
Piccsy Pitchdeck - jamesgolick
http://piccsy.com/investors/
======
tferris
Always when I see such exceptional HTML based pitch decks (the last one was
from a wedding thing, don't know the name anymore) I am on the fence: They
look so damn good and for sure you get attention en masse (today you should
get 20K from HN and many VC related people).

BUT:

\- Isn't this a hell of work? A good JS/frontend guy should need at least one
or rather two weeks? Please tell us how many people did this gem of a
presentation in how many days .

\- The pitch deck is basically an evolution—everytime you meet a VC, an angel
or whoever the deck gets better due to their feedback—after 2-3 months it's
perfect. This means that you need some good presentation software where you
can quickly add and change content all the time (nowadays it's Keynote which
is both fast and makes stylish presentation with ease).

\- And my last point (which is a matter of taste): if you go public with your
pitch deck, you are public and the surprise effect if you approach VCs after
you went stealth for months is gone. I think latter is pretty important, when
something is public, everybody knows it, incentives are smaller to make intros
and get angel/advisory shares and finally you have also the risk that you
don't get funded and the pitch quickly wears off (in your case with your stats
I wouldn't worry but still for startups in earlier stages this may be not the
right path; anyway I am wondering that you did this presentation because your
stats are so incredibly good and skyrocketing that you'd need only this one
stats chart attached to your an email).

So, isn't it better to spend time and effort instead for a great parallax HTML
JS page landing page for the actual users of your site??

Or you just want to put a VC who you currently talk to under pressure to get a
better valuation (by getting more leads and offers).

~~~
piccsydaniel
Thanks for the <3

Yes, it is a lot of work. Creative Director + Copywriter + Art
Director/Designer + Developer.

The deck is dynamic, we can change it pretty easy. And/or, we can present with
Keynote or whatever else alternatively in person.

We want to make as many VCs aware of our upcoming raise as possible. This
seemed like a smart way to do it :)

------
tptacek
Team has no apparent prior company operations experience, let alone M&A
success.

"Technical" team member isn't a "founder".

They're in photo sharing and clearly following in Pinterest's footsteps.

Yet, took the time to build an extremely well-designed, intricate, graphical
investment pitch in HTML.

Not sure if that's an antipattern or not.

Certainly, an equivalently beautiful presentation aimed at prospective _users_
of the site would be unquestionably valuable.

~~~
iuguy
> Team has no apparent prior company operations experience, let alone M&A
> success.

The advisors do have M&A experience, and that may well be why they have them.
Two of the team founded a company called Moxy, so they'll have some operations
experience. Not everyone needs it to start up and an investor should look at
the details, not the flashy site.

> "Technical" team member isn't a "founder".

I'm not aware that this is a requirement for a successful business. Indeed,
there are plenty of businesses where the technical people aren't founders that
do just fine.

I'd worry less about the design than the numbers. For me, I wouldn't say it
was well designed because of it's intricacy. It's not intuitive, things were
inconsistent (do I scroll or click, or both?) and some areas just seemed to be
blank (at least for me).

~~~
tptacek
I promise: no snark intended with this question, but I don't know a better way
to ask it: does starting a design shop count as company operations experience
in startupland?

Totally prepared for the answer to be "yes". And clearly there are design
shops that have become serious companies, with growth trajectories, quarterly
and yearly revenue forecasts, employee turnover, the whole nine yards. Is Moxy
one?

~~~
iuguy
I totally see where you're coming from on this, but I think you're placing an
awful lot of importance on things that might not be that important.

I'd say starting a design shop could count as company ops experience, but not
everyone who starts a startup has experience. Indeed, people start up without
experience all the time. From the looks of the presentation they have an MVP,
have users and have burned through less money than they're asking for
(although the details we don't know).

I don't know enough about Moxy to tell whether or not that's yes, but I would
say it might not be wholly necessary and would be down to the investor to
decide.

~~~
joshu
Actual angel here.

Ops is not that hard for a startup.

M&A? Build something people want and it will happen.

------
Tloewald
For a pitch deck it made zero sense to me. "the problem" was a bunch of
unreadable junk. "the solution" was...? Wtf?

~~~
danvoell
Agreed, the problem was way to difficult to understand. People are just wooed
by moving circles I guess.

~~~
majani
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zZYryyA28go#t=31s)

~~~
danvoell
Ha. Nice Reference.

------
mnicole
If I can get on my soapbox for a second (and let me know if this isn't cool -
I just like pointing people towards more effective products), I'd like to call
attention to <http://www.lookwork.com>, which was designed and developed by
Ben & Eric of Svpply fame quite a few years ago using the jQuery Masonry that
people seem to think is Pinterest's bread and butter. You can follow friends,
tag images, add your own feeds and sync it to your Dropbox.

