Dragdis 3 minute pitch. Feedback needed

Some context needed - who is the target audience? investors? potential hires? users? I would make some modifications to accommodate each. I think the product concept translates well and is easy to understand. Since you focus most of the pitch on it, it seems like a pitch for users.

If you're pitching to investors, a few things need to be sharpened / clarified -

* You say "0 marketing spend" - which most investors will call bullshit on that. Typically, what you really mean is that you spent nothing on ads. Unless you consider your time as worthless, you probably spent quite a bit on marketing. Even if you have the most viral product in the world, you need to kickstart it until it reaches critical mass. Investors want to know that you've given some thought on how to scale that operation (and not that you'll spend 0 on marketing going forward).

* Regarding marketing, you briefly mention that user acquisition is built into the product. You need to elaborate a little bit on that, cause right now it's not clear how that is the case.

* Dates on the x-axis of the user growth graph would be helpful. Did that growth happen mostly after the public launch or during the closed beta? most people would assume the latter unless you tell them otherwise.

* At the end you briefly group together your recruiting needs and fundraising goals. Depending on the audience, I would focus on one. If fundraising interest is the goal of the pitch, put a dedicated slide on that, and move the hiring part to a footnote on the team slide. If it's the reverse, do the opposite.

* I would make the contact details at the end way larger, and move it higher. In addition, it's always good practice to put the name of the company, a tagline and basic contact details in the header of every slide - for people who lost concentration, or want to put a note for themselves before you reach the last slide. Btw, it should be in header and not the footer, because sometimes people's heads obscure the bottom of the deck during presentations (depending on how the seats are arranged). That is also why you should move the contact details at the end higher, just in case.

* Again, investor audience only - add a slide about the market / opportunity size. Especially if you're aiming for a series A round, which typically means venture capital.

Hope this helps!

Love the concept and the pitch sold me. Your registration needs some work, there's too many steps/bail out moments. This was the sequence.

  1. Visit http://dragd.is. Big, obvious Register with ___ buttons, excellent.
  2. Click Register with Twitter. Oh, they'll be able to add/remove followers, wasn't expecting that ... alright-ish.
  3. Click authorize. "Your Twitter account was successfully linked to Dragdis. Yey! To finish your registration please enter your email and create a password." Abort!

The point (for me) of registering with Twitter/Google/whatever is to avoid giving yet another site my email address and maintaining yet another password. You already have a shared secret with me (the twitter oauth token), you don't need a password as well. Step 3 should have been "start dragging things".

PS You've almost certainly thought of this, but http://drag.it/ would be a more obvious/memorable URL/brand

My initial thought on this was that it needs to be a combination of self-hosted/hostable, open source and community driven. At the very least, it users should be able to control where their data is stored. Now that I see that advertising is a major component, I feel even less confident this can work.

If one of the goals is a Series A, the only way this thing works if it goes big and goes big fast and investors can be convinced on the promise of a working advertising model. If advertising is a big part of the monetization strategy, the chances of success are low. Everything would need to go right. But it's just as likely that in a few years time the company stops work on it if the numbers don't look encouraging.

The problem with being funded here and already having some eyes on a Series A, and also looking at an ad model, these are all big pressures that are placed on a startup (i.e. go big, go bust or pivot into solving another problem). It also takes the focus away from the user. Of course the idea is to build as good a product as possible. But the user is now the product and the userbase is tasked with showing enough growth potential to convince investors for more funding. The startup pressures can create conflicts of interest between users and company goals (do we need yet another company that harvests data from users as their reason for being?).

This product and the idea of it, from the outset, is about empowering users. Making their life easier. Giving them superpowers.

What gets me the most is that, technically, this is a product and an idea that doesn't require a funded startup and a cloud based service to succeed. For some products, having investors and a major push for growth is pivotal. But you could easily see a software that accomplishes the same things, but is either free and open source, or just a simple paid service or software. If the vision really is as good as you make it out to be, people should be willing to purchase it. That model is more compatible with the core concept of user empowerment.

Okay sounds nice, but where/how do I get started? Perhaps too much information for a 3 minute video, but I don't feel like googling the name and seeing whether it's an application (Linux?), browser add-on (Firefox?), or some javascript that needs to plug into the page.

Then I also feel like, what is the difference between this and a folder? It's not as if all of the topics I need fit in a non-scrolling sidebar, plus I need to organize that sidebar too. The dragging is new, but it's not like it's an auto-organizer.

The pitch itself is pretty nice though. Telling as much as possible about a product you're enthusiastic about in only 3 minutes is tough. Good job on that :)

A few questions (from an investor perspective):

1) For this to gain massive traction, a lot of people (millions) are going to have to install this

What are your plans for making that happen? In other words how will you scale this? What channels will you use? What customer acquisition costs do you anticipate?

