7 ms·

Show HN: Professional PowerPoint & Keynote Design as a Service Platform

29 points by ricksta 14y ago

Matt_Mickiewicz 14y ago
Cool idea, tons of execs and sales reps have corporate AMEX cards but use really boring/generic templates for all their presentations. I think the lifetime value for customers could be high if you can deliver quality work consistently.
- vowelless 14y ago
  Aren't you one of the people behind this site? Or are you just making a general statement about your own idea? http://prettify.co/about http://prettify.co/about
  - fairramone 14y ago
    If there was mention of his name on the /about page, it's now been removed.
  - vowelless 14y ago
    Ok, that page has now changed. But it did have Matt's name on it under "Team".
    - undergroundhero 14y ago
      Wow... What a convenient change.
    - Matt_Mickiewicz 14y ago
      Nah, I'm spending every waking moment (and some of my non-waking ones) on DeveloperAuction. I just know the founders and want to see them succeed.
craze3 14y ago
Cool startup, awesome domain name. I think there are alot of potential clients out there for this type of service. A company's pitch deck is what makes or breaks any investor pitch. Companies (or atleast the smart ones) realize this and are willing to invest to improve their chances of getting funded. Btw: I run Pitchenvy.com, a gallery of pitch deck presentation examples. If you want to work out a commission based affiliate program, I'd be more than happy to partner with you. Lemme know if you're interested :)
hoffmanc 14y ago
loose != lose
- hoffmanc 14y ago
  What if I have tried multiple ===>designer<=== and still don't like their work?
- hoffmanc 14y ago
  We accept all popular presentation ===>format<=== like Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Google Docs, Prezi, Libre Office Impress, OpenOffice Impress and more. Just upload your file or share your Google Doc's link and we will find the right designer to do the job.
- hoffmanc 14y ago
  So I give you the most actionable feedback, hands down, and I don't receive any upvotes? WTF?
verdatel 14y ago
I'd use this as an academic tool.. I have presentations to give quarterly to representatives from funding agencies.. Typically around 8-12 slides in my presentations.. the slides I see/ use are really boring.. whenever I see a well done presentation, I perk up and pay attention. If you use this as a potential niche.. some high quality graphing work etc. would be nice..
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  You could invest the time and learn how to do design good presentations. Honestly, better communication skills are important for everyone. For the aesthetic stuff (fonts, colors, layout) that we are less skilled in, copy style what you like best from your favorite presentations given by others.
  - verdatel 14y ago
    its about the opportunity cost for me. An hour of my time spent doing actual research versus prettifying my slides is a no-brainer.
highlander 14y ago
Nice idea, and I would use this if you had a convincing portfolio. I'd suggest you add some work samples to the site.
- xijuan 14y ago
  agree with highlander
runemadsen 14y ago
This is a great idea. I would probably add some examples to the home page. That is really what should attract new customers: Great designs.
mfung 14y ago
Overall, the site looks very genuine. The layout is simple and the wording is very concise and informative. I agree with runemadsen. Just stating that the service offers professional designs and layout is not good enough. Some samples of work need to be provided on the site to justify a $25/slide basic price. Also, there are some minor grammatical mistakes on the site. Consider some revising.
pbiggar 14y ago
Edit: I think this is a wonderful idea, and would use it, and can't wait for them to iterate. What I wrote below is intended to be constructive feedback. I was ready to go for this, but $25 per slide doesn't work for me. My deck is currently 30 slides. They're mostly low-content placeholders, many of them having 3 words or less, and they could all be handled by picking a nice theme, with maybe some minor tweaks. However, some slides are content-heavy and could be optimized for attractiveness and "usability". And some will have to be redone because they make no sense or something. So I could totally see paying for a customized theme and pallet and fixing the content-heavy slides and minor tweaks on the other slides, but that's not $750. Also, 5 days sucks. Everyone I know always makes slides at the last minute. I'd could see paying 30% more for same day, or 50% more for 1 hour delivery though.
- xijuan 14y ago
  I think you can upload the ppt and tell them which slides you want them to re-do. But I hear you. You probably want all slides to fit together and have a common theme or something. Maybe they should have a separate price for changing the overall theme of the ppt?
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    Oh, OK. They should make that clear. There might be something we can do then.
- ricksta 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. We are working on repricing our service and we will add the rush service option.
mnicole 14y ago
As a designer: - Your site's design doesn't make me feel confident in wanting to work with you. - That 'Become a Designer' form field is way too long. I'm not filling out a dating profile. You should be able to determine my ambition to work with you based on my reply alone, and you should be able to determine the quality of my work by my Dribbble and portfolios alone. All of the rest is just fluff. - You don't mention the guaranteed rate? - '..co-founded 99designs..' Ahh, I see. I'm done here.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Could you explain the 99designs reference I have looked into getting a professional designer for two sites now, instead opted for the faster route of buying a template and hacking next time out I want a human but why not 99designs?
  - gkoberger 14y ago
    Designers tend to dislike 99designs because it's spec work. Twenty designers will do work, and only one will get paid -- and for a fraction of what a real designer should be paid for a logo. At 99Designs, people are entrusting the branding of their site/firm/etc to someone willing to maybe make $100 for a logo. Exceptions aside (Nike, Google), branding should has more thought and work put into it than someone can do for a few bucks.
    - rabidsnail 14y ago
