission, trim them to one sentence, and say who said it.
"I gave up and called my granddaughter to do it for me." That's a 71-year-old customer trying to refill a prescription in our app. We heard some version of that sentence in nine of our fourteen interviews. Today I want to show you the three screens where people give up, and the changes we'd like to test first.
10. Start from the room
Refer to something that just happened: the previous speaker's last slide, a question from this morning, the rain everyone walked in through. It shows you're present and not reciting. You can't script it fully, so plan the slot instead: write a fallback opening, then listen to the sessions before yours for something better.
Maya closed the last session with a slide that said nobody reads the documentation. I'd like to spend the next twenty minutes disagreeing with her. People read documentation all the time. They just read the wrong page first, and six months of our search logs show which one.
Match the opening to the room
Choose the opening for the people in the room more than for the topic. A rough guide:
| Presentation | Openings that fit | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| PresentationExecutive or board update | Openings that fitBottom line, one number | AvoidBackground before the ask |
| PresentationSales or investor pitch | Openings that fitThe customer's problem as a story or number | AvoidCompany history and logo slides |
| PresentationConference talk | Openings that fitStory, puzzle, callback to the room | AvoidYour bio, which the host just read |
| PresentationClass presentation | Openings that fitPuzzle, one number, the question the class has | Avoid“Today I'm going to talk about…” |
| PresentationJob interview presentation | Openings that fitBottom line: your answer to their problem | AvoidYour résumé, which they've read |
| PresentationWorkshop or training | Openings that fitShow of hands, a story from the job | AvoidReading the day's agenda aloud |
| PresentationVideo call | Openings that fitBottom line or one number on the first slide | Avoid“Can everyone see my screen?” |
On a video call, people see your slide before they see you, often in a small window next to their inbox. Share your screen and check it before the start time, open on the hook slide rather than the title, and start talking at the scheduled minute. Anyone who joins late can catch up from your map.
Put one thing on the screen
The audience reads your first slide while you talk, so the slide is part of the opening. A slide full of text splits attention: people read ahead, finish before you, and wait. For the first 30 seconds, show one thing: a number, a photo, a short quote, two numbers side by side. Keep your opening sentence off it, or you'll be competing with it. The title slide is for the minutes while people find their seats. When you start speaking, click past it.
One opening, before and after
Here is a typical first draft for an internal review. Every sentence is polite, and none of it is about the audience.
Hi everyone, can you all see my screen? Great. So, for those who don't know me, I'm Priya, I lead the customer success team, and I've been here about three years. Thanks for having me. Today I'm going to walk you through our Q3 renewal numbers. Here's the agenda: first some background, then the data, then a few recommendations, and we'll leave time for Q&A at the end. So, starting with the background…
Eleven customers didn't renew in Q3. Nine of them had never opened a support ticket. That sounds like good news until you realize it means we never heard from them at all. I'm Priya from customer success, and I think we should call every account that's gone quiet for sixty days. I'll show you who those nine were and what a call program would cost, and then I'd like your questions.
What changed:
- The screen check moved before the meeting. It isn't part of the presentation.
- The hook is a number the room owns. Eleven lost customers is everyone's problem, not just Priya's topic.
- The name shrank to one clause and moved after the hook, when people are already listening.
- The point is a recommendation, made in the first 30 seconds instead of saved for slide 12.
- The agenda became a sentence with real stops on it.
How to write your opening
- Write your point first
Before any hook, write the one sentence you want people to repeat after the meeting, in 20 words or fewer. If you can't, the problem is upstream of the opening. Settle it in your presentation outline first.
- List what the room knows and worries about
Three or four lines: what they know about your topic, what they've heard, what they're anxious about. The best hook touches one of those.
- Draft three different openings
Try three types from the list, say a bottom line, a number and a story, and read each aloud. The one you can say without stumbling is usually the clearest.
- Cut to 75 words and time it
Time yourself saying the hook, point and map. Cut adjectives, warm-up phrases and every sentence that starts with "So." Nerves speed most people up, so an opening that fits in 30 seconds at your desk will fit on the day.
- Write the bridge to the next slide
Openings often come apart at the seam, when the speaker clicks to slide 2 and says "So, um, background." Write that transition sentence too.
- Learn the first 30 seconds by heart
Know it well enough to say it if the projector fails. Memorize the opening word for word and keep the rest as notes. There are methods for both in how to memorize a speech.
Openings that lose the room
Most weak openings come from treating the first minute as a warm-up before the real presentation starts. The usual forms:
- Reading the title slide aloud. They can read it. Say something it doesn't.
- Opening with company history. In a pitch, the "About us" slide answers a question nobody has asked yet. Move it to the end or cut it.
- Apologizing for the slides. "This one's a bit busy" tells the room to stop trying. Fix the slide or skip it.
- Testing the tech out loud. Check sound and screen sharing before the start time. If you must ask, ask once and move on.
- Promising too much. "By the end you'll know everything about our pricing" sets a bar the next twenty minutes won't clear.
- Talking over the noise. Wait for the room to settle. Three seconds of silence before your first line feels long to you and normal to them.
Drafting the opening in Strokes
Write the opening where you write the script, not on the slides. In Strokes you can keep three draft openings in one document, select one and press ⌘K to ask for a version under 75 words, or ask the AI Assistant which suits a room of executives. Version history keeps every draft, so the line you cut on Tuesday is still there on Thursday. Export the final script as a PDF for speaker notes or as a Word file for a co-presenter. For the rest of the talk, see how to write a presentation script.
Frequently asked questions
What should I say first in a presentation?
Something about the audience's situation: the decision you need from them, a number from their own work, or a short moment from a real event. Follow it with your main point in one sentence and a quick map of the talk. Your name and thanks can come after, in a single clause.
Should I introduce myself at the start of a presentation?
Briefly, and usually not as the very first line. If a host introduced you, skip it. Otherwise give your name and role in one clause right after the hook, and save longer credentials for the moment they support a claim.
How long should the introduction of a presentation be?
The opening itself, from hook to map, fits in about 30 seconds, or 50 to 75 words. A long talk may need more context before the first section, but the audience should hear your main point within the first minute.
Is it okay to start a presentation with a joke?
Only if it comes from the room or the topic and you have tried it on someone first. A stock joke that falls flat costs you the first 30 seconds. Humor usually works better a minute in, once people know what the talk is about.
Do I need an agenda slide?
Not as your first slide. Say the route in one sentence after your main point. Show an agenda slide second when the session is long enough that people need to plan around it, or when your organization requires one, and make each item specific.