Lookwork, out-of-the-box, has a ton of fantastic inspiration feeds that are of
much higher quality than Pinterest and Piccsy. In fact, when I received the
email about Piccsy yesterday, I made a tongue-in-cheek tweet about the worth
of an image aggregate that doesn't even aggregate quality images (both in
resolution and their usefulness to the user - sorry Daniel).

I've been really pushing the site over the past few years despite the founders
leaving it nigh high and dry after Svpply took up more of their time (and
after they really bombed their public launch).

Regardless, if you're a creative or a dev looking for design inspiration, I'd
highly suggest Lookwork over any other platform I've tried (and I'm a sucker
for curation sites, so I sign up and use all of them). I'm really hoping they
integrate it with Svpply and make it a truly one stop shop for all things
visual.

Note: It does cost $5, which I kind of wish they'd drop unless you want more
advanced features. I can see about getting people invites if anyone is
interested.

Also, to say something from a design perspective on this pitch deck, it's
rather annoying as between all of the CSS3 transform effects forcing the text
to juggle between antialiased and subpixel and whatever resizing mechanism is
causing the images to blur, it's hard to read/follow. Just because you can,
doesn't mean you should.

~~~
tferris
Is Pinterest using Masonry? It's not listed on the Masonry site as a
reference.

Why does it cost 5$?

~~~
mnicole
It might not be Masonry, but I've noticed that any site that uses that method
of floating content is automatically compared to Pinterest.

I'd assume it's $5 because it took some effort to build and there's no other
means of revenue for the time being. The homepage doesn't really do the rest
of the experience justice, but the whole thing is really clean and not nearly
as distracting from the actual content it claims it is highlighting like
Pinterest/Piccsy/Snip.it/Cubbi.es/etc.

------
pclark
I don't understand the problem slide. what do the size of the bubbles reflect?
it isn't consumer spend or market size.

~~~
WiseWeasel
It's definitely the most confusing one to me, and it only gets more so the
more you study it. It's almost as if the circles were designed first, and then
the groups of text were randomly assigned a circle. It's peculiar that stock
photography and blogs are the biggest circles. Maybe they're what the majority
of their users actually use the service for? Then there's the grouping and
positioning. It's strange to me that Tumblr is in bookmarking instead of
blogging, or that blogging is attached to postcards and image bookmarking and
not blogs. Why are the things in bookmarking not grouped with Instagram, and
why is Twitter with Instagram instead of Tumblr or Pinterest.

So I guess the main point they're trying to make is that you have to go to all
these sites to do this stuff, but they give it all to you in one place. What's
slightly strange to me is that there are a lot of sites in the problem area
whose content isn't in the solutions area, so it's maybe not clear if this is
providing some of that content or all of it. Maybe a clever graphic indicating
logical process, like a funnel or something sorting and processing the problem
balls for you as you scroll down would make more sense (and be less creepy
than Daniel's blinking mug looking at me).

------
hinathan
Is the HN traffic enough to crush their servers? Something is deeply broken as
I post this.

------
ejesse
"Ajax" is listed under Technologies. May as well include "computers" and
"internet," too.

------
vedant
The traction graph has a terrible y-axis. Equally spaced ticks measure 500,
1.5M - 500, 500k, 1M, and 600k. Many people who notice that will think it is
meant to deceive, regardless of whether that was the intention.

------
FuzzyDunlop
Design wise, and I've seen this more often lately with fancy HTML5 things, the
whole assumption of a minimum browser _height_ really gets on my nerves. I
know Google+ has this problem too (along with the disabling of vertical
scrolling), though a redesign might have changed it.

I browse on a Mac, and not in full-screen mode. My browser isn't sized to fill
the screen as it would be in Windows. Yet elements on the page are sized big
enough to overflow without resizing the window. Combined with a navbar that is
fixed to the top (and is huge), there's even less space to read the actual
content. The layout suggests that each section is probably designed to fit
comfortably within the browser window.

Granted, this is less of an offender than other sites I've encountered. If I
could remember what they were, I'd be able to back up my point better.

------
tomp
Beautiful, sure... But there's so much emphasis on the form that one hardly
sees/reads the content.

Also, I would really appreciate if the site was a bit narrower, smaller fonts,
and less flashy colors... But =, maybe it's just because I'm reading it at
night.

------
redguava
The "Visits vs Uniques" graph is one of the worst I have seen. When your
Y-Axis has such variable jumps it just makes the graph completely irrelevant.
I would say it was intentionally skewed to mislead, but sometimes the jumps
work in your favor and sometimes not, so I just can't understand the
reasoning.

Equally spaced increments go by 500k, 1mm, 500k, 1mm, 600k.

Charts are meant to give a visual representation of data, if you skew the
chart then you may as well be skewing the numbers.

------
chmike
I don't feel this is a good presentation. Text is too small in many places.
The solution is not made obvious from the graphic.

What I found original and nicely intuitive is the way to show fragmentation of
the playground field. But it is missing a clear view (in a snap) of the cause
of this fragmentation. Because the next slide is supposed to explain how to
solve the problem.

Making critics is very easy, making the art is very difficult.

------
Narretz
Nice work, but what the app actually does is not evident on first glance when
you scroll the page. You get to the solution, see the streams (and might not
see that you can open some of them), the scroll lower, and see the team etc.

Doesn't really tell me anything about the app itself.

------
MaysonL
Beautiful?? Beautiful??

You have got to be kidding.

Blinking eyes - balloons blowing up: it doesn't have the visual appeal of a
Roadrunner / Wile E. Coyote cartoon, let alone something like the mother of
all demos.

------
hoopism
Had some trouble viewing the presentation at first in Chrome. I did go back
and it rendered beautifully later. I suspect most people won't do that...
which is a shame but the risk with using complex presentation style.

Not sure why there's so much concern with the time it took to make. Working on
your startup is a labor of love... describing and pitching should be too. Very
nice work.

------
robbles
Is there a well-known framework or JS library that most of these "scroll to
animate" pitch decks are using?

It seems like a lot of work to roll your own, and I imagine the designers have
better things to do. They all seem to work roughly the same way.

