Always when I see such exceptional HTML based pitch decks (the last one was from a wedding thing, don't know the name anymore) I am on the fence: They look so damn good and for sure you get attention en masse (today you should get 20K from HN and many VC related people).<p>BUT:<p>- Isn't this a hell of work? A good JS/frontend guy should need at least one or rather two weeks? Please tell us how many people did this gem of a presentation in how many days .<p>- The pitch deck is basically an evolution—everytime you meet a VC, an angel or whoever the deck gets better due to their feedback—after 2-3 months it's perfect. This means that you need some good presentation software where you can quickly add and change content all the time (nowadays it's Keynote which is both fast and makes stylish presentation with ease).<p>- And my last point (which is a matter of taste): if you go public with your pitch deck, you are public and the surprise effect if you approach VCs after you went stealth for months is gone. I think latter is pretty important, when something is public, everybody knows it, incentives are smaller to make intros and get angel/advisory shares and finally you have also the risk that you don't get funded and the pitch quickly wears off (in your case with your stats I wouldn't worry but still for startups in earlier stages this may be not the right path; anyway I am wondering that you did this presentation because your stats are so incredibly good and skyrocketing that you'd need only this one stats chart attached to your an email).<p>So, isn't it better to spend time and effort instead for a great parallax HTML JS page landing page for the actual users of your site??<p>Or you just want to put a VC who you currently talk to under pressure to get a better valuation (by getting more leads and offers).
Team has no apparent prior company operations experience, let alone M&A success.<p>"Technical" team member isn't a "founder".<p>They're in photo sharing and clearly following in Pinterest's footsteps.<p>Yet, took the time to build an extremely well-designed, intricate, graphical investment pitch in HTML.<p>Not sure if that's an antipattern or not.<p>Certainly, an equivalently beautiful presentation aimed at prospective <i>users</i> of the site would be unquestionably valuable.
If I can get on my soapbox for a second (and let me know if this isn't cool - I just like pointing people towards more effective products), I'd like to call attention to <a href="http://www.lookwork.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.lookwork.com</a>, which was designed and developed by Ben & Eric of Svpply fame quite a few years ago using the jQuery Masonry that people seem to think is Pinterest's bread and butter. You can follow friends, tag images, add your own feeds and sync it to your Dropbox.<p>Lookwork, out-of-the-box, has a ton of fantastic inspiration feeds that are of much higher quality than Pinterest and Piccsy. In fact, when I received the email about Piccsy yesterday, I made a tongue-in-cheek tweet about the worth of an image aggregate that doesn't even aggregate quality images (both in resolution and their usefulness to the user - sorry Daniel).<p>I've been really pushing the site over the past few years despite the founders leaving it nigh high and dry after Svpply took up more of their time (and after they really bombed their public launch).<p>Regardless, if you're a creative or a dev looking for design inspiration, I'd highly suggest Lookwork over any other platform I've tried (and I'm a sucker for curation sites, so I sign up and use all of them). I'm really hoping they integrate it with Svpply and make it a truly one stop shop for all things visual.<p>Note: It does cost $5, which I kind of wish they'd drop unless you want more advanced features. I can see about getting people invites if anyone is interested.<p>Also, to say something from a design perspective on this pitch deck, it's rather annoying as between all of the CSS3 transform effects forcing the text to juggle between antialiased and subpixel and whatever resizing mechanism is causing the images to blur, it's hard to read/follow. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
The traction graph has a terrible y-axis. Equally spaced ticks measure 500, 1.5M - 500, 500k, 1M, and 600k. Many people who notice that will think it is meant to deceive, regardless of whether that was the intention.
Design wise, and I've seen this more often lately with fancy HTML5 things, the whole assumption of a minimum browser <i>height</i> really gets on my nerves. I know Google+ has this problem too (along with the disabling of vertical scrolling), though a redesign might have changed it.<p>I browse on a Mac, and not in full-screen mode. My browser isn't sized to fill the screen as it would be in Windows. Yet elements on the page are sized big enough to overflow without resizing the window. Combined with a navbar that is fixed to the top (and is huge), there's even less space to read the actual content. The layout suggests that each section is probably designed to fit comfortably within the browser window.<p>Granted, this is less of an offender than other sites I've encountered. If I could remember what they were, I'd be able to back up my point better.
Beautiful, sure... But there's so much emphasis on the form that one hardly sees/reads the content.<p>Also, I would really appreciate if the site was a bit narrower, smaller fonts, and less flashy colors... But =, maybe it's just because I'm reading it at night.
The "Visits vs Uniques" graph is one of the worst I have seen. When your Y-Axis has such variable jumps it just makes the graph completely irrelevant. I would say it was intentionally skewed to mislead, but sometimes the jumps work in your favor and sometimes not, so I just can't understand the reasoning.<p>Equally spaced increments go by 500k, 1mm, 500k, 1mm, 600k.<p>Charts are meant to give a visual representation of data, if you skew the chart then you may as well be skewing the numbers.
I don't feel this is a good presentation. Text is too small in many places. The solution is not made obvious from the graphic.<p>What I found original and nicely intuitive is the way to show fragmentation of the playground field. But it is missing a clear view (in a snap) of the cause of this fragmentation. Because the next slide is supposed to explain how to solve the problem.<p>Making critics is very easy, making the art is very difficult.
Nice work, but what the app actually does is not evident on first glance when you scroll the page. You get to the solution, see the streams (and might not see that you can open some of them), the scroll lower, and see the team etc.<p>Doesn't really tell me anything about the app itself.
Beautiful?? Beautiful??<p>You have got to be kidding.<p>Blinking eyes - balloons blowing up: it doesn't have the visual appeal of a Roadrunner / Wile E. Coyote cartoon, let alone something like the mother of all demos.
Had some trouble viewing the presentation at first in Chrome. I did go back and it rendered beautifully later. I suspect most people won't do that... which is a shame but the risk with using complex presentation style.<p>Not sure why there's so much concern with the time it took to make. Working on your startup is a labor of love... describing and pitching should be too. Very nice work.
Is there a well-known framework or JS library that most of these "scroll to animate" pitch decks are using?<p>It seems like a lot of work to roll your own, and I imagine the designers have better things to do. They all seem to work roughly the same way.
I'm not sure they did that deck in-house. In the footer it says "Designed by Moxy Creative House" and that level of visual polish isn't present on the main Piccsy site.<p>Just uninformed guessing, but interesting if it's true.
I think that deck is much better designed than the product itself. Actually I was disappointed by that as I expected something on the same level. I guess I might be not the only one feeling that way.
Heh. Beautiful on desktop maybe, but on Chrome for Android, it's messy and runs like a slideshow while I can feel my phone getting really hot... better hope your investors aren't checking on mobile.
Near the bottom under Advisors the "role" of the two advisors is reversed.
iStock Photo / Getty Images and Flickr/Bitly should be swapped based on the description of the two men.
How can they have so many visitors with no website? <a href="http://www.piccsy.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.piccsy.com</a> doesn't give me anything. Is it just me?
Yeah wow that is outstanding. In terms of communicating their ideas this is simply phenomenal. The first time I've seen this scroll-to-reveal technique used well.
For laughs go to piccsy.com and try to click any of the links in the footer (e.g. "About").<p>edit: They appear to have now disabled infinite scrolling.