      My experience with 99designs (on the buying side) has been that there are a _lot_ of shitty "designers", but if you persevere someone from Romania will show up and do a pretty good job for very little money. But you have to know exactly what you want and you have to be willing to play editor.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      This is, as near as I can tell, a marketing campaign unique to graphic design. In other professions, spec work isn't just accepted; it's close to the norm. For instance, a good lawyer might sit down with you for over an hour to consult about your situation long before he ever starts billing for his time. A full proposal usually takes me a couple days full time, and we're billable wall-to-wall. And so on. The campaign against spec work began as a reaction to a genuinely abusive practice: companies would hold "design contests" and solicit whole campaigns from multiple firms, then cherry-pick their favorite ideas from all of them while only paying one firm. But it's evolved to a mythology about all spec work, and that mythology mostly covers up the real issue: the Internet has made "good-enough" design cheap for the majority of companies, including the majority of 8-9 figure revenue tech companies. PepsiCo will still pay you $100k for an important campaign, but most of the design business isn't PepsiCo. 99designs has issues (the biggest isn't quality, it's plagiarism), but there's nothing unethical about its structure, and anyone who suggests that the people who helped build it should be ostracized are saying much more about themselves and their own fears than they are about anyone else.
stcredzero 14y ago
> Choosing the wrong designer will cost you to loose both time and money. Choosing the wrong copy editor will cost you credibility and customers. (There are two glaring errors in this sentence.) If it would look bad in a presentation, it looks bad for a presentation service site.
mkching 14y ago
Almost every item in the FAQ has grammatical errors in it. With no portfolio, fixing these would go a long ways to establishing more credibility -- especially when the product you are selling is polish. Also, is the bar graph on the laptop image supposed to be an example of an ugly presentation, or a pretty one?
kineticflow 14y ago
How does it work if the slides contain confidential information?
gkoberger 14y ago
Is the bar graph an example of what the end product might look like? It seems like (slightly ugly) stock art. If your product is redesigned slides, you should show well designed slides. Why aren't there more before/after examples?
dh 14y ago
Sounds like a nice idea but just not impressed with the site. Also there are not examples of work. If I am going to pay someone to make my presentation pretty I want some examples of past work. I am involved in Deck Foundry (http://deckfoundry.com http://deckfoundry.com) and we make amazing investor decks. The site looks nice and we have examples of work.
rabidsnail 14y ago
1. Show me some examples of what I can get for my money 2. Charging by the slide encourages a certain kind of presentation style. On the rare occasions that I do keynote presentations I usually have one very spare slide every few seconds, which ends up being thousands of dollars for one presentation.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  They should have samples. every designer/design firm has at least some kind of portfolio they can show customers. these people are probably not professionals. PechaKucha! 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6 minutes 40 seconds. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha) But to be honest, if you go there each slide would be simple; a picture + 3-5 word caption. This service is probably aimed at the clueless business type who do bullet point heavy slides. They would do much better to charge by perceived length of presentation; but this is a subjective metric.
ricksta 14y ago
Co-founder of Prettify here. Thanks for the feedback. We started working on this last thursday and this is our low fidelity MVP. We are totally embarrassed by the quality of our website right now, but they say if the MVP is not embarrassing, then it's launched too late so we forced ourself to "launch" early to get feedbacks. Sorry about the grammar mistakes, we drafted the copy in like 10 minutes and we were suppose to proof read it before we "launch", but it was forgotten. Two things we will definitely work on from looking at all the feedbacks. 1. Add some sample work 2. Change the pricing model We are thinking of add a pricing model of flat setup fee + lower per slide fee for those customer with bigger pitch deck. Another idea is "name your own price" model. What do you guys think?
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  +1 for launching an MVP I have a little experience of the "polishing of presentations" industry (if someone is in a bank in London at 2am, odds are its one of the army of powerpoint polishers working for the sales teams 9am meeting) The presentation here: http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends covers most of the major "modes" for a PPT. I would suggest each of these is a "feature" that you could sell. I would guess your ideal brief would be "I want to review 2012, talk about the foobar project and predictions for 2013. Alice, Bob and charlie did one each. Please put a bookend in between all three, take the data in the enbedded excel and make it animated, and find me a picture of a foobar that succeeded and one that is dead and covered in an oil slick" * bookends (plain slide, concept in words, introduces next few slides conceptually) * Graphs - this was the main cause of problems - twenty excel sheets and the instructions to pull out "sales". I would make this time and materials, but it will be a really powerful area - the above example from one of SVs biggest investors has boring Excel produced slides. Animate them, hgihlight the graphs with zooms, make them OSX not win98 and people will really pay. Trust me. * expositiory images - pictures tell a story - the before and after images here are a good example, but they take time and effort to find. And thats before we get onto the idea that really most PPTs need an editor to tease out the story (dont let your 1:1 people get dragged into understanding the whole presentation unless they are on Time and Materials), and interactivity (pygame is a good one here) really can work well. Sorry for the rambling - its late. Good luck
RileyJames 14y ago
Very interesting service. Solves a real problem for me, our slides always look average. We were considering getting a designer on board and the slides would be a significant part of what they do. That said, this might be suitable for a standard presentation, but for a full investor pitch I'm not sure if I'd use it.
DeepDuh 14y ago
Something about the price table is odd. You mention specifically the only difference between basic and premium is the stock photo budget, yet for a price difference of 30$ you get 20$ more budget? As others here say I'd rework the pricing options a bit, other than that it's a good idea.
statictype 14y ago
I'm guessing you should change the pricing page to not specifically mention what the budget for stock photos is.

