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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

lipstick on a pig usually