

Show HN: Professional PowerPoint & Keynote Design as a Service Platform - ricksta
http://prettify.co

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mnicole
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.

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lifeisstillgood
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?

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gkoberger
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

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ricksta
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?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
You really have to define your customers! I'm going to assume that a designer
wouldn't use your service, nor probably higher-end presenters; too much is
riding on their presentations to leave them to an outside service. Your target
is more likely business folks who give presentations sometimes, its not a
primary aspect of their job, and sometimes these presentations mean a lot and
they want design help.

But what does design help mean? Layouts, fonts, and colors? Assets, structure,
and story telling? If the former, the client could easily game you by having a
few slides done and repeating the style; these aren't posters after all! The
latter is much less gameable, but also much more involved, I don't see how
that could work at all without a tight feedback loop between the designer and
client.

I dislike "name your own price" models personally. You might get the
occasional sociopath who pays little, and everyone else will agonize over
coming up with the right price to pay. Sometimes its easier to just set some
kind of price, you might put slides into different buckets based on their
complexity/work needed and compute a price dynamically (use per-word, per-
graphic, speaking time specified by the user, etc...). But good design changes
might cause reorganizations in the entire deck. In that case, I would go with
something like "intended length of presentation."

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pbiggar
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
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
Oh, OK. They should make that clear. There might be something we can do then.

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stcredzero
_> 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.

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craze3
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 :)

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mfung
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.

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dh
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>) and we make amazing
investor decks. The site looks nice and we have examples of work.

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verdatel
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
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
its about the opportunity cost for me. An hour of my time spent doing actual
research versus prettifying my slides is a no-brainer.

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runemadsen
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.

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RileyJames
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.

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mkching
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?

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highlander
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
agree with highlander

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rabidsnail
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
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>)

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.

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DeepDuh
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.

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Matt_Mickiewicz
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
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>

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vowelless
Ok, that page has now changed. But it did have Matt's name on it under "Team".

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
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.

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gkoberger
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?

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kineticflow
How does it work if the slides contain confidential information?

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

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hoffmanc
loose != lose

~~~
hoffmanc
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.