29 points by ricksta 14y ago

Cool idea, tons of execs and sales reps have corporate AMEX cards but use really boring/generic templates for all their presentations. I think the lifetime value for customers could be high if you can deliver quality work consistently.

vowelless 14y ago
Aren't you one of the people behind this site? Or are you just making a general statement about your own idea? http://prettify.co/about http://prettify.co/about
- fairramone 14y ago
  If there was mention of his name on the /about page, it's now been removed.
- vowelless 14y ago
  Ok, that page has now changed. But it did have Matt's name on it under "Team".
  - undergroundhero 14y ago
    Wow... What a convenient change.
  - Matt_Mickiewicz 14y ago
    Nah, I'm spending every waking moment (and some of my non-waking ones) on DeveloperAuction. I just know the founders and want to see them succeed.

craze3 14y ago

Cool startup, awesome domain name. I think there are alot of potential clients out there for this type of service. A company's pitch deck is what makes or breaks any investor pitch. Companies (or atleast the smart ones) realize this and are willing to invest to improve their chances of getting funded. Btw: I run Pitchenvy.com, a gallery of pitch deck presentation examples. If you want to work out a commission based affiliate program, I'd be more than happy to partner with you. Lemme know if you're interested :)

hoffmanc 14y ago

loose != lose

hoffmanc 14y ago
What if I have tried multiple ===>designer<=== and still don't like their work?
hoffmanc 14y ago
We accept all popular presentation ===>format<=== like Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Google Docs, Prezi, Libre Office Impress, OpenOffice Impress and more. Just upload your file or share your Google Doc's link and we will find the right designer to do the job.
hoffmanc 14y ago
So I give you the most actionable feedback, hands down, and I don't receive any upvotes? WTF?

verdatel 14y ago

I'd use this as an academic tool.. I have presentations to give quarterly to representatives from funding agencies.. Typically around 8-12 slides in my presentations.. the slides I see/ use are really boring.. whenever I see a well done presentation, I perk up and pay attention. If you use this as a potential niche.. some high quality graphing work etc. would be nice..

