Show HN: Professional PowerPoint & Keynote Design as a Service Platform | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Professional PowerPoint & Keynote Design as a Service Platform

prettify.co

29 pointsricksta48 comments

As a designer:

- Your site's design doesn't make me feel confident in wanting to work with you.

- That 'Become a Designer' form field is way too long. I'm not filling out a dating profile. You should be able to determine my ambition to work with you based on my reply alone, and you should be able to determine the quality of my work by my Dribbble and portfolios alone. All of the rest is just fluff.

- You don't mention the guaranteed rate?

- '..co-founded 99designs..' Ahh, I see. I'm done here.

Could you explain the 99designs reference

I have looked into getting a professional designer for two sites now, instead opted for the faster route of buying a template and hacking

next time out I want a human but why not 99designs?

Designers tend to dislike 99designs because it's spec work. Twenty designers will do work, and only one will get paid -- and for a fraction of what a real designer should be paid for a logo.

At 99Designs, people are entrusting the branding of their site/firm/etc to someone willing to maybe make $100 for a logo. Exceptions aside (Nike, Google), branding should has more thought and work put into it than someone can do for a few bucks.

My experience with 99designs (on the buying side) has been that there are a _lot_ of shitty "designers", but if you persevere someone from Romania will show up and do a pretty good job for very little money. But you have to know exactly what you want and you have to be willing to play editor.

This is, as near as I can tell, a marketing campaign unique to graphic design. In other professions, spec work isn't just accepted; it's close to the norm. For instance, a good lawyer might sit down with you for over an hour to consult about your situation long before he ever starts billing for his time. A full proposal usually takes me a couple days full time, and we're billable wall-to-wall. And so on.

The campaign against spec work began as a reaction to a genuinely abusive practice: companies would hold "design contests" and solicit whole campaigns from multiple firms, then cherry-pick their favorite ideas from all of them while only paying one firm. But it's evolved to a mythology about all spec work, and that mythology mostly covers up the real issue: the Internet has made "good-enough" design cheap for the majority of companies, including the majority of 8-9 figure revenue tech companies. PepsiCo will still pay you $100k for an important campaign, but most of the design business isn't PepsiCo.

99designs has issues (the biggest isn't quality, it's plagiarism), but there's nothing unethical about its structure, and anyone who suggests that the people who helped build it should be ostracized are saying much more about themselves and their own fears than they are about anyone else.

Let's say that you wanted a really good chef. Would you go to a place where 99 chefs, each one, will cook a meal for free so you can choose the one you wanted the best? And knowing that most of the chefs had been cooking lot of free meals daily?

You may be lucky and find a world class dish by a struggling undiscovered great chef, but most likely you'll settle on whatever doesn't make you vomit.

>"Would you go to a place where 99 chefs, each one, will cook a meal for free so you can choose the one you wanted the best? "

That sounds to me like a great way to choose a chef, no?

When I go to buy a car, I haggle with salesmen and test drive cars, all for free, before I choose one. When I am condo shopping, I go see many buildings, and many different agents give me the sales spiel, free, before I choose which condo I want and provide the commission to that realtor.

I don't understand how this method is in any way bad for the consumer.

As far as this service, it's good idea, but that price point is pretty intense. I'm not very good with PowerPoint, but I can definitely "prettify" more than 4 slides per hour. At that pace, I'm paying you $100 an hour for equivalent work? If you can find enterprise clients willing to pay, that's good stuff for you. But I couldn't pay this.

Most of us aren't sociopaths. We'll have some empathy for the chef. The reason it works out for the car salesman and real estate agent is that a commission on one sale more than makes up for many lost sales; if they could have more sure sales their commission would surely go down accordingly. This isn't the case for 99 designs or 99 chefs.

>"We'll have some empathy for the chef."

I must have missed the part where the chefs were obligated to participate, rather than out of their own free will in the hopes of winning the contract. God forbid they're forced to demonstrate their skills in the most practical, open way possible: direct competition. If they don't want to, they can get work through the multitude of other, regular channels. That hasn't gone away.

>"Most of us aren't sociopaths."

Let me guess, you're a designer? Do you feel sorry for me when I have to terminate design contracts mid-project, after spending real money, because the designer couldn't pull off what he promised? Or just flaked out and ended communication? Because that happens. Often. Ask anyone who is forced to contract out for work.

I don't think any self-respecting chef WOULD participate in 99 chefs, at least, not for the money. But a better analogy would be the American tip: do you leave her 15%, 20%, or 25%? I literally have to break out a calculator to ensure I'm leaving a 20% tip, I would feel guilty otherwise, and I also don't want to overpay. I hate going to the states because of that.

Again, no self-respecting GOOD designer is going to participate in 99 designers, not with the effort needed to come up with good choices for their clients. At least everything must start with a good faith contract, and then maybe contracts get cancelled sometime for non-performance (but really, the designer might avoid that at all costs even if it means working off clock). Now how would 99 designers change that and make it better?

