This startup is going to make you feel that sending a normal PDF is outdated. Check out PitchXO, a Danish startup that allows you to upload your presentations to their service, giving you branded hosting to pass on to your clients or investors, which comes with a few benefits.
As you can tell by the name, the startup is scratching their own itch by targeting other startups at first, although it seems useful to any company. The concept was first started by Danish serial entrepreneur and Angel investor Morten Lund and his co-founder Markus Stefanko, who was swamped with sending and receiving proposals and was losing track of knowing whether he sent it out or if they’ve looked at it.
There are clear benefits and costs to someone sending out a pitch or marketing deck through PitchXO. First, you can see if and when the person actually opened up your presentation, saving both sides a pointless follow-up email. Secondly, it’s got a little more security than sending a straight presentation, which might get forwarded around without your knowledge. And third of all, PitchXO provides you some metrics on how the person is actually consuming your slide deck – say for instance if you know that a VC is spending a lot of time looking at your competitors slide, then you know that should be a bullet point to discuss in the next meeting.
The platform is pretty smart as well, say you’ve got some KPIs you want to share in a Google speadsheet, then you can create nice looking graphs just using PitchXO. And in general it’s a better communication platform than the back and forth of email. If you have any questions in the presentation, a viewer can just click and ask a question right there in the platform, giving better context to their questions.
But with this, of course, is much more friction than clicking a PDF in an email. To get people to log in with their Facebook, LinkedIn, or Angellist credentials, then you need to be sure you’ve enticed these leads enough that they’ll come back again once you’ve approved them – this isn’t a service for cold emails. To get around this there’s also a “pre-approve button” if you want to approve someone straight away, but I would have a little anxiety about that working correctly.
The other cost of PitchXO is the cost of the service. Their lowest tier is priced at $59/mo (adding up to $700 a year) which seems steep for a little extra info on how people are viewing your slides – especially for fundraising startups. At that price level it seems more like a tool for sprints rather than something to always keep in your back pocket.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