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
You could invest the time and learn how to do design good presentations. Honestly, better communication skills are important for everyone. For the aesthetic stuff (fonts, colors, layout) that we are less skilled in, copy style what you like best from your favorite presentations given by others.
- verdatel 14y ago
  its about the opportunity cost for me. An hour of my time spent doing actual research versus prettifying my slides is a no-brainer.

highlander 14y ago

Nice idea, and I would use this if you had a convincing portfolio. I'd suggest you add some work samples to the site.

xijuan 14y ago
agree with highlander

runemadsen 14y ago

This is a great idea. I would probably add some examples to the home page. That is really what should attract new customers: Great designs.

mfung 14y ago

Overall, the site looks very genuine. The layout is simple and the wording is very concise and informative. I agree with runemadsen. Just stating that the service offers professional designs and layout is not good enough. Some samples of work need to be provided on the site to justify a $25/slide basic price. Also, there are some minor grammatical mistakes on the site. Consider some revising.

pbiggar 14y ago

Edit: I think this is a wonderful idea, and would use it, and can't wait for them to iterate. What I wrote below is intended to be constructive feedback. I was ready to go for this, but $25 per slide doesn't work for me. My deck is currently 30 slides. They're mostly low-content placeholders, many of them having 3 words or less, and they could all be handled by picking a nice theme, with maybe some minor tweaks. However, some slides are content-heavy and could be optimized for attractiveness and "usability". And some will have to be redone because they make no sense or something. So I could totally see paying for a customized theme and pallet and fixing the content-heavy slides and minor tweaks on the other slides, but that's not $750. Also, 5 days sucks. Everyone I know always makes slides at the last minute. I'd could see paying 30% more for same day, or 50% more for 1 hour delivery though.

xijuan 14y ago
I think you can upload the ppt and tell them which slides you want them to re-do. But I hear you. You probably want all slides to fit together and have a common theme or something. Maybe they should have a separate price for changing the overall theme of the ppt?
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Oh, OK. They should make that clear. There might be something we can do then.
ricksta 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback. We are working on repricing our service and we will add the rush service option.

mnicole 14y ago

As a designer: - Your site's design doesn't make me feel confident in wanting to work with you. - That 'Become a Designer' form field is way too long. I'm not filling out a dating profile. You should be able to determine my ambition to work with you based on my reply alone, and you should be able to determine the quality of my work by my Dribbble and portfolios alone. All of the rest is just fluff. - You don't mention the guaranteed rate? - '..co-founded 99designs..' Ahh, I see. I'm done here.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Could you explain the 99designs reference I have looked into getting a professional designer for two sites now, instead opted for the faster route of buying a template and hacking next time out I want a human but why not 99designs?
- gkoberger 14y ago
  Designers tend to dislike 99designs because it's spec work. Twenty designers will do work, and only one will get paid -- and for a fraction of what a real designer should be paid for a logo. At 99Designs, people are entrusting the branding of their site/firm/etc to someone willing to maybe make $100 for a logo. Exceptions aside (Nike, Google), branding should has more thought and work put into it than someone can do for a few bucks.
  - rabidsnail 14y ago
    My experience with 99designs (on the buying side) has been that there are a _lot_ of shitty "designers", but if you persevere someone from Romania will show up and do a pretty good job for very little money. But you have to know exactly what you want and you have to be willing to play editor.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    This is, as near as I can tell, a marketing campaign unique to graphic design. In other professions, spec work isn't just accepted; it's close to the norm. For instance, a good lawyer might sit down with you for over an hour to consult about your situation long before he ever starts billing for his time. A full proposal usually takes me a couple days full time, and we're billable wall-to-wall. And so on. The campaign against spec work began as a reaction to a genuinely abusive practice: companies would hold "design contests" and solicit whole campaigns from multiple firms, then cherry-pick their favorite ideas from all of them while only paying one firm. But it's evolved to a mythology about all spec work, and that mythology mostly covers up the real issue: the Internet has made "good-enough" design cheap for the majority of companies, including the majority of 8-9 figure revenue tech companies. PepsiCo will still pay you $100k for an important campaign, but most of the design business isn't PepsiCo. 99designs has issues (the biggest isn't quality, it's plagiarism), but there's nothing unethical about its structure, and anyone who suggests that the people who helped build it should be ostracized are saying much more about themselves and their own fears than they are about anyone else.