~~~
heelhook
scrollorama.js and impress.js are good starting points for that

------
dgurney
I'm not sure they did that deck in-house. In the footer it says "Designed by
Moxy Creative House" and that level of visual polish isn't present on the main
Piccsy site.

Just uninformed guessing, but interesting if it's true.

~~~
foobarqux
Read the team bios. They _are_ Moxy.

------
ArekDymalski
I think that deck is much better designed than the product itself. Actually I
was disappointed by that as I expected something on the same level. I guess I
might be not the only one feeling that way.

------
AshleysBrain
Heh. Beautiful on desktop maybe, but on Chrome for Android, it's messy and
runs like a slideshow while I can feel my phone getting really hot... better
hope your investors aren't checking on mobile.

------
rurounijones
That site crawls like a dog on my Firefox 12, Linux i7 quad core system.

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jondcampbell
Near the bottom under Advisors the "role" of the two advisors is reversed.
iStock Photo / Getty Images and Flickr/Bitly should be swapped based on the
description of the two men.

------
mrgreenfur
How can they have so many visitors with no website? <http://www.piccsy.com>
doesn't give me anything. Is it just me?

~~~
tar
It is just you.

~~~
catch23
site doesn't load for me either... maybe the HN traffic is crushing their
servers?

------
skyhook_mockups
Yeah wow that is outstanding. In terms of communicating their ideas this is
simply phenomenal. The first time I've seen this scroll-to-reveal technique
used well.

------
padolsey
Blinking team profile pictures are a really nice touch!

~~~
piccsydaniel
Thanks, this is one of my favorite parts!

------
mrgoldenbrown
Our corporate nannyware (websense) associates this site with "nudity". I could
not make heads or tails of the site on my Nexus Galaxy.

------
foobarqux
For laughs go to piccsy.com and try to click any of the links in the footer
(e.g. "About").

edit: They appear to have now disabled infinite scrolling.

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tlogan
If they want money, maybe they should spend this effort to make their site
works well on mobile and tablets.

------
kleiba
...except they misspelled "Flickr" on the second slide. But I guess only
nitpickers like me would mind. :-)

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EternalFury
If you ignore the fact it takes minutes to display anything beyond a blank
page, yes it is nice.

------
tzury
@piccsydaniel, may you release that framework so others can reuse it with
their theme and data

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beedogs
The site not actually loading is sort of a turn-off, no matter how pretty the
presentation is.

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serverascode
Who's the artist for the team pics? I quite like them. Maybe not the blinking
so much though.

~~~
piccsydaniel
Glenn Michael, the Creative Director of Piccsy. <http://www.moxycreative.com>

------
tzury
@piccsydaniel, may you release that framwork so other can reuse it with their
theme and data

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wheelerwj
that was really hard to read. And I only have a vague idea of what you are.

it does look really nice though.

------
donky_cong
Makes it sounds like these days you sell Pitch Decks to investors, not
businesses

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ehutch79
Doesn't work on chrome on mac, many images are broken, some slides are
doubled.

~~~
jondcampbell
Works fine in my Chrome 18, its way smoother in chrome than in Firefox 12

------
jasonkolb
Is this time and money well spent?

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kurrent
a startup pitch and proudly display that they use php/mysql

kudos to them!

------
piccsydaniel
Thanks James!

------
damoncali
Is this legal?

~~~
damoncali
Let me rephrase> Is it legal to put a pitch deck aimed at private investors
online for all to see? I know this is a grey area in the past, and recent
legislation has changed things, so I ask again, in hopes of actually getting
an answer: Is this legal?

~~~
david927
As far as I understand, even with the recent legislation, this is still not
legal. They could get into a lot of trouble for publicly advertising an
investment opportunity like this.

