
SketchDeck Turns Terrible Slide Decks Into Beautiful Presentations In Just A Day - edmack
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/12/sketchdeck-turns-terrible-slide-decks-into-beautiful-presentations-in-just-a-day/
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Angostura
The 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?

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Crito
I think that the best way to improve most powerpoint decks is to remove all
content except for the titles on slides.

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TrainedMonkey
After that put them on one page, and email them to everyone before the
meeting.

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markrages
And then cancel the meeting.

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hudibras
But wait, my whole job is going to meetings!

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TrainedMonkey
Quickly call a meeting to discuss going to meetings.

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atulagarwal
Interesting 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?

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edmack
We'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.

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akbar501
I 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.

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ajiang
If 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.

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edmack
Hi! 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.

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bruceb
First, 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-
pay...](http://www.businessinsider.com/18-slide-pitch-deck-lands-payment-
startup-dwolla-165-million-2013-4?op=1)

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edmack
It's high on our todo list! We need to get more examples together from our
body of work.

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joelrunyon
For 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.

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akbar501
Good 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.

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rafekett
nice service that people take for granted working at a big company. at SQ we
had designers who just made keynote presentations.

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grimmfang
It'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.

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BvS
Do you have any before and after examples? Could only find the 'after' version
on your website.

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edmack
We'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
:)

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dsl
How 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?

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tdiggity
* 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.

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olivermarks
lipstick on a pig usually

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Blahah
some pigs can actually be quite attractive with carefully applied lipstick

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catshirt
and the point is that it's _still a pig_

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Blahah
and my point is that it doens't matter if all you want is something pretty...

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catshirt
that'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.

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Blahah
my impression is that quite a lot of the time, people get away with selling
pigs. Lipstick can be really distracting