I'm not a designer, but I work with many (and my partner is one).

> When I go to buy a car, I haggle with salesmen and test drive cars, all for free, before I choose one. When I am condo shopping, I go see many buildings, and many different agents give me the sales spiel, free, before I choose which condo I want and provide the commission to that realtor.

Yeah, but you're viewing pre-built cars and condos, rather than asking for a completely original work to be created from scratch before you buy.

It's not the car, it's the salesman.

I'm occupying the salesman's time, time he could spend making a sale to someone else. Just like I've used the designer's time by not choosing their design. It's where the term "tire-kicker" comes from. Ask your realtor how they feel when they get clients who they know have no intention of buying. It's part of the job.

Let's say that you wanted a really good chef.

Let's say you wanted a chef and it's not necessary for the chef to be really good because you have objectively determined that the quality of your chef has no meaningful bearing on your business's bottom line beyond 'the food must not make me want to hurl'

Sounds like 99Chefs is good enough for this use case.

Co-founder of Prettify here. Thanks for the feedback. We started working on this last thursday and this is our low fidelity MVP. We are totally embarrassed by the quality of our website right now, but they say if the MVP is not embarrassing, then it's launched too late so we forced ourself to "launch" early to get feedbacks. Sorry about the grammar mistakes, we drafted the copy in like 10 minutes and we were suppose to proof read it before we "launch", but it was forgotten.

Two things we will definitely work on from looking at all the feedbacks. 1. Add some sample work 2. Change the pricing model

We are thinking of add a pricing model of flat setup fee + lower per slide fee for those customer with bigger pitch deck. Another idea is "name your own price" model. What do you guys think?

+1 for launching an MVP

I have a little experience of the "polishing of presentations" industry (if someone is in a bank in London at 2am, odds are its one of the army of powerpoint polishers working for the sales teams 9am meeting)

The presentation here:

  http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends

covers most of the major "modes" for a PPT. I would suggest each of these is a "feature" that you could sell. I would guess your ideal brief would be

   "I want to review 2012, talk about the foobar project 
   and predictions for 2013. Alice, Bob and charlie did one 
   each.  Please put a bookend in between all three, take 
   the data in the enbedded excel and make it animated, and 
   find me a picture of a foobar that succeeded and one that
   is dead and covered in an oil slick"

* bookends (plain slide, concept in words, introduces next few slides conceptually)

* Graphs - this was the main cause of problems - twenty excel sheets and the instructions to pull out "sales". I would make this time and materials, but it will be a really powerful area - the above example from one of SVs biggest investors has boring Excel produced slides. Animate them, hgihlight the graphs with zooms, make them OSX not win98 and people will really pay. Trust me.

* expositiory images - pictures tell a story - the before and after images here are a good example, but they take time and effort to find.

And thats before we get onto the idea that really most PPTs need an editor to tease out the story (dont let your 1:1 people get dragged into understanding the whole presentation unless they are on Time and Materials), and interactivity (pygame is a good one here) really can work well.

Sorry for the rambling - its late. Good luck

You really have to define your customers! I'm going to assume that a designer wouldn't use your service, nor probably higher-end presenters; too much is riding on their presentations to leave them to an outside service. Your target is more likely business folks who give presentations sometimes, its not a primary aspect of their job, and sometimes these presentations mean a lot and they want design help.

But what does design help mean? Layouts, fonts, and colors? Assets, structure, and story telling? If the former, the client could easily game you by having a few slides done and repeating the style; these aren't posters after all! The latter is much less gameable, but also much more involved, I don't see how that could work at all without a tight feedback loop between the designer and client.

I dislike "name your own price" models personally. You might get the occasional sociopath who pays little, and everyone else will agonize over coming up with the right price to pay. Sometimes its easier to just set some kind of price, you might put slides into different buckets based on their complexity/work needed and compute a price dynamically (use per-word, per-graphic, speaking time specified by the user, etc...). But good design changes might cause reorganizations in the entire deck. In that case, I would go with something like "intended length of presentation."

Edit: I think this is a wonderful idea, and would use it, and can't wait for them to iterate. What I wrote below is intended to be constructive feedback.

I was ready to go for this, but $25 per slide doesn't work for me.

My deck is currently 30 slides. They're mostly low-content placeholders, many of them having 3 words or less, and they could all be handled by picking a nice theme, with maybe some minor tweaks.

However, some slides are content-heavy and could be optimized for attractiveness and "usability". And some will have to be redone because they make no sense or something.

So I could totally see paying for a customized theme and pallet and fixing the content-heavy slides and minor tweaks on the other slides, but that's not $750.

Also, 5 days sucks. Everyone I know always makes slides at the last minute. I'd could see paying 30% more for same day, or 50% more for 1 hour delivery though.