stcredzero 14y ago

> Choosing the wrong designer will cost you to loose both time and money. Choosing the wrong copy editor will cost you credibility and customers. (There are two glaring errors in this sentence.) If it would look bad in a presentation, it looks bad for a presentation service site.

mkching 14y ago

Almost every item in the FAQ has grammatical errors in it. With no portfolio, fixing these would go a long ways to establishing more credibility -- especially when the product you are selling is polish. Also, is the bar graph on the laptop image supposed to be an example of an ugly presentation, or a pretty one?

kineticflow 14y ago

How does it work if the slides contain confidential information?

gkoberger 14y ago

Is the bar graph an example of what the end product might look like? It seems like (slightly ugly) stock art. If your product is redesigned slides, you should show well designed slides. Why aren't there more before/after examples?

dh 14y ago

Sounds like a nice idea but just not impressed with the site. Also there are not examples of work. If I am going to pay someone to make my presentation pretty I want some examples of past work. I am involved in Deck Foundry (http://deckfoundry.com http://deckfoundry.com) and we make amazing investor decks. The site looks nice and we have examples of work.

rabidsnail 14y ago

1. Show me some examples of what I can get for my money 2. Charging by the slide encourages a certain kind of presentation style. On the rare occasions that I do keynote presentations I usually have one very spare slide every few seconds, which ends up being thousands of dollars for one presentation.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
They should have samples. every designer/design firm has at least some kind of portfolio they can show customers. these people are probably not professionals. PechaKucha! 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6 minutes 40 seconds. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha) But to be honest, if you go there each slide would be simple; a picture + 3-5 word caption. This service is probably aimed at the clueless business type who do bullet point heavy slides. They would do much better to charge by perceived length of presentation; but this is a subjective metric.

ricksta 14y ago

Co-founder of Prettify here. Thanks for the feedback. We started working on this last thursday and this is our low fidelity MVP. We are totally embarrassed by the quality of our website right now, but they say if the MVP is not embarrassing, then it's launched too late so we forced ourself to "launch" early to get feedbacks. Sorry about the grammar mistakes, we drafted the copy in like 10 minutes and we were suppose to proof read it before we "launch", but it was forgotten. Two things we will definitely work on from looking at all the feedbacks. 1. Add some sample work 2. Change the pricing model We are thinking of add a pricing model of flat setup fee + lower per slide fee for those customer with bigger pitch deck. Another idea is "name your own price" model. What do you guys think?

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
+1 for launching an MVP I have a little experience of the "polishing of presentations" industry (if someone is in a bank in London at 2am, odds are its one of the army of powerpoint polishers working for the sales teams 9am meeting) The presentation here: http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends covers most of the major "modes" for a PPT. I would suggest each of these is a "feature" that you could sell. I would guess your ideal brief would be "I want to review 2012, talk about the foobar project and predictions for 2013. Alice, Bob and charlie did one each. Please put a bookend in between all three, take the data in the enbedded excel and make it animated, and find me a picture of a foobar that succeeded and one that is dead and covered in an oil slick" * bookends (plain slide, concept in words, introduces next few slides conceptually) * Graphs - this was the main cause of problems - twenty excel sheets and the instructions to pull out "sales". I would make this time and materials, but it will be a really powerful area - the above example from one of SVs biggest investors has boring Excel produced slides. Animate them, hgihlight the graphs with zooms, make them OSX not win98 and people will really pay. Trust me. * expositiory images - pictures tell a story - the before and after images here are a good example, but they take time and effort to find. And thats before we get onto the idea that really most PPTs need an editor to tease out the story (dont let your 1:1 people get dragged into understanding the whole presentation unless they are on Time and Materials), and interactivity (pygame is a good one here) really can work well. Sorry for the rambling - its late. Good luck

RileyJames 14y ago

Very interesting service. Solves a real problem for me, our slides always look average. We were considering getting a designer on board and the slides would be a significant part of what they do. That said, this might be suitable for a standard presentation, but for a full investor pitch I'm not sure if I'd use it.

DeepDuh 14y ago

Something about the price table is odd. You mention specifically the only difference between basic and premium is the stock photo budget, yet for a price difference of 30$ you get 20$ more budget? As others here say I'd rework the pricing options a bit, other than that it's a good idea.

statictype 14y ago

I'm guessing you should change the pricing page to not specifically mention what the budget for stock photos is.