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SketchDeck Turns Terrible Slide Decks Into Beautiful Presentations In Just A Day
- ajiang 13y agoIf VGI were to say open their doors to the public, would the prices be much cheaper? I remember the per hour rates those outsourced powerpoint guys work at being very very low.
- edmack 13y agoHi! It depends on the level of design service you require - we're getting the VGI type tasks to a fairly low cost base, however many clients want a much higher level of design than VGI would provide.
- bruceb 13y agoFirst, nice job on the TC article. I see you have a few examples on your site but I was wondering if you might put up a few that show icons, process, and more pitch deck type stuff. Something like this:http://www.businessinsider.com/18-slide-pitch-deck-lands-payment-startup-dwolla-165-million-2013-4?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/18-slide-pitch-deck-lands-pay...
- edmack 13y agoIt's high on our todo list! We need to get more examples together from our body of work.
- milesskorpen 13y agoPersonally, I rarely used VGI while at McKinsey. The quality of work almost disappointed me. There were rather hilarious lost-in-translation moments on a very regular basis.
- atulagarwal 13y agoInteresting service. I'm thinking about the privacy/security concerns. Many PPTs contain proprietary material that cannot/should not be shared to third parties. NDAs exist, but they're difficult to enforce or sometimes maybe an overkill. How are the founders looking at addressing this problem? Or something automated with minimal (or none) human intervention is desirable?
- edmack 13y agoWe're building a solution for this including scrambling key information and company identity from work. We work on a client by client basis to make sure that what we have in place meets their needs - often NDAs work very well.
- rafekett 13y agonice service that people take for granted working at a big company. at SQ we had designers who just made keynote presentations.
- olivermarks 13y agolipstick on a pig usually
- Blahah 13y agosome pigs can actually be quite attractive with carefully applied lipstick
- catshirt 13y agoand the point is that it's still a pig
- Blahah 13y agoand my point is that it doens't matter if all you want is something pretty...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- catshirt 13y agothat's not really the point of a slideshow though. if you're trying to sell a pig, no amount of lipstick is going to disguise the fact that you are trying to sell a pig.
- Blahah 13y agomy impression is that quite a lot of the time, people get away with selling pigs. Lipstick can be really distracting
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dsl 13y agoHow is this different than other companies that do the same thing like eSlide and VisualSpiders? Just targeting the valley market than can afford to pay more?
- tdiggity 13y ago* SketchDeck seems more upfront about their pricing. eSlide and VisualSpiders both ask for consultation to get a price. SketchDeck gives a rough estimate per slide, so at least I know what I'm getting into. * SketchDeck has a nice and simple site. Presentation does matter. Similar concept to homejoy and iamexec.
- BvS 13y agoDo you have any before and after examples? Could only find the 'after' version on your website.
- edmack 13y agoWe're getting some good ones together - a lot of content is confidential, so we cannot share the befores often. If you look on our splash page you can see some of the sketches in the background - we'll get a better examples page soon :)
- Angostura 13y agoThe worst issue with most PowerPoint decks that I'm asked to review isn't so much with the design as the fact that the author has attempted to write a small novel on each slide. How does the company cope with that issue? Suggest cuts?
- edmack 13y agoIt depends on the client. For a lot of dense content, just getting a strong grid structure into its alignment and regularising the design helps. We always advise to have a medium amount of content on the slide, some of our clients ask us to break down slides into multiple slides to help. There's always a lot that can be done :)
- Crito 13y agoI think that the best way to improve most powerpoint decks is to remove all content except for the titles on slides.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoAfter that put them on one page, and email them to everyone before the meeting.
- markrages 13y agoAnd then cancel the meeting.
- hudibras 13y agoBut wait, my whole job is going to meetings!
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoQuickly call a meeting to discuss going to meetings.
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- joelrunyon 13y agoFor all the people that are hating on this - some people (like me) sometimes just need a quick design run through on a set of slides to make them not look like default off-the-shelf presentations. I could see these guys scaling their services beyond powerpoint to provide targeted design services, but they gotta start somewhere.
- grimmfang 13y agoIt's a cool service (and it caught my attention) but isn't the price a little high? I really considered it until I saw the prices. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the basic plans just seem like template work. I feel like if I'm going to pay that much for something like this I need to have a personal relationship with the designer.
- akbar501 13y agoGood idea once they hit scale. The model is a traditional outsourcing model along the lines of the OfficeTiger company. This type of service fits within the Business Process Outsourcing, or BPO market. Within the BPO framework, its common practice to start with a single process, scale it, then start to cross sell existing clients to grow new service lines. They keys to scale are obvious a fat sales pipeline with a high percent of recurring revenue, combined with stringent people and process controls.
- akbar501 13y agoI assume the founders are reading this. The following is based on my experience. I obviously don't know your business, nor do I know the specifics of it. The following has been my experience with having run a business in an emerging market for 15 years. I think you'll need to raise the $10/hour price (unless you pad the hours - which is a perfectly viable option and one that some markets are fine with). Depending on the emerging market you're outsourcing to, as you grow and start an office you'll find that salaries are lower (in the emerging market), but infrastructure is massively higher. By way of example, we pay thousands of dollars each month for a high quality phone line, plus thousands more per month per gig than we do in the US. Plus US overhead will be a large part of the cost structure. Our Cisco routers in India are way more expensive than what we pay here. Even small things like buying new drives for our servers are way more expensive, and due to power fluctuations are replaced way more frequently than we experience here. But beyond my experience, you should tap the resources of the other country's services counsel/body. For example, in India NASSCOM sets the tone for the software services market. They also (or at least they used to) publish minimum rates that a scaled business should charge. If this is relevant to your business, then I hope it helps.