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Comment by fairpx | Hacker News Reader

I’d like to add one more tip: good design. I’ve seen and designed many decks for startups and some engineers pay zero attention to design. Sure if you have insane traction or other extraordinary data points it becomes less of an issue. But the investors, like yourself, are human beings who want things to look clean, neat and be clear. Nice design doesnt mean add nice colors. It means to make it a joy to go through with visuals of your product, clear font and font color selection, consistent branding etc. don’t waste too much time on the design but do treat your deck as a product of its own.

If you need any advice, feel free to ping me.

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Tackling great design for presentations is what I'm working on with my startup, https://www.beautiful.ai/

We focus on exactly the types of things you're mentioning, but we try to automate it for those who don't have the design skills (or time to invest even if you do have design skills)!

How contact?

Who would you like to talk to? You can contact me at ben@beautiful.ai and I can route you to whoever you'd like to speak with. Thanks!

The site claims not to work in Safari, but it works fine with a user agent switch. Please don't arbitrarily limit browsers.

You're almost right. We've been doing a lot of work to fix Safari issues. There are only a handful of bugs unique to Safari left, and enabling Safari support is on our immediate roadmap. We actually have benchmarked Safari being quite a bit faster than Chrome, as well, so we're very excited to get everything working. Firefox has many more unique bugs that we haven't had time to tackle yet. Thanks for exploring!

Great! Sorry for the harsh tone, it's good that you're working on it.

What is "AI" about it? assuming AI means artificial intelligence? What is that connotation supposed to represent?

Here is an article we wrote about our thinking: https://blog.beautiful.ai/designai

The shorter answer is that we don't have any ML in production at the moment, but we will as we grow. The core of our product is similar to video game enemy AI.

it's the top-level domain for Anguilla

I fell in love with beautiful.ai.

Thanks, sumang!

Very nice work, however the text contrast is so low I can barely read it. Sad that hard-to-read is still a design fad thing.

I appreciate the feedback. I'll pass it along to our designer.

Y Combinator has a blog piece on this very subject: https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-design-a-better-pitch-de...

I work at a VC firm and can second this. It's not terribly important for B2B companies, though it rarely hurts. But it's pretty important for B2C/Ecommerce companies. Customers don't grade on a curve and the bar for minimally acceptable design is pretty high these days. If your deck doesn't signal to the investors that you have strong design/branding instincts, be prepared for a tough sale.

> I’ve seen and designed many decks for startups and some engineers pay zero attention to design.

"design" is such a vague term. In 99% of the cases the meat of the pitch is much more important than design, at least because of the thinking process that needs to lead there. Making beautiful decks without substance is going to be the risk if you hammer that kind of message, because there is always going to be more time you should spend on perfecting your pitch that will be taken by trivial design details. By going with very simple decks (little text, spare visuals, very few colors if any), you remove the risk of "bad taste" and this enables you to focus on everything else.

The truth is you need both style and substance. Your deck needs to be better than 99/100 others. Though design is just the icing on the cake to take you from 95/100 to 99/100.

Yes but my point was clear: substance is hard to get right, and it's better time invested working on it than trying to optimize your deck visuals.

My approach is to spend 98% on substance, then use a template (like Beautiful.ai) or contractor to quickly put together something visually appealing. Doesn't have to be a unique design, but for under $100 or a couple hours time, I can get something that's just pleasant to look at.

thats one of the best ways to go about it. delegate that design task to someone or something that is good enough so that you dpnt have to worry about it.

Yes. It’s not only visually pleasing to especially a non technical audience. I’d argue helps build trust subconciously, signals competence, that you care, are looking after the details, and have some at least sense of what looks good (marketing).

ok while we are on the topic, can you show us a sample of what is a good design in a deck?

A shameless plug for my startup: https://blog.beautiful.ai/uber-vc-pitch-deck-presentation-te...

looks very nice but I have to ask - it says you not live yet but then you have all those logos of known companies in "used by" section... can you elaborate?

Typically this means the team has convinced someone they know at these companies to try it or give some feedback on an early version and thus voila you'll find "used by Apple" or something impressive like that in slides :)

You're not wrong. We don't have any paying customers, but we've had discussions with people from dozens of companies, and those are the ones we chose to advertise. Only a couple are people we knew beforehand.

Thanks for checking it out! Where does it say we are not live? Maybe we missed updating some copy: we officially launched 6 weeks ago, but were in a private beta for a while before that. Those logos represent people we gave access to in our private beta.

I came to this conclusion after checking price page. Says TBD summer time; so I figured if you have no payment plant, you are still in some pre-beta.

No, we're on a freemium model, but haven't launched any paid features quite yet. We expect to have a very valuable offering available for free forever.

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