I think you can upload the ppt and tell them which slides you want them to re-do. But I hear you. You probably want all slides to fit together and have a common theme or something. Maybe they should have a separate price for changing the overall theme of the ppt?

Oh, OK. They should make that clear. There might be something we can do then.

Thanks for the feedback. We are working on repricing our service and we will add the rush service option.

> Choosing the wrong designer will cost you to loose both time and money.

Choosing the wrong copy editor will cost you credibility and customers. (There are two glaring errors in this sentence.) If it would look bad in a presentation, it looks bad for a presentation service site.

Cool startup, awesome domain name. I think there are alot of potential clients out there for this type of service. A company's pitch deck is what makes or breaks any investor pitch. Companies (or atleast the smart ones) realize this and are willing to invest to improve their chances of getting funded.

Btw: I run Pitchenvy.com, a gallery of pitch deck presentation examples. If you want to work out a commission based affiliate program, I'd be more than happy to partner with you. Lemme know if you're interested :)

I'd use this as an academic tool.. I have presentations to give quarterly to representatives from funding agencies.. Typically around 8-12 slides in my presentations.. the slides I see/ use are really boring.. whenever I see a well done presentation, I perk up and pay attention. If you use this as a potential niche.. some high quality graphing work etc. would be nice..

You could invest the time and learn how to do design good presentations. Honestly, better communication skills are important for everyone. For the aesthetic stuff (fonts, colors, layout) that we are less skilled in, copy style what you like best from your favorite presentations given by others.

its about the opportunity cost for me. An hour of my time spent doing actual research versus prettifying my slides is a no-brainer.

Sounds like a nice idea but just not impressed with the site. Also there are not examples of work. If I am going to pay someone to make my presentation pretty I want some examples of past work.

I am involved in Deck Foundry (http://deckfoundry.com) and we make amazing investor decks. The site looks nice and we have examples of work.

Overall, the site looks very genuine. The layout is simple and the wording is very concise and informative.

I agree with runemadsen. Just stating that the service offers professional designs and layout is not good enough. Some samples of work need to be provided on the site to justify a $25/slide basic price.

Also, there are some minor grammatical mistakes on the site. Consider some revising.

This is a great idea. I would probably add some examples to the home page. That is really what should attract new customers: Great designs.

Nice idea, and I would use this if you had a convincing portfolio. I'd suggest you add some work samples to the site.

agree with highlander

Very interesting service. Solves a real problem for me, our slides always look average. We were considering getting a designer on board and the slides would be a significant part of what they do.

That said, this might be suitable for a standard presentation, but for a full investor pitch I'm not sure if I'd use it.

Almost every item in the FAQ has grammatical errors in it. With no portfolio, fixing these would go a long ways to establishing more credibility -- especially when the product you are selling is polish.

Also, is the bar graph on the laptop image supposed to be an example of an ugly presentation, or a pretty one?

1. Show me some examples of what I can get for my money

2. Charging by the slide encourages a certain kind of presentation style. On the rare occasions that I do keynote presentations I usually have one very spare slide every few seconds, which ends up being thousands of dollars for one presentation.

They should have samples. every designer/design firm has at least some kind of portfolio they can show customers. these people are probably not professionals.

PechaKucha! 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6 minutes 40 seconds. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha)

But to be honest, if you go there each slide would be simple; a picture + 3-5 word caption. This service is probably aimed at the clueless business type who do bullet point heavy slides. They would do much better to charge by perceived length of presentation; but this is a subjective metric.

Something about the price table is odd. You mention specifically the only difference between basic and premium is the stock photo budget, yet for a price difference of 30$ you get 20$ more budget?

As others here say I'd rework the pricing options a bit, other than that it's a good idea.

Cool idea, tons of execs and sales reps have corporate AMEX cards but use really boring/generic templates for all their presentations.

I think the lifetime value for customers could be high if you can deliver quality work consistently.

Aren't you one of the people behind this site? Or are you just making a general statement about your own idea?

http://prettify.co/about

If there was mention of his name on the /about page, it's now been removed.

Ok, that page has now changed. But it did have Matt's name on it under "Team".

Wow... What a convenient change.

Nah, I'm spending every waking moment (and some of my non-waking ones) on DeveloperAuction.

I just know the founders and want to see them succeed.

Is the bar graph an example of what the end product might look like? It seems like (slightly ugly) stock art. If your product is redesigned slides, you should show well designed slides.

Why aren't there more before/after examples?

How does it work if the slides contain confidential information?

I'm guessing you should change the pricing page to not specifically mention what the budget for stock photos is.

loose != lose

What if I have tried multiple ===>designer<=== and still don't like their work?

We accept all popular presentation ===>format<=== like Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Google Docs, Prezi, Libre Office Impress, OpenOffice Impress and more. Just upload your file or share your Google Doc's link and we will find the right designer to do the job.

So I give you the most actionable feedback, hands down, and I don't receive any upvotes? WTF?

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