We have our own ArcticStartup master slides we use for our presentations but still it seems that three quarters of the time I spend on building presentations is still getting things to look right, or figuring out how to insert a graph into a slide when we don’t have a good master slide for it. With our conference, Arctic15, just around the corner, I’ve been making plenty of presentations which is why this “Instagram-meets-powerpoint” startup with Swedish roots look like something I could actually use.
The startup, called Slidebean, gives you a stupid simple workflow for creating a presentation. You log into their web service, give your presentation a title, and just focus on content. When you need to add a new slide, you just click a button for the type of slide you want, and then keep typing… it’s a type of workflow I almost wonder why the big players aren’t using it. Adding content is also easy – they pull stock photos from 500px, so if you want a photo of New York or something like that, you’ve got photos right there for you, or obviously you can add your own content.
After you’ve got your information in there, you just pick a design format or color scheme and you’re good to go.
“I think Slidebean is a time saver,” says Wouter Veenstra of Slidebean. “I’m pretty good with photoshop and keynote, but if I have little time and only my iPad then I feel that those things really don’t work for me.”
All presentations are public by default, and presentations get put into a public repository of slides you can browse – much like browsing and searching for information on Slideshare. The company is still in beta, and plans to officially launch June 2nd but so far they’ve seen good traction with over 7000 presentations being created by their testers.
On the monetization side, it’s free to build and present presentations, but they charge $4.99 a month if you want to make your presentations private and to download your presentations. Slidebean has also gotten good feedback on the enterprise side, something they’re testing, where a company could have their own branded slides good to go. For employees it saves them time on creating content, and for a brand manager it’s great to make sure everyone is creating content that works with your company’s brand.
Slidebean just went through Startup Chile, and is now moving their team to New York to participate in Dreamit Ventures’ accelerator. The company has four people and have raised the $40,000 funding from Startup Chile as well as $25,000 from Dreamit Ventures’ accelerator program.
Through my years covering startups I think I’ve at least heard of a similar concept to Slidebean, but the fact that I can’t recall what the name was says enough that there’s no real market leader in this space. The company is up against some huge brands, but if they can sell the fast workflow and improve upon the slide design to fit a wider range of people, then they might have something there.
