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Comment by jeremysizle | Hacker News Reader

Hey all, Sizle is an alternative to PowerPoint for sales teams that need to see when their document was opened by a client, what slides they saw, time spent, and it can also automatically schedule a follow up with the viewer. Currently testing it with a bunch of companies here in Australia, but if anyone here is in sales and marketing I'd love to have you try out the (experimental) beta :)

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Not sure how I feel about this level of tracking TBH. I can see how the data might benefit some sales teams, but mostly I think it'll be hoovered up, stored and nothing done with it.

Have you put consent mechanisms in place to allow readers to opt out of tracking, while still letting them read the document/slides?

It provides more visibility into the funnel. Seems valuable. Whether it's ethical or not is something different.

Examples of the value it could bring:

Did the prospect drop off because they never even opened the presentation, or did they at least consider it?

After it's been opened, was it opened a bunch more times? Shows that it wasn't ruled out or glazed over.

How recent was it last opened? If it was today then we know it's still under consideration. If it was a month ago, seems like the lead has gone cold.

To me, it seems like there's a mismatch. If the sales channel justifies slide deck type presentations, reliance on analytics smells way too hands off. Slide decks are at the phone call layer not the $10/month SaaS layer. A slide deck doesn't have a "call to action" button that starts the process of charging a credit card.

I don't think it's either or. You can use the analytics to check on the level of interest following a call. You can see the dwell time on particular slides to know when something is of interest or concern.

I'm probably biased. But using slide decks as a stand-alone marketing artifact seems like a poor choice of alternative. Better analytics probably makes it better, but still leaves stand-alone slide decks as a poor form of marketing. A web page, video, email, phone-call, brochure, etc. all seem like a better focus of attention.

It's not that I don't appreciate the product. I just think it is likely to leave the big problem intact in the cases where it is used.

What makes slide decks stand out as bad among web pages, videos, email, calls and brochures?

Inherent low information density. Inherent lack of interactivity. Incidental lack of call to action buttons.

Hey Gordon, I’m pushing a patch in early Jan to address this exact issue.

So, if you intend to sell in the EU, don’t forget the reader will need to give consent to be tracked. And thus is an option you should build in globally too if you believe in people’s privacy.

Thanks, I responded to a similar post earlier but we are pushing a feature soon with a minimalistic consent notification dialog that gives a recipient opt-out ability.

This is creepy.

Do the customers know that they are being spied on?

I think these guys are being a bit precious and don't realise how much is tracked these days. All the email marketing campaign platforms do it, all the specialist quoting tools and line stores do it.

Good work mate, keep going.

In this case the tracking is the only USP. If someone sent me a link to one of these I’d decline.

There is a myriad of document tracking, analytics and crm software out there in enterprise that captures a scary amount of data, Sizle does't do that.

Like any email campaign manager, Sizle tells you when your document is opened, and tells you how much time the user spent looking at it.

Instead of whatabouting it, maybe you can answer sadfklsjlkjwt’s question: do they know this is happening?

Recipients of Mailchimp campaigns have the same experience as recipients of Sizle presentations. They’re not told the sender will be notified when the document is opened however this type of tracking is fairly commonplace.

For comparison, you might allow cookies from a website you visit regularly, even though they’ve notified you do you really know the extent to which you’re being tracked by a cookie like GA? A large part of the online community assume at least some part of their activity is being stored somewhere, Sizle doesn’t even come close to the tracking that’s being applied to almost everyone that visits any news media site for example.

We made our own analytics tool from scratch that only gathers a few metrics to support sales teams. If that’s creepy to you I would recommend looking into some of the bigger data giants.

Email recipients are generally notified by their mail client, despite the intention of the sender to keep it hidden. Email clients do not load remote images by default for this reason, requiring additional user action. Email clients warn users when the text of a link is one URL, but the target is another, for this reason.

Being so uncomfortable to just explain one of the core value propositions of your product in plain language is not a good look. If you’re not confident in what your product does or able to explain why it’s a good thing, you might want to redesign it.

So, no.

I don’t think this is necessarily untrue - but I do think you need to think carefully about what your talk track is on this.

Hey. I'm in Australia and have a back burner project that's about to become medium burner. I'm serious. Going to write an expression of interest for a grant over Christmas. Nearly at MVP stage. Will need customers soon.

You in Sydney?

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