SketchDeck Turns Terrible Slide Decks Into Beautiful Presentations In Just A Day

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/12/sketchdeck-turns-terrible-slide-decks-into-beautiful-presentations-in-just-a-day/

by edmack • 12 years ago

56 31 12 years ago

ajiang• 12 years ago

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.

edmack5• 12 years ago

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.

bruceb• 12 years ago

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...

milesskorpen• 12 years ago

Personally, 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• 12 years ago

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?

edmack5• 12 years ago

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.

rafekett• 12 years ago

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

olivermarks• 12 years ago

lipstick on a pig usually

Blahah3• 12 years ago

some pigs can actually be quite attractive with carefully applied lipstick

catshirt2• 12 years ago

and the point is that it's still a pig

dsl• 12 years ago

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?

tdiggity• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

edmack5• 12 years ago

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 :)

Angostura• 12 years ago

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?

edmack5• 12 years ago

It 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• 12 years ago

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

TrainedMonkey2• 12 years ago

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

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

I just frickin hate when slides contain word for word what the person presenting them says.

seanmcdirmid• 12 years ago

Most people don't have design problems, they have content problems. Giving a talk is difficult, and "slides not being pretty enough" ranks way down there in ways to screw it up.

joelrunyon• 12 years ago

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.

grimmfang• 12 years ago

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.

akbar5012• 12 years ago

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.

akbar5012• 12 years ago

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.

SketchDeck Turns Terrible Slide Decks Into Beautiful Presentations In Just A Day

Related Stories