2) Do people actually click on ads? The intent of the products is to drag/drop, be done & move on - not hang around to see ads etc. So how profitable is this channel? What other sources of revenue are you considering?

3) Who would you consider your nearest/biggest competitor? What stops them from creating features that your offering has that they may be missing?

First, I wanted to say I saw this a while back and loved the idea. You've done an excellent job all around and should be proud of yourselves! I just installed it and I'll see how it goes. I bookmark a fair amount of coding/tech related bits...

Regarding the pitch, I'd say it's already pretty polished. You are good at pitching and execute on the basics: what the problem is, who has the problem, how you solve it, how you think you are going to make money, and what you want from the audience. If I have to give feedback, it would consist of suggesting removing any distracting content, including showing all the cluttered folders at the beginning and then speed up the fairly slow explanation and the speed up the demo of dragging and dropping things. You could probably trim 30 seconds from the pitch without losing the intent and still demo the feature: bookmarking small bits of information is currently difficult and TIME CONSUMING. Dragdis fixes that. FWIW, I see a (downvoted) post at the bottom of the comments mentioning Dragdis helps him make a cluttered mess faster. He may be right...

Second piece of feedback (because you asked!): stop moving around so much. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the two hands to the head movement, but coupled with the pacing and other arm movements, it's distracting and too much. Marketing is about raising interest in your product. Raising interest in something else (like, why is this guy pacing?) takes away interest in the audience. Practice and confidence usually remedies this.

Lastly, I have a feature request: A folder that auto Tweets things I drag to it.

You have a statement like "user aquisition is build in" roughly in the middle of the presentation but you don't explain that point. Which has a quite puzzling effect, since I had up to that point apparently completely misunderstood what you are doing. (I had essentially a local application in my mind.) So either you should emphasize more that one can drag to twitter, facebook etc. in the first part, or you talk at that point about web integration, in a one more thing kind of twist.

Awesome job dude, well done! It's just simple as it needs to be, don't mess it up. Just try to be more clear and simple on monetization. Hit and finish me with just something like this : "There will be two plans: free 500 items plan and paid for 500 or more items. Paid plan will be 4.99$ for a year and we will have 2 million users in two years". Because, as you know, nowadays analyzing people's data is horrible business model for monetization because of privacy.

I guess I'm very farm from your target audience but for what it's worth I wouldn't use a tool like this, especially if it revolves around ads.

In my view the problem you are solving does not warrant a service with ads because it can rather easily be solved locally with a standalone application.

Google gets away with ads because I can't get those search results anywhere else.

But technology wise your solution is easy to replicate, your point of advantage may be in the number of integrations, but nothing fundamentally difficult like searching the web.

Thought it was a good pitch, a genuine problem, and a good long term vision.

I think you need a new name. Potentially focusing on a different angle other than Drag and Drop. Such as curating. Organising. Sharing. Simplifying.

Also, the phrase "Drag & Drop" sounds old school. It's like you're trying to sell something we've all been doing for years.

As a developer I'd also be more interested in keyboard shortcuts, like Cmd-Shift-V to paste to Dragdis :) So Drag and Drop isn't that relevant. But the product idea is.

This is the only organizational tool I use and it is awesome! Never been one for saving things to say Evernote or Pocket, but because the drag and drop is so intuitive and easy, I use this everyday.

I think the presentation was great, engaging, interesting. You did a bid of Jobs-ian presenting, making the platform look simple and magical. I've been using it for a month and love it. I still use Evernote for screenshotting designs I like, and use Google bookmarks for full articles, but Dragdis is perfect for copy snippets or quotes I want to save for later. Great for idea generation.

Holy moly. Connect this up to my del.icio.us & trello and you've created something very useful! Think rich annotations for my bookmarks.

As an early adopter, I've been using this service a lot as my main bookmarking service. It's fantastic. Thanks.

I use this. I love this. But when you told me you're going to make money from my drag & drops, it made me pause. Not that I think you're an immoral company, and not that I am being naive in thinking that a dozen others aren't already tracking me, but how exactly will you be using "my data"?

Would've expected that you say "all you need to do is just dragdis" at the end.

Figure out how to import from Pocket and I'll use this till the end of my days

hey just signed up for the service, really really useful! I just have a question: Where is everything saved?

I thought at first that the saving is done locally since you started the presentation showing a desktop and then you moved to Dragdis where there are folders defined.

A bit off-topic, but is there a way to import a bookmark folder into Dragdis? :)

How soon until those new icons are going to arrive? ;)

Can you drag into email ?